The AI-Native CRM: Lightfield

Lightfield is an AI-native CRM that captures every customer interaction, remembers the full context, and turns it into action automatically. From prospecting and follow-ups to meeting prep, deal coaching, and pipeline updates, Lightfield lets teams focus on selling while AI agents handle the admin.

In this episode, we speak with Matt Serna, Head of GTM at Lightfield, an AI-native CRM platform. We discuss the challenges of traditional CRM systems, which often rely on manual data entry and can lead to incomplete data. Lightfield aims to solve this by automatically capturing and organizing customer interactions, allowing AI to perform tasks like writing emails and updating records. Matt shares insights into how AI is transforming CRM from a sales tool into a comprehensive company resource, emphasizing the importance of AI-native systems for future growth. The conversation highlights the potential of AI to enhance productivity and decision-making across various business functions.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hello everyone and welcome to the SourceForge podcast. I'm your host, Bo Hamilton, senior editor and multimedia producer here at SourceForge, the world's most visited software comparison site where B2B software buyers compare and find business software solutions. All right, let's talk about customer relationship management software, CRM for short. Now, CRM is one of the most used and I would say most complained about categories in software. The core problem has never really changed too much. It only works if people update it and people don't really update it a lot of the time. So teams end up making decisions based on incomplete data in a system nobody trusts. So that's a problem, of course. And today's guest is from Lightfield, an AI-native CRM that automatically captures every customer interaction, think uh calls, emails, meetings, messages, those sorts of fields, and structures them into a system of record that stays current without anyone touching any one of those fields. So the CRM updates itself, which solves a lot of that incomplete data and trust problem uh that I was uh was talking about. So uh of course, you know, that's easier said than done, but I think the founders know a thing or two about building at scale. Keith Pearce spent nearly 12 years at Meta growing Instagram direct to 500 million monthly active users. And then the other founder, Henry Liriani, led the rebuild of Facebook Messenger. They previously built Tome, a productivity tool that hit 25 million users at a $300 million valuation. And then they shut it down to build Lightfield. And since launching in 2025, over 2,500 companies have signed up. So I think it's pretty clear that they know what they're doing. Um, today we're gonna uh talk with Lightfield's go-to-market leader, Matt Cerna, to learn more about the platform, what AI native actually means, how AI agents are changing sales workflows, and then where CRM is headed. So let's get into it. Matt, welcome to the podcast. I'm really glad you could join us. Likewise, thanks for having me, though. So let's start at the top with the basics for people who haven't heard of Lightfield yet. What does the company actually do?

SPEAKER_01 2:14

So Lightfield is the fastest growing AI-nated CRM. Every couple of weeks, I have to go update the numbers we have on our website because now we're actually up to 4,000 companies that have signed up to the platform. And I think it's just a reflection of the quality of what we built and how helpful it's been for you know early stage startups, founders, you know, as well as sales leaders at fast-growing scale-ups. Um, you know, I feel so fortunate to work with guys like Keith and Henry that that you mentioned. They really are legends in their field. And it's a it's a a real honor every day to get to be able to talk about and share more about what they built. So Lightfield, I think you actually you've hit on the head, Bo. Um, I think the the core thing that Lightfield does is it automatically ingests every single interaction that you have with your prospects, your customers, and it structures that in a way that AI can do work off of. We all have the experience of we've used ChatGPT or Claude, and we didn't give it the right data or the right prompting, and it gives you an answer that's not quite right or it's a bit off, or the tone is weird. And and we fundamentally solve that entire problem for every customer interaction because we take that context and organize it in a way that actually allow like AI to do like real quality work for you, whether it's writing your emails, helping you with follow-up tasks, or just doing basic things like uh updating CR records, which is something that uh nobody loves to do, but it's really important to understand what's going on in your business.

SPEAKER_00 3:50

Absolutely. Okay, wow. So thanks for thanks for explaining the basics uh of Lightfield, what it is you guys are working on solving, uh, what it is you guys have already done thus far. And you have already 4,000 plus uh companies that have signed up to work with you. I mean, I thought I was getting up-to-date information, but uh apparently, apparently not. That's pretty remarkable. I also I name dropped um your two founders. And before we get too into the weeds with um, you know, some of the further questions I have for you, uh, how did how did you get involved with with the company and and this space?

