Console launches 'Assistant': the AI that reads API docs, builds its own integrations, and deploys CrowdStrike in 40 minutes

some real utility out of it.

All right, John, bring a six-pack over to figure and we'll we'll test them out in person.

It's a deal. I'll talk to you soon.

Awesome.

Yeah. See you guys week. I'll talk to you soon.

Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And let me also tell you about Crowdstrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. Crowd Strike secures AI and stops breaches. And without further ado, we have Andre from Console TVP Royalty in the TVP Ultra. Andre, how you doing?

What's going on?

Great to see you.

Great to see you, dude.

Thank you so much for taking the time to come shop with us.

You're always you're always with us.

You're always with us.

Yeah. I was going to say love special to have you here. Um anyway uh uh why don't you just give us a general update on the business like where uh walk us through some features some customers and then I want to hear the latest and greatest.

Cool. Absolutely. Um thanks again guys for for having me on. Um

of course

um yeah so I think as you guys know uh maybe the rest of the audience doesn't but uh we are we're console we build AI agents that automate service management or employee support. Uh we do that directly in, you know, Slack or Teams. Um and you know, things like onboarding, offboarding, PTO requests, access management. Um you know, even telling the facilities team there's no more napkins left in the bathroom or something. Um and so last week we just launched our kind of a big product called assistant. Um and assistant helps you do tier 2 work. Um so it's not just the tier one employee support stuff. Now it's an assist. It's an agent that helps your IT, HR, legal, finance team automate the more complex tasks that often span, you know, multiple systems. So, for example, say uh, you know, there's like there's an internet outage, you can actually now ask console to go and investigate uh across those different systems. So on the back end, we're plugged into your Maro, your crowd strike, your octa, your entra, all these different systems and console knows how to go and pull data from different those different tools and kind of come back with a report for you. Um you can also tell assistant to go and like fix things, right? So you can say actually go and you know push this update to this user's laptop or something like that.

Um and then you can also have console build out itself now. So with assistant you can tell it, hey, I want to connect into Koopa or Netswuite to to pull this information. and console will go read the API docs and then build its own connector into that system and then write a workflow with it.

Wow.

That's like that's basically like it's instead of doing a feature request just request the feature.

Yeah. Yeah. I was going to ask like it feels like years ago you would be spending like you know you'd be stack ranking all the different integration requests. It would take like maybe a month or two to write each one by hand. I imagine that that was accelerated when you first built the product but now it can be handled on the customer side which is crazy to me.

Yeah. So when we started consular you know we were like hey we're actually going to build this framework internally and then our engineers are going to use AI agents to like build out integration super fast using that framework. And so we get things done in like 2 to 3 4 days. Um and then I think you know a couple maybe two 3 months ago we were thinking to ourselves like can we actually just have console do that you know just iterate on itself um and that's that's where the idea came from um and and that's what it does. So you just tell it you know the same way I would tell an engineer hey like we need to build this for this customer now the customer can just tell console directly you know I want to pull these you know I will pull this data I want to all these actions into these systems and

uh you know it'll build itself out to do that. How are

you think that's going to be an entirely new basically part of every product where

you'll still be able to request a feature but at some point it's like you're paying for the software you should be able to adapt it to your own

needs but I haven't no one no one's come on the show and like pitch that specifically as as a company in the application layer basically like we're going to give you the autonomy to adapt the product to your

crazy new paradigm

which is just crazy because like every every SAS like just

every customer wants that.

Yeah,

they want it. They want to be

Oh, I want to wait for the support to get back or my account manager to talk to the engineers and and

yeah um I think I'm sure it'll I'm sure it'll come you know come about in in other tools as well. I would say the core unlock for us was actually building out a really robust again like kind of framework interface that you know we can plug into. Um, I think once you have that, um, and you have, you know, the really important piece for us is this, you know, the context graph. So, we have a context graph under the hood where we're ingesting data from these different systems and we actually like model out your organization. And so, um, when you tell it, hey, like go and update, you know, John's laptop to this version or you ask it like, you know, what is John's version of his laptop? It gives you an answer. You say, go and update it. Um, you know, console already knows who John is. You know, we know what laptop you have. We know where to find it. um if you were to build that from scratch like you know you might have too many lookups it would get kind of like you know a little lost in the sauce and so um that that context graph is is really important uh it's a really core part of what we've built here. How are people thinking about

You got to coin this by the way.

