Attio launches hybrid agentic architecture to let AI agents work inside CRM data with full guardrails

Speaker 3: Our next guest is Nicolas Sharp, the cofounder and CEO of Adio. He's in the waiting room. He's been on the show twice. Welcome back. Nicolas, how are doing?

Speaker 8: Hey, guys. Good to see you again. Good to be back.

Speaker 2: Great to have you back.

Speaker 8: Always a... Yeah. Always a good sign. It means we've launched something.

Speaker 3: So that's a

Speaker 8: good marker for us.

Speaker 3: Yes. Yes. What is

Speaker 2: your Always launch so so so late. So thanks for

Speaker 3: That's hanging right. That's right.

Speaker 8: No, you've got to remember that in Europe, we wake up late and set up late, so it's very normal.

Speaker 2: West Coast hours.

Speaker 8: Yeah. Exactly.

Speaker 2: Exactly. Awesome. What's new?

Speaker 8: So what's new is a really big launch from us. We have launched our new architecture, hybrid architecture, for AgenTic revenue. So it's all about allowing agents to be unleashed on your data while maintaining all of the guardrails you'd expect from business applications. So it's trying to drastically blur the lines between infrastructure and having just a raw fire hose to your to a database, but all of the stuff you'd expect when dealing with customer data, guardrails and policies and all those sorts of things What's more to unlock.

Speaker 3: What's more important to people right now? Because if you go to some frontier model and you give it slash goal and you just say like

Speaker 7: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Look, I got a spreadsheet here. I got... I'm pointing you in the general direction. Go figure out how to get into my, you know, this database and then this this SaaS product and like figure it out. A lot of times it can write an API binding and then build an integration on the fly. But so it feels like there's the unleashing, like adding capability then there's the adding the guardrails. And it feels like right now people are shopping for guardrails, but what are you feeling from customers?

Speaker 8: That's right. And then, you know, and and what we wanna do is we want people to be able to do that. We want people to be able to point an agent at the CRM at Atio and say, hey. Go and find me these customers and have all of the context. You know, we shipped universal context earlier in the year, which is this kind of full three sixty view of all of the unstructured data in a vector store so that the agent can go and search all over it. And so you do want to unleash them. You do want to allow them to go and do all of this really difficult work. And they will write amazing queries and they'll blow your mind. But equally, you are dealing with customer data and a lot of it. And there's a lot of orchestration that goes into that. There's a lot of governance and policy and all that kind of stuff. So we're really trying to push the best of both worlds.

Speaker 2: What are the best sales teams and and GTM teams in the world doing? We were talking about cold email on on the show earlier and this frustration now with like, you know, feels like 90% of the emails I get are like, you know, hi, Jordy. Here's some random context from something you shared online at some point.

Speaker 8: Yeah, like two years ago. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Years ago. Now here's the product and it's like, obviously, like very low effort. Yeah. But what are you seeing like the best teams in the world actually do?

Speaker 8: Well, it's... So so you had one of those teams, I I think, like, if if not already on your show, on your show today, Model Yeah. Is one of our other customers and has built some awesome things on Ateo. But what we see with these great go to market teams is essentially that they are not just trying to do what was done in the old world with agents. So they're not just simply replicating the kind of like SDR, you know, outbound SDR to inbound SDR to, you know, hand over to sales rep, etcetera. They're rethinking the customer flows entirely and and not just building a skew... Skeuomorphic version of what they did before. So And what that looks like is being much more personalized, doing way more work per customer and being able to deliver a experience that might only be safe for your very highest value customers to absolutely all of them. And for companies that might be PLG have sign ups, that means doing a ton of research on every customer and making sure that when they show up for a call or when you reach out to them, you actually have the full picture. There's no need for all those handoffs. You don't drop the ball, etcetera. Yeah. So I think we're seeing the, yeah, the best teams are just being way more imaginative and and are are in real build mode and first principle mode.

Speaker 2: Do you... Where where are you most excited for models to make meaningful progress? It feels like for a lot of this work, like, using using sort of cheaper models or open weight models, like, probably can can get a lot of the job done.

Speaker 8: Yeah. I mean, we're pretty excited about some of the decision models as well because it's really nice. There's so much of this stuff that's making lots and lots of decisions before you actually need the output of a traditional LLM. And we're very excited about what we can do there and the next order of magnitude of scale it allows. And especially when you start being able to get access to probabilities as well, then you can start building very, very different types of workflows. And so much of what you need to do before you actually get into a reasoning model and into unstructured output is just lots of decision making. And so we're very excited about the capabilities of those models.

Speaker 2: Makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 3: How much are you dogfooding Adio? Like, how pro are you in terms of... How key is Adio in, like, your actual growth story?

Speaker 8: We are the... We're we're patient zero. We're... Mean, it's sometimes to the frustration of the team because we get the the very, very kind of, you know, day zero releases. And we are we really use our own team as guinea pigs of this stuff. So sometimes you have to remember that the version of the product that your customers has is a month or so behind what we have. And we're always kind of very excited to to show them the latest and greatest features. But, no, we're we're we're huge ATEO users.