SPEAKER_01 4:23

I have been passionate about go-to-market technology for a long time. Prior to Lightfield, I was the CMO and RevOps leader for a high growth uh growth stage company in the AI customer service space. Prior to that, I had similar roles in companies in the health tech space. And every stop in my career, I have been going to war with the CRM, whether it was as a sales rep early in my career, whether it was a marketing manager in the middle part of my career to the past six or seven years where I've served in an executive capacity. The CRM has always been a source of enormous frustration, but it's it's always felt kind of inevitable. Like, you know, the way I've always thought about it is it's like death taxes and Salesforce. Like you can't complain about it. You just gotta accept that it's it's part of your reality. And at least that's how I thought. And and so when I was connected to uh Keith and Henry through a mutual, mutual contact of ours to learn a bit more about the company and the vision, uh, I was sold. You know, I was I was exploring what my next move was going to be. I was talking to you know a lot of companies where they had you know large marketing organizations or sales organizations that they wanted somebody to take the helm of to help them get to that next chapter. But I I think it was one 10-minute demo of the earliest version of what is now Lightfield from Keith. It's actually sold me on the idea of you know, this is the place to be. I will join this company that back then was in stealth to go build this out because I I believe that this is absolutely what every go-to-market team needs to truly build an AI native selling and marketing motion.

SPEAKER_00 6:09

Very cool. Okay. Well, well, I I love that you've yeah, you've had a uh a wide-ranging background, but you've you've sounds like you've worked with CRMs um at a lot of different facets. Like you've seen sort of every angle of them and and um you've kind of you've seen the the the pain points and then seeing that demo working with uh Keith and Henry over there. That's really neat. And I the reason I I I want to name, you know, name drop the the founders and and sort of your background for listeners is because I think that's important with the the competition and how there's so many different people, you know, tackling some of these these problems um and using AI to kind of innovate in this space, um, which is all you know very interesting and cool and whatnot. But like you gotta look at the the people behind the scenes working to make this happen and the success they've they've had under their belt because it takes a really you know capable, competent team of people to to execute. And so um I think you guys uh are well well established there. So we've got that established. Um I'll uh we we got the uh basics of Lightfield established. Um CRM, you mentioned Salesforce, CRM has been around for decades at this point, right? Salesforce alone has been doing this since 1999 or so. Um so what's the problem that still hasn't been solved?

SPEAKER_01 7:28

So I I th I look at it less as a an unsolved problem and more of a complete shift in the the role that data can play in the business. And so if you look at the world pre-AI, data was used as an instrument for measurement and business understanding. And so if you think about how sales teams used to work with CRM, it was essentially a tool of management to be able to inspect and report on and understand what's going on with growth. And to get that data, you needed to continually crack the whip on salespeople who would rather be spending time actually selling to customers than feeding the data machine that's required for a sales leader to go do their forecasting, for a finance leader to go and put numbers out to the street. And this is just the way that the world has been for, you know, probably since the late 90s until uh when ChatGPT came out, I believe in 2022. I think AI has fundamentally changed the nature of what data can do for a business from simply giving a cohort or a leadership team understanding to actually doing a work for everybody in the company, whether it is helping a salesperson to find new accounts or prospect into, helping a marketer understand what messages are resonating, helping a product leader to figure out how they should prioritize their roadmap. Or, you know, we work with a lot of forward deployed engineers, helping a forward deployed engineer to understand where customers are at, where their duct stack is at, and how to go and and service their needs. And so I think that the the challenge that we're solving is is really twofold. One is how do I actually get all this data from my customer interactions and structure, structure it in a way that I can actually go activate it for AI. And then how do I actually go overlay AI agents on top of that data to go and do the work? And I think the challenge a lot of companies are facing is if you try and do this with a a pre-AI CRM, you you get hit on both of those fronts. You don't get the quality of data that you need in the system to have an up-to-date understanding of your business. And and you don't have the ability to easily layer on agents on top of that to go and do work for you because the the data is low quality and and the agents are are are bolted onto a legacy architecture that's not designed for them to do work off of. And so, and that's really what people want. Everyone wants to, you know, I was at Saster a few weeks ago. Everybody is all about agents. Uh, but if you if you don't have the foundation right to layer them on top of with, you know, with your data, then then ultimately your AI efforts are going to fall very short. In fact, I, you know, have many battle scars of trying to implement AI uh on top of some of the more legacy pre-AI CRMs and uh and a lot of bat pain I've gone through is, but what drew me to life field and what makes me so passionate about this topic?