Yeah, there's there's

this is an entirely you need you need a you need

deployed something I don't know for yeah something is defin like agentically deployed engineering or something is

I was saying you name it after yourself.

Yeah method.

Yeah. Yeah. The serb

the serban.

Yeah. You got to get you got to get people posting like Figma needs to incorporate the serban method.

Yes. Yes. This is it. Yeah, I think we got it. We'll

we'll work on it.

Wait, so so uh talk me through the the experience of of onboarding to console and how people are thinking about this in terms of like net new functionality. So I'm basically increasing my AI uh my IT spend, but it's all justified because workers are happier. we're getting more stuff done versus like ripping replacing an existing system or not going with an alternative solution or like at one point in like 2013 I was scaling a startup. We had like 50 employees. We had like a an outsourced IT partner that was like one day a week and they managed like a ticketing system. It was very manual. Uh but there was basically like a consultant who was available every once in a while like a fractional IT person. How how are how are uh companies actually like interfacing with console and like integrating?

Yeah, so I would say most IT and kind of service management teams roughly scale linearly with headcount growth. Um so you have like one IT person for 100 people or maybe one to 150 maybe 1 to 200 um if you don't include ramp who has a very you know insane ratio. Um but but you know most companies are in that range and so with console they're able to take that you know they go one to like 400 1 to 500. Um so we act as ultimately like this force multiplier for for your team. So, you know, yes, there's there's spend going into console, but you're actually saving on the back end of that as you're, you know, we we work with companies like data bricks, you know, uh, cursor, Figma, Chime, uh,

founder,

you know, and these guys are growing incredibly fast and, you know, a lot of these guys actually have plans to keep their IT teams flat um, you know, through this this hyperrowth phase that they're about to experience and, um, it's it's entirely because of console and so we we're seeing we're starting to see that now not just in IT but you know HR legal finance workflows as well um where you know they're they're just doing this employee support where they're just answering questions that um you know answering questions or taking action into systems that they have kind of elevated permissions into. Now you can have an agent that just does that so they don't need to spend their time on that. They can

What's your approaching do you just uh are you the only IT person at console? Like do you force yourself to to dog food the product to the extreme or you what's the

we we take a bit of a crazy approach here where everyone has full admin access to console and everyone is encouraged to build their

own smarter you want everybody using the product

at some point we probably need to pull it back u I think our head of security was complaining last week uh he's like okay we've got too many sales people in here um

I can imagine

um but like you know we've got uh We actually have like our I was actually just talking to to our office manager. Uh we're going to have console just do our dinner orders as we do dinner in the office every day. Um and you know with with assistant now she can build out her own workflow. She says hey I want to you know ping me every every week at 4 p.m. Ask give me the options. I'll select it and she's like go and order it into I think she's using like ECater. Um so not an integration we would have built out if if uh you know on our own but I think with assistant it can do that. And so um you know our head of security actually he was just we he was presenting a use case to us the other week. He rolled out CrowdStrike on our devices um and he did in like 40 minutes instead of I think what he said you know would have taken him like a day or two. Uh and he was just he did that entirely through assistant. He was just hey I want to you know plug into these laptops. It went it understood hey you need to download these two binaries if you're going to deploy it on these versions of uh Mac OS. Here's where you upload it. Here's the script you write. Okay. Do you want me to push it? Yes. And just deployed it. Um, so I think there's there's kind of a lot there's more use cases than we can imagine and so I think we work closely with our customers where we're almost like just trying to show them the technology and then I think they tell us uh what they what they want to build.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean there's so many startups I'm sure a lot of a lot of founders in the audience have have felt this before where you're the CEO and you set up the you know all the IT systems and then actually offboarding as like the super admin is extremely difficult. I actually I actually fully lost my Amazon account at a previous company because it was so deeply integrated into the company that they just couldn't figure out how to change the super admin. I was like just take my just take my Amazon account. And so I just don't have Audible anymore or like Amazon Prime. I need to set up like a new account and basically just declare like Amazon bankruptcy because I was just the admin for like a decade and things just like built up and and I'd try and give people the other password. Anyway, there's

how are you how are how do you uh how do you try to um

how have you been trying to model like the like overall opportunity for console because you're still early stage. So at this point it's just like let's get as many great companies as we can on the product. But then you know 5 10 years from now at later later rounds or stages you'll be kind of you'll probably be asked that question more seriously. But how do you think about it? because you are at this moment like selling against what historically was like the kind of I don't know labor TAM to some degree where um but the other side of that the interesting thing is there's a lot of companies that would like use console that never would have had a dedicated IT person and so it's not entire it's not just replacing people it's like bringing a kind of capability to a to a company but how are you thinking about the the overall category?

