“It’s replaced about eight tools.”

Hi, I’m Cliff Wilson, founder of Huddle. It’s an executive search firm, and we have a team of four people that goes up and down. I am now using Seby as our operating model, or the operating model that has learned to work the way we work. I’ve spent years trying to get AI into the business, and before AI, spent years trying to have the right technology to help us be the best we can be.

Every tool I used had lots of strengths, but the biggest challenge was we had to learn how to work with that tool, particularly around data in, data out. Behaviour change is hard. You do the online training, but nobody uses it the same way. The other thing about those tools was there was no one to drive it, despite the amount of money I was paying in licence fees. The training was online, and I had to bring it all together. The nuance of how we work wasn’t available, so there was nobody really to bring you on the journey in terms of that change management. We were working across eight, ten systems: Microsoft 365, CRMs, spreadsheets, Loop, To Do, Zoom.

Seby, when you get your head around it, learns the way we work, and that’s really important. If you know what good looks like and you know the journey to good, Seby learns that. You’ve got to trust that, and that’s the best thing about it. It’s also hard when you’ve been in that traditional world, where you’ve learned how the product works and adapt to that. This is not a tool. It’s almost like, I don’t want to say a person, but it’s almost like that assistant that’s an expert in whatever part of your business you’re operating in, that has context and reasons, and tries to understand what goal you’re achieving, or what good looks like for whatever you’re trying to do. That could be business development, proposals, project management, delivery. So conceptually, the power of this to amplify or get more out of the same capacity in your business, which is people, is brilliant. It is brilliant.

As an example, it’s changed many things. It’s changed how we sell. Our process to selling is the same, but the work and effort we as a team put in has changed. We’re all on the same page. When we’re in meetings discussing how to pitch, the doing part, or much of the doing part, is done by Seby, and done in the background very, very quickly, not instantly. Decks and client reports used to be done by hand, again back in one of those tools, Microsoft 365 and PowerPoint. While everyone knows PowerPoint, no one’s an expert in it, and there was just a lot of manual rework and frustration, and also people on different pages in terms of a deck going to a client. Now the proposals pretty much write themselves. Again, you need to be instructive of what good looks like, but then Seby does it, and I’ve got very good at giving it some guidelines to keep it looking exactly like we want it to look. The engagement with the client is a lot different now, because before I didn’t know if they’d opened it, and if they’d looked at it. Now I can see the interaction, both on when to chase them, but also what was of interest and what wasn’t.

The thing I find brilliant, but also the thing I found hardest to get my head around, is that it never forgets. Unlike when I was in Copilot, or even ChatGPT, it isn’t about the most recent note or most recent data content. It’s about what is relevant to what you’re trying to do. Seby is very good at taking all that data with that context and giving you an answer for today. It could be the latest update, but it could be something that needs your awareness from all the information Seby has, and how that’s relevant to whatever it is you’re looking to achieve and do.

It also does that for everyone on the team. One of the things Huddle is all about is building great teams, and how we can be one team. Seby’s been very good at having us all on the one page. A very simple and trivial example: you’re working across Teams, Slack, email, texts, WhatsApp, and you’re asking a team member a question because you can’t remember what was said in the meeting, or you weren’t in the meeting. You don’t have to do that now. You just ask Seby, and Seby will give you that context. If it’s still not marrying up with what you’ve got, you can still go to your team, but that’s more an old behaviour rather than a need.

Veronica is building our whole operating system on it here, and what that looks like, I suppose, is that we now have sales meetings, and the conversations in those meetings update our sales pipeline and move things along stages. So that admin piece we used to have after the sales meeting is pretty much 100% gone, and that’s in pipeline and in people. There was a lot of manual administration work around preparing client reporting, or formatting resumes, or looking up content to populate those reports. A lot of that is done now automatically, and the work on us is to review and make sure it is what we want the client to see. Even where we’re getting to on Outlook and emails, it’s giving us an email to focus on what we need to achieve that day, and addressing other emails appropriately. So as a team we have a lot more of an intentional focus on the work we need to do in our business, as opposed to reacting to tonnes of information that come in from outside.

We’re four months in, and Seby has done a huge amount of work, which I’m happy to talk to, in terms of understanding our business. It’s replaced about eight tools. It’s definitely amplified what we do. If I take a simple day for me, I’m in startup mode, so I’m probably working 11, 12 hours a day. I’m probably at least tripling that with Seby, and the cost is almost zero, and a lot less than what I was paying for licences for tools that had their place, but they were all siloed, which was a lot of work on me and the team.