SPEAKER_00 10:50

Yeah, I mean it has to kind of be be reworked from the ground up before you start, you know, uh because if you start layering things on top, it's just gonna, you know, kind of create this wobbly sort of like leading tower pizza thing that's probably gonna topple at some point. Um, but uh it sounds like, yeah, fundamentally it's uh it's a design problem. And now that you're able to take this AI and become deliver more personalized and quality data, you're able to, it's able to determine like the specific use cases, be proactive about information that caters to specific um users of the CRM. Um, and in some cases, like with the agentic features, be able to actually carry out specific tasks without the user having to execute on those tasks themselves. Um I think that ultimately, like, the more a system requires humans to like remember to do certain things, the more it's already sort of like fighting human nature and like, you know, the more you're kind of set yourself up for for for problems, right? So if you're able to kind of automate a lot of these tasks, I think it's very helpful.

SPEAKER_01 11:47

Yeah, it's it's it's spot on. At the end of the day, most sellers and most companies spend most of their time not selling. It's very strange. And it's something that we would never we would never expect from any other function, right? If you were to, if you were to go to a company and they were to tell you that the majority of the time their software engineers are spending is is not on writing code or you know, architecture diagrams, but is is in like work around the work, you'd find it to be absolutely preposterous. And it's it's interesting that you know you you look at where where software engineering is now, where at least at Lifefield, we have a large chunk of our of our code written by AI. We have our engineers deploying multiple agents in parallel to go drive multiple projects at the same time, and each engineer is functionally managing a fleet of agents. And that's not uncommon. But what's so funny is you know, we I talk to companies every day where they have the engineering team that is like very much in the present moment of deploying fleets of agents in parallel to go and and and build the product. But those engineers have no context on what's actually happening with customers because the customer context is in a 2010s system where you have salespeople manually keying in what they remember to key in. And it's it's just such a funny, funny disconnect where even at some of the most AI forward companies, um, when they come to us, they are, you know, they are on such a frontier with how they build product, and yet they're using software that's like very much part of a 2010's operating model for figuring out how to service their customers.

unknown 13:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:26

So let's continue to unpack that the AI native uh you know, uh moniker and like portion of this and and kind of uh rehash some of these AI features and what you're working on here. So um I know AI, AI native is a is a pretty common phrase we're starting to hear a lot of nowadays with with companies and platforms. Um, but that can mean different things for different people. For someone who's heard that term thrown around lately, what does it actually mean in in simple terms?

