In short
Podcast Notes: The Thoughtful Entrepreneur - Episode 1840
Episode Overview In this episode of The Thoughtful Entrepreneur, host Josh Elledge interviews Artem Koren, CPO & Co-Founder of [Sembly](https://www.sembly.ai/). The discussion centers around enhancing efficiency and productivity through Sembly's AI-driven meeting assistant, which saves time and improves outcomes for individuals and organizations.
Key Takeaways
- Introduction of Artem Koren: Artem emphasizes the role of AI in enhancing human experiences and productivity.
- What is Sembly?
- An AI meeting assistant designed for platforms like Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom.
- Features include automatic meeting notes, task identification, and app integration.
- Benefits of Using Sembly:
- Time-Saving: Provides comprehensive meeting notes automatically, enabling users to focus on discussions rather than note-taking.
- Enhanced Meeting Outcomes: Offers contextualized insights, identifies tasks, and allows users to interact with an AI chatbot for quick information retrieval.
- Account Options:
- Offers a range of plans from personal to enterprise-level, catering to various user needs.
- Examples of clients include industries like pharmaceutical and construction, showcasing Sembly's versatility.
- Future Direction:
- Plans to enhance automation of meeting notes, streamline task management, and provide deeper insights for improved productivity.
Detailed Insights
Features of Sembly
- Automatic Meeting Notes: Captures and summarizes discussions based on the type of meeting (e.g., sales meetings vs. tech team meetings).
- Task Identification: Automatically identifies and assigns tasks from meetings.
- App Integration: Seamlessly connects with other tools like Notion, Salesforce, and Slack to streamline workflows.
Differentiation from Competitors
- Sembly serves as an active meeting participant rather than just a recorder.
- It supports various platforms and allows users to upload past recordings for transcription and analysis.
- Offers advanced features tailored for team and enterprise needs, such as unlimited meetings and custom integrations.
Client Use Cases
- Industry Applications: Notable clients from the pharma and construction sectors utilize Sembly to mitigate risks and enhance project management efficiency.
- User Journey: Clients often start with basic features and gradually adopt advanced functionalities like risk and issue tracking.
Pricing Model
- Free Trial: Users can start with a personal plan at no cost to explore Sembly's features.
- Tiered Plans:
- Professional plan starting at $10/month (annual billing).
- Team plan available with advanced automation for under $20/month (annual billing).
- Enterprise options for larger organizations with additional security features and support.
About Artem Koren Artem Koren is passionate about leveraging AI to foster positive change and enhance productivity. At Sembly, he plays a key role in driving innovation through applied natural language understanding.
About Sembly Sembly is a SaaS platform that transforms meetings into actionable insights using AI. It streamlines communication and enhances decision-making by providing accessible meeting content and analysis.
Links Mentioned in the Episode
- [Sembly Website](https://www.sembly.ai/)
- [Sembly on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/semblyai/)
- [Sembly on Twitter](https://twitter.com/sembly_ai)
Conclusion This episode emphasizes the importance of technology in improving productivity and efficiency in today's fast-paced business environment. Sembly stands out as a versatile tool for individuals and organizations looking to optimize their meeting processes and outcomes.
For those interested in enhancing their meeting experiences, a trial of Sembly is recommended to explore its capabilities firsthand.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:05Hey, thoughtful listener. Before we get going. Did you know that my company up my influence. dot com has launched more than 200 business podcasts. The hosts of our shows are amazing leaders and collaborators. Folks, I want to connect you with. Maybe you deserve your moment in the spotlight as a guest of one of these amazing shows. Just go to upmyinfluence.com where you can see more than 50 shows that are actively seeking business leader guests like you to celebrate right now in front of their high caliber audiences. Just click on the podcast tab at upmyinfluence.com where you'll see shows like Experience Focused Leaders Podcast.
