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What's stopping large language models from being truly enterprise-ready?
In this episode, Vectara CEO and co-founder Amr Awadallah breaks down how his team is solving one of AI's biggest problems: hallucinations.
From his early work at Yahoo and Cloudera to building Vectara, Amr shares his mission to make AI accurate, secure, and explainable. He dives deep into why RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) is essential, how Vectara detects hallucinations in real-time, and why trust and transparency are non-negotiable for AI in business.
Whether you're a developer, founder, or enterprise leader, this conversation sheds light on the future of safe, reliable, and production-ready AI.
Don't miss this if you want to understand how AI will really be used at scale.
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SDRs are the most efficient channel for predictable B2B pipeline generation, but successfully scaling a team isn't easy. This session will cover the pillars of effectively recruiting, training, aligning, and empowering SDRs from the early stages of revenue through a global operation. Lars Nilsson has designed and built 25+ SDR operations at B2B SaaS software companies, and currently leads Snowflake's 200+ SDRs. Come have a listen to what all the buzz in SDR-Land is about!
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In this episode, we’re joined by Santiago Giraldo, Director Of Product Marketing for Data Engineering & Machine Learning at Cloudera. In our conversation, we discuss Cloudera’s talks at TWIMLcon, as well as their various research efforts from their Fast Forward Labs arm.
The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/sponsorseries.
Today we’re joined by Sushil Thomas, VP of Engineering for Machine Learning at Cloudera.
Over the summer, I had the pleasure of hosting Sushil and a handful of business leaders across industries at the Cloudera Virtual Roundtable. In this conversation with Sushil, we recap the roundtable, exploring some of the topics discussed and insights gained from those conversations. Sushil gives us a look at how COVID19 has impacted business throughout the year, and how the pandemic is shaping enterprise decision making moving forward.
We also discuss some of the key trends he’s seeing as organizations try to scale their machine learning and AI efforts, including understanding best practices, and learning how to hybridize the engineering side of ML with the scientific exploration of the tasks. Finally, we explore if organizational models like hub vs centralized are still organization-specific or if that’s changed in recent years, as well as how to get and retain good ML talent with giant companies like Google and Microsoft looming large.
The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/429.
Machine learning and AI is finding a place in the traditional enterprise - although the path to get there is different. In this episode, our panel analyzes the state and future of larger, more established brands. Hear from Amr Awadallah, Founder and Global CTO of Cloudera, Pallav Agrawal, Director of Data Science at Levi Strauss & Co., and Jürgen Weichenberger, Data Science Senior Principal & Global AI Lead at Accenture, moderated by Josh Bloom, Professor at UC Berkeley.
Lars Nilsson is the VP of Global Inside Sales for Cloudera and with over twenty-five years of sales and operations experience, Lars Nilsson is a global leader in enterprise software and selling solutions. One of Lars many incredible achievements was he and his team at Cloudera built the sales methodology Account-Based Sales Development (ABSD), which has transformed how businesses approach high-value targets. Prior to Cloudera, Lars founded SalesSource, a business services consulting firm specializing in CRM customization and sales process development. Lars has also served in sales executive roles at ArcSight/Hewlett Packard, Riverbed Technology and Portal Software – all three of which achieved IPOs, in addition to Cloudera (2017). As Special Advisor at True Ventures, Lars helps True portfolio companies develop sales compensation plans from the ground up, implement best-of-breed sales technologies, and rapidly scale sales teams to meet demand.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
How did Lars make his way into the world of enterprise sales back in 1995? How has Lars seen the industry change so significantly over the last 22 years?
Why does Lars believe that SDRs are the most important role in sales? How does their role of ensuring a full pipe compare to the role of demand gen and marketing?
How does Lars think about setting a quota that ensures a desired behaviour beyond pure revenue chasing? What is his framework for setting and optimising the right quota? Why does Lars believe that ales is all about activities? What activities is Lars most eager to measure and test?
What is Lars' biggest advice to someone looking to build out their SDR team from the ground up? What core characteristics should one look for in those initial SDR hires? What is and has been Lars' biggest challenge in building out his SDR team? Why is building SDR teams in the bay so hard?
How does Lars think about setting ideal customer profiles? How big a TAM is large enough to be excited, yet narrow enough to be achievable and solve a true and inherent customer need?
60 Second SaaStr
What does Lars know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?
What is Lars favourite piece of SaaS reading material?
Sales rep productivity, what does Lars believe is the scale from exceptional to poor?
If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here:
Jason Lemkin
Harry Stebbings
SaaStr
Lars Nilsson