SPEAKER_01 13:52

Um I think it's um in simple terms, it means it's design for for AI from the ground up. I think like an imperfect analogy would be um the difference between loading up like an old school 1990s desktop web experience on your phone and trying to like have to like zoom and squint and like piece your way through versus a mobile app where it's it's the it's it's the same category, but it's designed for a new technology paradigm. And so that's how I think about AI native CRM. To go one click more technical, like what's the actual difference? The traditional CRM is built around this model of humans do the work. And so you have a primarily human interface where humans are are guided down paths to go fill out forms and fields. And you can add AI onto that, but it's only going to be able to work off of like the very structured fields that the the humans have put in. And even if you had everybody accurately update every record, which is impossible, but even if you did that, then you would still just have AI that's reading the discrete fields that you have defined in your your CRM uh records, right? Um what we do with AI Native is we flip that. We we put the fields aside and we just collect the entire corpus of every every interaction. And so if we were to take a deal, for example, you can imagine uh a complex enterprise sale with hundreds of contacts and a sales opportunity that goes across 18 months. And there's so much richness of that relationship that would never be captured in like the 17 fields that you fill out in Salesforce, right? And what we do is we take every single interaction and we create a chronology of from beginning to end every relationship with every person at every step and how it changed and every change of uh where the deal is at at every step in the process and presenting all of that context for an agent to reason off of. And so if you ask like a pretty simple question like, is this deal at risk? In the old world, you could look at the the fields filled out and say, maybe this deal is at risk. The sales are upset that it's at stage one and the close date is a week from now. Whereas in an AI native CRM, you ask the same question and it's looking in the full context of everything that's happened in the deal of, hey, well, in in most deals that you win, you get IT involved at least two months before the close date. And here your champion has struggled to activate your CIO. And not only can it give you that understanding of where things are at and how your business is working, you can actually have it do work for you. And so every day I use Lightfield, for example, as my sales coach, where I'll have it break down deals for me. I will ask it to, you know, help me brainstorm different ways to phrase things or position things or price things or package things. And it uses all the context of the at this point, but it's gotta be thousands of conversations I've personally had over the past six months with prospects and customers at Lightfield to go help me figure out, you know, what to do and where to go and how to take a deal. And and honestly, I'd probably ascribe a fair chunk of our success to the fact that we ourselves use Lightfield and it just makes our team so much more productive.

SPEAKER_00 17:30

Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, the proof is in the pudding, right? And if you're using it to to um just scale up and continue to to grow, I think that's um saying a lot. But that's man, okay. So I imagine one one thing when you were um explaining that and great visuals, by the way, it helps, you know, it helps really helps me understand kind of the the picture of like an old, old school uh CRM versus kind of this AI native solution nowadays. But I imagine some of the the um maybe more traditional old school CRMs that are sprinkling AI on top, I imagine one roadblock is like they don't have access to a lot of the data. Um maybe like some of the pillars of the CRM, the pillars of uh of of data pillars that like can ultimately lead to more context and better solutions, right? Um and and at the end of the day, that's what's that's what's so valuable is delivering that context and those solutions.

SPEAKER_01 18:21

It's it's it's data and it's context. Uh and there are actually two things, right? So data is you know, do you do you have all the information that you need, but there's also context and organization. And so like the analogy I like they give is imagine if I imagine if I if we took every single pod a transcript of every single podcast that you ever recorded and we printed out you know tens of thousands of sheets of paper, and we just scrambled them all over a room and said, all right, you know, help me figure out like what Bo likes to talk about in the SourceForge podcast. Like the data is all there, but it's like an impossible problem to solve. And because it's all disorganized. And one of the things that it's actually unique to what Lightfield does is we organize it. So in that analogy, it would be more like, all right, we're gonna have like a packaged little or organized folder set of like each of the podcasts with all the data organized and sorted by theme and like same set of papers, same set of data, ask the same question. Hey, like what kind of things does Bo like to talk about? You're like, oh, like, you know, very quickly can get a sense of, oh, this is a technology podcast. Oh, he likes to talk to like category leaders. Oh, he likes to talk about growth. And and the same is true for agents. If you structure the data for them the right way, you can just get a lot like more quality responses and work uh done by them.

SPEAKER_00 19:37

Totally. Yeah. No, I love this analogy. Like, if if if uh you could ask, like, uh, has Bo had, you know, how many cups of coffee has he had? How many shots of espresso? Is he drinking Yurba Mate? Is he drinking coffee? Is he drinking a Red Bull? Like this will all uh dictate which questions he's gonna ask, you know? Um, but no, I love these analogies. That's uh that's spot on. And um uh you mentioned the agentic portion. Um, what what are some of the, I mean, I understand Lightfield has obviously AI agents that can do things like manage uh I was seeing it can manage follow-ups, um, you can just populate certain um perspective suggestions of what a client might be um, you know, what what what a customer might be looking for. Um you can kind of coach reps on various deals. What what are some of the the tangible things that someone uh using a day-to-day could expect to see?

