My first newsletter 3 months ago was about leveraging GenAI for Account Research and I had documented my experiments with various approaches. Here and here. Over the last 3 months I have talked to many founders that have built amazing products and with my focus on GenAI, I've got a chance to really look at the various options and solutions out there.
I'll caveat this by saying that even with all this focus and research I am sure I am missing tons of companies. There are so many out there. That being said, it has helped me organize the solutions to this problem. What I have realized is that there is no one way to solve this need and the good news is that there is choice. Each choice has it's pros and cons.
While I am using Account Planning / Account Research as an example to showcase the various ways organizations can use GenAI to solve problems, this framework applies to any GenAI solution to a business need (maybe it is even broader than that).
Here I have a 2 x 2 that organizes the various solutions.
So when it comes to doing account research using GenAI your options are -
Use the LLM - Whether this is Gemini, ChatGPT or Anthropic you can definitely use these to do your account research. You can upload a 10K and ask questions. That being said, you quickly run into challenges and limitations. It takes time, you have to repeat your prompts for each account, you cannot access real time information, you cannot upload your company content due to security reasons. You also need to really understand prompting and nuances of each LLM etc. Overall it is more pain that is worth the effort and even after that you solve a piece of the need.
Feature in existing product - You have licenses for LinkedIn SalesNav, Zoominfo etc. and these companies provide account research in their offerings. They have crawled the 10Ks and earnings reports, news about the company etc. and using GenAI summarized this and provide the information to you without you having to do anything. The level of effort you have to put in here is nothing. The research is done and provided to you. The drawback of this approach is that these companies tend to provide generic research. While you can get details about the company you are researching, you are not able to tailor that to your company's products and value proposition. This is the current state and can change but for now, they are limited.
Agent Builders - This is a new category of products that combines GenAI with Integration and Automation. I strongly believe that agents will be where we see practical use cases of GenAI. They let you break up your prompts into smaller prompts (since the LLMs work best this way), they let you chain a series of prompts in a flow (this way you can build a repeatable process), they can integrate with various systems (which is key to solve real problems), they let you pick the right LLM for the job and they let you do this in a secure way. This is the most flexible and powerful approach. The biggest downside here, is that you need someone that is a knowledge worker that is pretty savvy with GenAI and business processes. You don't need someone who is a data scientist or python programmer etc. but you still need a skilled resource. Examples of products here are AnyQuest (www.anyquest.ai), Clay (www.clay.com), Copy (www.copy.ai), Relevance AI (www.relevanceai.com). It also takes time to build these agents.
Point Solutions - These are solutions that are built to address this one need around account research and planning and they have pre-built all the content / integrations etc. that you need. They have been built to combine your value prop to the account's priorities, so they are personalized and they do this one thing really really well. A lot of these companies are relatively new, so they are adding new features constantly and focused on meeting this need completely. Examples here are Salesmotion.io, Pipelinegeneration.ai, poggio.ai, databook.com. The bring in account research, user research and a personalized value prop that saves you the time to figure out how your product can address your customers' strategic initiatives. They will stay on top of hiring trends, news items you should be interested in etc. They will help generate targeted and personalized emails and you cannot beat the time to value that these solutions provide. The question - Why can't LinkedIn / Zoominfo / Gong etc. do this is a very valid one, but for some reason they are not. I assume they will buy these point solutions at some point.
As I had mentioned earlier, I am finding that whether it is Account Research or some other business need, the solutions tend to fall into these buckets and each has their pros and cons and you have to decide which one makes most sense for you.
I am advising companies on leveraging GenAI in GTM and if you are interested in learning more, ping me.