Speaker 3: Amazing. Thank you so much for coming

Speaker 2: on Great update. Congrats.

Speaker 8: Thank you, guys. Nice to see you again.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Great to see

Speaker 5: you. Yeah.

Speaker 3: Goodbye.

Speaker 2: Cheers.

Speaker 3: Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Mary Coke over at the Wall Street Journal shares a story from Palantir chief technology officer, Sham Sankar, friend of the show, says some AI researchers have started smoking cigarettes because they are confident that technology will cure cancer. The trend is a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI. He told CBS News, if that logic is sound, AI optimists might soon hitting the bottle and eating cake for breakfast sometimes. Seems like we're begging AI to replace us. She's not a fan of this. We we we were pitching this months ago. We were saying if you really believe it's gonna cure cancer

Speaker 2: Didn't we say cigars?

Speaker 3: Start smoking cigars. We said everything. Everything. You know? Eat cake for breakfast. Hit the bottle. I wanna I wanna see it. Yeah. This all started with the sunscreen thing. Oh, I don't wear sunscreen because AI's gonna cure skin cancer. There's still a chance. And I I like the idea of the the revealed preferences. You know? You gotta be aware. It can't just be the stated preferences. Gotta be the revealed preferences. We have yet to see an AI lab leader smoke a cigar in an interview. Yep. But that feels like something that might happen in the next month.

Speaker 2: I'd like to I'd like to see that.

Speaker 3: I hope so. Yeah. Put your put your money where your mouth is. Put your lungs where your where your mouth is, I guess.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I'd like a a sit down founder, you know, interview podcast Yeah. Where they they actually have a live smoke break. So they keep taping...

Speaker 3: But it's just ripping darts the whole

Speaker 2: time. Yeah. Yeah. That's actually an under explored... Cheeky... Like the last like white space in tech media is just like smoke breaks. Yeah. Because we have running We've done it. We have the walk and talk interviews. Yeah. We now have running interviews.

Speaker 3: Yeah. No one's done like a Marvel Yeah. Red

Speaker 2: tour.

Speaker 3: Show. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. But like a ten minute mini podcast where somebody's having a smoke. Yeah. You're just rattling off questions, riffing.

Speaker 3: Dwarf Kasch is right. Could do it.

Speaker 2: He's the guy.

Speaker 3: Or, you know, maybe the next Dwarf Kasch. A challenger. A spin off. A knock off. It's Dwarf Cash with cigarettes. Cheeky heater. Yeah. Heaters. Well, they're on a heater. There's some other news. Muse was just knocked out of the top of the app store despite Alex Wong, Mark Zuckerberg, Cheeky Pint, amazing model. They couldn't go up against what company? Dave's Hot Chicken. Dave's Hot Chicken. They have a new discount going, I think. Have you had Dave's Hot Chicken?

Speaker 2: Never have. Delicious. Never will.

Speaker 3: It's so good. It's kind of the air one of fast food. No. It's ridiculous. But...

Speaker 6: How

Speaker 2: does Vinted do it?

Speaker 3: Vinted is really on such a run. Vinted is is doing really well. But fun to see Dave's hot chicken up there at number one. Anyway, what else is... What else needs to be discussed? People are people are really feeling the cheeky pint debating when will the first person drink 12 Guinnesses or delete 12 Guinnesses and pick a fight with the film crew. We got a little preview because I think Will O'Brien...

Speaker 12: Yeah. He's going on. So... Well, he's already been on.

Speaker 3: He's already... He's been on once or he's... Or they filmed it but they haven't released it

Speaker 7: yet.

Speaker 12: So that like trailer...

Speaker 3: He's in season two.

Speaker 12: We know that he already filmed it. Okay. We don't know how many Guinnesses he's deleted.

Speaker 3: But he... Wasn't he backtracking? I thought he was saying that, oh, well, the real metric is not total Guinnesses but Guinnesses per hour.

Speaker 12: Yeah. So independently, he texted me a slightly different metric than just mass because... He's a freaky.... Elon interview was so long. I think if he's only on there for an hour, like, can't expect him to actually put down 12.

Speaker 3: I think we can. I think we can. You get one...

Speaker 2: What if John has to go back to work, but he just stays and they just let the... They let let it run. True. And he can and he can just start getting some work done, have a few more drinks.

Speaker 3: True. Yeah. I don't know. I I I love Will. I'm sure he put on a masterful performance, but I'm getting some some red flags with this fuzzy map. This is a vanity metric. He wants to switch to to beers per hour as some, you know, non GAAP metric here. I think, like, the the the standard has been established. If you want to put down more beers, you've got to keep the conversation going. You've got to be good content and then you get the opportunity to spend more time drinking beers. So if you only have an hour of content, you gotta be really be chugging the whole time. You gotta get as many as possible because Elon's gonna be able to go on a run for hours and hours and hours.