SPEAKER_01 20:28

Yeah, so um any instruction or process that you could teach a person to do in your system with your data, Lightfield can do in an automated way. And so I'll actually just talk you through like what a day looks like for me. Every single day, Lightfield will provide a digest for me of every single call that happened the previous day, every single meaningful deal movement that happened, and will give me both a synthesis of what's most important that's packaged exactly how I like it, and it will give me a more detailed breakdown of call by call that I can go and explore. Separately, it will give me a breakdown of every single meeting I'm going to have in the day. Who is there? It will research the people, it will bring in all the context of previous conversations that have we've had with them or other people on the team have had with them. It will provide me with recommended next steps and actions so that every time I show up to a meeting, I am fully prepared, which is actually very helpful because given the demand, we're we're back to back to back to back to back to back basically all day, every day. After every meeting, Lightfield will it'll it'll listen to the conversation, it will under analyze the deal, it will look at our sales process, and it'll give me tasks of here's all the things that I need to do. Which it's it sounds generally helpful when you have two meetings a day, but when you have eight or ten or somebody is honest. Me or you know some folks in our sales working at 15. It's impossible to remember. I mean, it's 12:30 right now on the West Coast. I I probably couldn't tell you half of the things that I told people on my my you know 8:30 and 9 and 9:30 calls I would do, but I feel can. And so at the end of my day, I have a fully organized digest where I actually just rolled out this like inbox-like experience called full review. And what that does, it organizes every single uh follow-up you're supposed to send, every single task that's overdue, um, any updates you need to make in that it you know it thinks you should make, but wants to get your permission to make before it it makes it on its own. Everything that you need to audit or or do is is organized for you in a neat way. And so um that that's how my day works. I have peers who use Lightfield to find uh you know customer stories and and look for those every day. I have peers who look use it to go get product feedback on a recurring basis. Uh again, it's anything that you can anything that you can you know teach a person to do, uh, you can teach Lightfield to do. And typically you can build a new automation in in less than five minutes.

SPEAKER_00 23:13

Wow. Yeah, it's really it sounds like it's just it's doing the kind of thing that like a really good sales manager or account executive uh does naturally, right? It's built into the platform. They're they're scanning for what's missing, what's at risk, they're kind of giving you the play-by-play, sort of directing, you know, um different people around to different, you know, high priority areas. Um and then getting people, getting the system to do that proactively is uh is obviously a big deal, right? Um uh like you said you have a million different meetings, um, you get an overview of of kind of the meeting notes and and like the relevant information. Um, I think that's uh the efficiency gains there um are super, super valuable. So that's uh that's a great sort of uh inside look at like how you're using it and how companies can expect to use it. I really appreciate that. Uh so it sort of brings me to something that I found interesting about how Lightfield lets you interact with the data. Teams can ask questions in in plain English, right? Instead of actually building rapports or digging through dashboards. How does that, you know, just change the way people actually use their CRM data?

SPEAKER_01 24:18

It's so powerful. It usually takes people like five to ten minutes to really figure it out. But anything that you could imagine doing in a UX in a more traditional way, you can you can do in in chat. And so I think there's there's a couple of of things lazy do. One, it it allows you to get data and analysis at a much more grand level, much more easily. So old world, I need to go and like build the filters, build the reports, go, you know, organize it. New world, I can just say, give me a breakdown of how all of Austin's deals from the last week have progressed, and it'll just go and tell me. Uh, configuring and updating things is a lot easier. Um, so for example, um I you know, we launched a new product recently, and I said I told Lightfield, hey, go add a new field to go track, track this product and go look at every conversation we've ever had over the past three months. And any time, any conversation where we talked about that product, go tag that in the CRM so that we have that as a record. No one would ever have the time to even do something like that and you just accept that you have imperfect data, whereas Lightfield, it's literally just it's it's two prompts away. Um, we have people using the chat to go build their CRM. You know, we we were at Saster and people were using our chat to go uh migrate on the fly from their old CRM. We uh we had a company use our chat to migrate over 300,000 records and recreate a data model from their old CRM and their new CRM. In Lightfield, it's it's really um it's very expansive and it really transforms the the the way in which you um you use a CRM. You all the normal buttons and triggers and toggles are still there. Some people really like those. Uh, but I you know, I I honestly I would say 98% of my interactions with Lightfield are are through the chat.