0:49If you're seeking insights on transforming customer experiences, you can't miss the Experience Focused Leaders Podcast with your host, Alex Shevolenko. Alex, the CEO and founder of Relay2, brings his rich background from Stanford MBA, Wharton BSE, and the University of Pennsylvania BA. He's a smart dude, along with his real-world experiences of building organizations across global hubs to the forefront of this engaging podcast. Now, each episode is a deep dive into the world of customer-centric strategies, where Alex and his guests, seasoned business owners and industry veterans share their invaluable insights.
1:32They discuss the latest trends, offer practical advice, and reveal the secrets behind exceptional customer experiences and business growth. Are you a business owner who values customer experience above all? Then this podcast is your go-to resource. Better yet, if you've got unique insights and strategies that have helped you stand out in your industry, we'd love to have you as a guest on the show. Share your story with a community that's as passionate about customer experience excellence as you are. Tune into the Experience Focused Leaders podcast for your weekly dose of inspiration and practical tips.
2:08Let's push the boundaries of customer experience together.
2:16With us right now, Artem Koren. Artem, you are the co-founder and chief product officer with Assembly AI. You're found on the web at assembly.ai. Artem, thank you so much for joining us. Glad to be here. Yeah. Well, give us an overview of what Assembly is. Assembly is an AI teammate, sometimes known as an AI meeting assistant. It joins your meetings in Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and then it automatically takes your meeting notes, identifies your tasks, risks, issues, decisions. You can chat to an AI bot about your meeting, and you can send all of these items automatically to your favorite apps.
2:58For example, your to-do app can automatically get to-dos from the meetings you've had. Yeah. So we're recording this in kind of mid-February, and there's a lot of movement in this space. So I think the bottom line is, I mean, if you're just going, listen, I can tell you, you know, having used similar tools, I'll have you kind of differentiate and explain how assembly is different and why it's better and that sort of thing and which use cases might be helpful. But especially for people that have, well, in lots of cases, right? If you have a lot of meetings in a day, I don't know if I'm alone, Artem, but I get to the end of the day and I'm like, who was that?
3:38What did we talk about? By the end of the day, when that's usually when I end up doing all my follow-up at the end. Without notes and summaries and transcripts or going back and sometimes, you know, having to watch some of my meetings, there's no way. Like, I have to rely on that. And so I'm excited because there's so much new technology that's available to us right now. So I just say, number one, if you're not actively using an AI tool, I mean, that's just silly now. We have the tools, we have the technology. But Artem, where does assembly kind of fit in you know i've kind of explained my use case you know i have a lot of client meetings a lot of potential client meetings obviously the podcast itself all of the above i use great ai tools with ultimately assembly has two main goals the first is to give you back time from your day and there's a few ways that it does it one way is it takes meeting notes for you so you don't have to so you can focus on the call at hand.
4:42And then after the call, you're going to have the best meeting notes in industry. For example, we take into account the kind of a meeting you had, what the type of the meeting was. And so if this was a sales meeting versus a daily standup of your tech team or something else, the meeting notes are going to be completely different, including different sections, different details, very relevant to the specific insights that you might want to have in your notes from your meeting. So you can rely on those notes to be useful and helpful for you down the line. So that's first. Second is Assembly attends meetings in a very special way.
5:17It's actually a meeting attendee. So it's not a meeting recorder, although it will listen and will record the meeting when it's there, but it's a meeting attendee. That means that you can invite it to a meeting or have it attend the meeting that you're not even on. So you can invite Assembly just like you would invite any other teammate by including it in a calendar invite or syncing your calendar with our product, and then it will automatically come based on your rules. But essentially, Assembly can come to a meeting with or without you, come back with the meeting notes, and then you can review those notes at your leisure.
5:50If you want to get into some more details, you can review a part of the video. We record the video as well. Or you can go and look in the transcript. So those are some of the ways it will save you time. The second big thing that Assembly does is it enhances your meeting outcomes. It improves your results. So it does that in several ways. I'll mention two. One is there's an AI chatbot that you can talk to. So you just mentioned, okay, I have all these meetings. By the end of the day, I don't know who I talked to and what I talked about. I'm the same. I have a huge volume of meetings that I attend.