Yeah, absolutely. So there's a there's a couple of things I think that are that are going on at once. I think the first one is, you know, when we when we look at um it today, it's very much a reactive role. It's very much a cost center because I think we've just it's kind of like escaped us a little bit, right? In the 80s and 90s, it was actually an enablement center, right? You were bringing in technology or deploying, you know, giving people computers, you're you know, deploying Wi-Fi and or not Wi-Fi, but internet. uh you know giving an email and so on. That's like a force multiplier. Um

we've done too much of that. We have too many SAS apps. There's all this sprawl and now all you're you kind of the team is just managing that, right? They're just doing support. Um, and so with console, the way we think about it is we're going to bring our teams back to kind of what it was like in the 90s where you can actually have this agent handling, you know, all of the the the ticket management for those those simple systems and um those those kind of basic requests. Now you have assistant that can go and do more complex work across the the enterprise. And the value there is now you can do 10 times as much as you were going to do in you know in that year. And you know if you think of you talk to any uh company, uh no one will tell you, oh yeah, like our IT team is kind of always on top of it. Our IT systems are, you know, perfectly set up. There's always something kind of a little bit lagging behind. And it's because they're just constantly drowning. And so console allows them to to kind of focus on the more strategic and kind of be more outcome based. Um and so I think when you think of it that way, um you know that the TAM is actually all of the work that you know all these companies would love to do. uh and they just don't have the the employee headcount or or the cost really the the to to to go and spend on it. Um and so that's that's one big piece. The other one is we're actually just ripping out replacing you know tools like Service Now and um you know Jer Service Desk and Fresh Service and kind of replacing with a more AI native solution. Um and so we we expect that to to kind of scale as as you uh on board more as as companies become more digital native right they they have more

saying you're the SAS apocalypse. You're flaming the you're flaming the fires of the SAS apocalypse.

I didn't say that.

I said that. Uh there you go.

Very very cool. Uh yeah, it's great great to get the update. Um that uh yeah and and we're going to work on this coinage. Go back with the team, brainstorm a little bit. You tell us you tell us what and we'll start asking every company. Are you guys using the Serban method?

Yeah, we'll figure it out. It's good. It's good.

I love it.

I'll run it by my head of growth. We'll see what she says. Fantastic.

Great to see you.

Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

Thanks, guys. Great to see you. All right. Thanks a lot.

We'll talk to you soon.

Um, there's a bunch of news that we need to run through before we head out. Uh, Artemis 2 is launching and Khi has it at 64% chance before April 2nd of this year. We're going to the moon. Four people are going to the moon. Everyday Astronaut says, "I'm honestly shocked at how the general public has no idea Artemis 2 is taking humans out to the moon and will be the furthest humans have ever flown. Every non-space nerd I've talked to has no idea. We got to get people stoked. This is what I'm going to be writing about tomorrow. I want to deep dive this. I want

Why is no one talking about our

Why is no one talking about the moon? We're going uh NASA is set to launch four astronauts around the moon. the deepest human space flight since the final Apollo lunar landing on n in 1972. And there's a bunch of goals. So, uh you can go track that and uh and we will talk more about that tomorrow. And of course, bring you a whole bunch of other news and interviews tomorrow. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com.

It's been a It's been an honor.

It's been an honor.

It's been an honor to to be here.

It was a rough couple days. It was a rough couple days being away.

Yeah.

But we're back.

We're incredibly back.

I'm glad.

It's going to be a great week and uh have a wonderful evening.

Yeah. We will see you tomorrow. Goodbye.

Throwing smoke.

Throwing smoke.

Okay. Goodbye everyone.

See you tomorrow folks.

Goodbye. We will be back when the smoke clears.

Wonderful day.

Goodbye.