SPEAKER_00 26:14

So if you're coming from one of these older or older CRMs, you'll you'll still you know feel at home with some of these uh you know older like um modules and and knobs, so to speak.

SPEAKER_01 26:24

Um Yeah, uh yeah, I would say like the the philosophy is that there's nothing that you can only do in chat with the agent. Any any functionality you can is exposed in the UX to go and you know peck and type if you want to. Um all of that is also exposed via the chat. All of it's also exposed via the API. So if you want to have it go, you know, have another system, uh like Claude, or use like an MCP server, or you want to hook up to a command line interface if you're technical, it's it's all accessible through through any medium. So however you're comfortable interacting with the CRM, uh, you know, we make that available for you.

SPEAKER_00 27:05

Now, broadly speaking, like what kind of uh like data, it sounds like it has pretty much access to all the sort of relevant data uh you might want to help um that a CRM, an older CRM has access to. But like with AI, I mean, obviously there's some concerns around privacy and security, but like uh at the same time, you know that the more data it has, the more it's able to kind of understand the context and deliver solutions. What kind of data have you maybe been apprehensive of or like haven't been sharing or incorporating into this AI model?

SPEAKER_01 27:37

Well, not not all. So I think there's a couple things. One, we we never share customer data uh with model providers for training purposes. That is, that is their data. It's not anybody else's. We are stewards of that data to hold on to on their behalf for as long as they would like us to, and it doesn't go anywhere else. Uh in terms of what kinds of data should and shouldn't go in the CRM, we we really believe in giving our our customers the the tools to choose that. So and there, so for example, um, you know, you can add domains for emails or companies that you do not want to sync into the CRM. Uh if there's specific users who have particularly sensitive work, you can uh restrict the the context of the information that flows from their account into the CRM. Um if you have a private call in uh, for example, you don't want recorded or you only want you to be able to see a recording, you can go to that. Our fellow, like generally speaking, we believe that companies should be more open and that, you know, and that you should develop one sense of customer truth. But we recognize that there's there's some conversations that are sensitive that that need to be screened from the broader corpus of data that everyone in a workspace has access to, and we give our customers the control to do that.

SPEAKER_00 28:56

Totally. Yeah, I think that's a great uh great standpoint of just having the the customer kind of dictate sort of what how much data they're open to to sharing and be incorporated into the CRM, right? Because and I I think it's good to um, you know, I don't want to put you on the spot too much with that question, but like I think it's interesting to to think about and good for for current and prospective customers um because we're talking about how much you know the the flood, the how much data it has access to and what it's capable of doing, but naturally there's you know sensitive information, right, that you want to be a little bit weary of of incorporating, at least at this stage. Um so yeah, thanks for you know uh easing some concerns there.

SPEAKER_01 29:35

I like we're actually very philosophically convicted on this, which is if as as a customer, your data is yours. We are stewards of the data to help you get value from your data. It's not ours. And it sounds pretty obvious and straightforward, but in practice, what we are seeing, and I'm not going to name names, but people listen to who they are, there's companies who, major players who charge egress fees to push data out of their system via API or put restrictions or roadblocks on, or make it hard to go and easily export your data from the CRM. And, you know, it's interesting as a company that we've actually invested in making it as easy as possible to get your data out of Lightfield because it's it's your data. We believe in that. And we actually believe that by having that more open stance, more companies are going to trust us, knowing that we're we're not going to hold on tight or prevent them from using that data elsewhere.

SPEAKER_00 30:38

So when teams are considering moving from an existing CRM or even just a bunch of spreadsheets, let's say, um, to something more automated like Lightfield, um, what are the things they're most nervous about? Are is it the the fees you mentioned? Is it the kind of the data security privacy element? Um, what what are you seeing?

SPEAKER_01 30:57

Um I would say change is hard and it's a it's a very new way of of doing things. I almost I almost in many ways I liken it to I'm not sure Bo if you've had the chance to ride in a self-driving car yet. Um where um it where like the the they've been you know I'm in San Francisco, they've been around quite a while, and like the first time you do it, it's this very, very wild novel experience, and sometimes it can feel it can feel very disorienting and you have to get over this hump to like get in the car. And you but then you do it enough times and you realize, oh, like this car is safer than a human driving it or me driving it, and it's a great experience, and you almost lose a sense of of the novelty of it. I think that in many ways an AI native CRM it's it's so obviously more intelligent and powerful, but it's just it's just new. And you know, for folks who've been on Salesforce for 20 years, it's you know, change can be be difficult. Um I I think there's that. I think people also, you know, anytime AI is involved, um, you know, people are worried about um accuracy and hallucinations, and you know, we probably spin a lot of controls to make sure that kind of thing never happens in our platform. Um but I I think really that the main thing is it's it's just different and it requires a bit of a different way of operating. And in the same way that ChatGPT is different from Google. And and you know, it's you know, you have some people they basically use Chat GPT as like an advanced Google, and that that's usually a first step before you figure out how to use the platform in its fullest. And so that's really what I'm focused on is how do I and why I like to do things like this is to really bridge the gap between you know folks who really understand the old world and these comfortable, familiar, albeit you know, painful to use tools, uh, and and this new world of AI native CRM, which uh does require some some new patterns to be learned, but ultimately it just gives you so much more power.

SPEAKER_00 33:00

Yeah, I can see that. Changes change is hard, change is scary. People get comfortable with what they've been using for for years, so it's it's tough to make that that switch. Um, even if you see some of the upsides and and look at the data and and what it's capable of doing. I imagine when you show them a demo, let's say, or just have a uh kind of intro, intro meeting uh with prospective clients, I imagine they're they that's what really they need to to kind of make the switch, at least think about it. They kind of see what's what's how it works. Like just like how you got involved with the company, right? You just spent that 10-minute demo with the two founders, um, and we're like, okay, yes, this is the future, you know. Well, um, zooming out a little bit, you know, as as these these AI tools, AI agents become just a bigger part of how sales works, how customer success works, how really all of the go-to market strategy works. How do you see CRM evolving over the next few years? I know it's really difficult to say, but uh, you know, where is this all going?

SPEAKER_01 34:02

Oh man, I mean, I think about this all the time. And and I'll give you some takes that I think you know have not been not been explored as as widely. I think one, and something we're already seeing, both with our customer base, is the the quote unquote CRM is is becoming less like it's evolving from a catalog of customer interactions and sales transactions into a a source of truth for the entire company. So we you know, we work with a lot of technology forward companies, and what's interesting is that the CEOs consistently don't just want their sales team on light field, they get their engineering team on light field, they get their FDEs on light field, they get their uh support teams on light field, they get their product teams or product designers on light field. And the reason why is because CRM, like managing the relationship of a customer, it's not just about a sales transaction. It's about how do you actually serve them in their needs. And that starts from the moment you try and decide what product to build for them all the way into how you go and implement that product for the customer. Every single function at a company, more or less, is involved or is involved or should be involved in that that value chain of delivering for a customer. And all of them can benefit from that shared customer truth. And so we actually don't look at light field as a sales tool. We look at it as a a company tool to help everybody understand how their customers are perceiving their product in the market so that they can be better served. So I think that's that's the most like broad, broad way I see this going for how companies are built. I think for go-to-market teams specifically, my belief is that the already the majority of go-to-market work that can be automated will be automated. I, you know, we're seeing extraordinary productivity gains using our own AI native CRM, such that I actually believe pretty strongly that you know there's there's so much competition in in these hot AI markets. And I truly believe that you know if if you know everybody can get great talent and get a lot of investor funding, it's how you actually uh multiply that talent with agents that's gonna be the difference between the the winners and the losers. I think it's gonna be very, very hard to win uh in a hot AI native category while running a 2010s uh sales playbook and supporting technology strategy. And so I think that very quickly the AI native CRM is going to become the uh is going to become the paradigm. And I actually think that um, especially for grow stage companies, I actually think it's gonna be untenable for a sale, a CRO or a CMO, like at a high growth tech company to advocate for one of the legacy systems, just how it would be seen as preposterous if um, well, I don't want to throw any you know brand names under the bus, but in every other category from like cloud infrastructure to uh product design and planning to like software engineering to QA, today it would be absolutely inexcusable if you know you were a chief product officer or and you or a CIO at some high growth AI company and you you propose rolling out you know something that was founded in the you know before 2010 and and and not the AI native version of that thing. And Sierra, I'm still catching up a bit. I think we're probably you know, I'm starting to see it happen now, and I think we're probably about you know 18 months away from it becoming like a a very career-limiting move to roll with one of the old players.

SPEAKER_00 37:55

Oh man, interesting. Yeah, so you really it's it's all about so a Gentec AI is very much here and it's gonna be a main sort of um you know pillar selling point of of the platform. It's gonna continue to evolve. Um, and then just having uh, you know, continuing to bring more and more people into the into the loop with um with the current you know CRM and having more data, like getting people to actually want to open it up and use it and and innovate um from what it offers. Sounds like that's the kind of the the the big sort of selling point there, right? Um a lot of things to to think about though, just how things are shaping up. And um, yeah, this is a safe place. You don't have to name competitors, but I think we know uh who you're talking about. And um having an AI native solution is uh, you know, you're ahead of the game. So you got to continue to to maintain that that lead and that advantage, competitive advantage, right? Well, um, for those interested in learning more about Lightfield, maybe getting a hands-on demo of the platform, where should they go? Do you guys offer a demo?

SPEAKER_01 38:56

Um, we we we offer demos to as many folks as we can. Um the the calendar can be a bit tough sometimes, but we we are rapidly you know expanding the team to be able to talk to more folks. Uh you go to lightfield.app, you can go request a demo. I actually think for what it's worth, the best way to see if Lightfield's a fit is to try it. We basically created an experience where in I think in 10 minutes, you can get a good sense of if it's a fit for you. You literally just sign up, click a button to connect to your inbox, and all of all of your contact information, all your meetings, all your emails will be automatically synced into the CRM. You'll get all your accounts built, all your contacts built, and and you can go upload data from another system into the agent and get it in Lightfield very, very quickly and start using the the chat and the agent yourself to start doing this work. And so for folks who are on the fence, uh I would encourage you to commit 15 minutes of your curiosity towards towards trying Lightfield. I think you'll be very pleasantly surprised by just how far you can go uh when you when you work with a truly AIA of CRM that makes it super easy to get started.

SPEAKER_00 40:06

So go visit lightfield.app. We'll have the link down below in the show notes. Uh 10, 15 minutes. All that's all you need to get a get a taste of of what it can offer. Um and then Matt, you've have been a wealth of information. Um, I appreciate all of your insights. Where can listeners get in contact with you?

SPEAKER_01 40:23

Uh LinkedIn. It's probably the best spot. I I may have some dormant social profiles elsewhere, but uh you can you can find me pretty regularly on LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_00 40:32

Perfect. Matt Cerno over on LinkedIn. All right. Well, um, thank you again so much for for everything you shared with us. Uh really fascinating conversation. And um, I mean, I'd love to have you back and and and talk updates and see, you know, if some of these things you talked about have of have come true in in the in the uh coming months. You know, things are changing so fast. It's hard to keep up. If they if they do, I'll come back. If they don't, then uh we'll see. Yeah. All right. Sounds like a deal. We'll have to uh meet up in Q4 and see uh and see what the look into the crystal ball and see what happened. But um, all right, Matt. Well, thank you again. Uh thank you all for listening to the Source Forge podcast. I'm your host, Bo Hamilton. Make sure to subscribe to stay up to date with all of our upcoming B2B software related podcasts. I will talk to you in the next one.