6:21And so when it's a few weeks later and I'm talking to someone from a sales team, from a vendor, and we're going back to numbers and prices and discounts, I don't remember if it was 20 % or 25 % or what it was. And so what I do, I literally do this. This is normal thing that I do now. I'm a big user of our own product is I will go into the conversation that I had with this vendor and I will ask our AI chat about, Hey, what was the discount they offered in our previous call? And it will, assembly will tell you, it was like a 20 % was offered. And I've had situations already where, you know, the there's number X that we started the conversation on.
7:00That's why it was so interesting. And by the time it was a month later, that number somehow drifted to Y. And I have all the backing to say, no, no, no, we need to stick to the X. So that's one way that it improves outcomes. Another way that it will improve outcomes is through the automation. So we connect into CRMs, we connect into task management systems, and you can send meeting notes, tasks, all of these things to your app. So you can send it to Notion, you can send it to Slack, you can send it to Microsoft To-Do, You can send it to Salesforce. You want to manage your process. And so what that does is provide additional, very relevant insights into your workflow so that other teams can benefit from it.
7:38When somebody else looks at the Salesforce and interactions you've had with your customers, you have all the details there at your fingertips. So those are the two big value points of Assembly. Yeah, that's very cool. And I think you've already illustrated some differentiation between maybe other tools that may be on the market. And I hope you're OK with maybe addressing, you know, for folks that use Zoom a lot, they not too long ago rolled in kind of an AI companion. It doesn't do what you described. But can I maybe just as of again, when we're recording this, if you wouldn't mind, maybe, you know, kind of differentiate for someone that's in the evaluation phase.
8:16Right. So they're looking at your tool and they might be looking at other things that might be in the market. at, what are they going to find when they do their research in regards to the capabilities of Assembly that just isn't out there? It really depends on what you're trying to get out of the meeting notes and tests and all the insights that come out of a meeting. So, for example, if you're an individual user, 99 % of your calls happen on Zoom. And from time to time, you kind of forget what you talked about with a person. and you want to kind of quickly check back on Zoom and just see what it was about, like through a quick summary, Zoom summary function is a great option.
8:54And maybe for this case, a bit better option than assembly. However, if you want to instantiate meeting notes as a capability for yourself, for your team, for your organization, which means that it covers all the platforms that you use, including things like you can upload previously recorded conversations. So this is on Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams. It will exclude sensitive conversations, so only attend the right kinds of meetings. It will identify you and other users and assign them tasks appropriately. If you want to make sure that the quality of those meeting notes is up to par, the privacy and security is assured, it plugs into your other application workflows that you use, you need assembly for that.
9:42Zoom is not going to help you with that. So in brief, one-off individual, you're just on Zoom, great, you can use the Zoom function. Meeting notes as a capability to power other processes on your team, and also tasks as a capability to power other processes on your team that you need assembly for. Yeah. And so maybe you could share, Artem, some of the clients that you work with. Now, I will say, just regards to pricing, you could go all the way from just personal usage, very accessible. I don't know if you Kind of explain the range of account options all the way up to enterprise. To just try the product, just to get a sense of what it is, you can start with a personal plan that's free.
10:25But that's just to get a sense of what it is to have an AI meeting assistant app in your world. To really get the benefit, to really see what the power is, you start with a professional plan. It's very accessible. It's as cheap as$10 a month if you buy for a year. and on that you can get most of everything you get you get all you get all the meeting notes you get all task transcripts all of the bells and whistles if you are using it with a team with other co-workers you have advanced automation use case like there's real integrations that you want to plug in for that you can use the team plan and that's also very accessible if you go month to months, it's 29, but it's much cheaper than that.
11:07It's less than$20 a month if you go for a full per user. And it's unlimited, meaning that you can have as many meetings as you want on it, no limit. So that's very special also about assembly is we don't, starting with a team plan, there's no limit to how many meetings you can have. And you can just go all out, just use it for all the meetings in your world. They all become searchable. They all become queryable with the AI, it's beautiful. And then of course, if you're a larger company, like an enterprise, or even what we call like a baby enterprise, like let's say you have, you know, a thousand users or something like that, you might want to look at the enterprise option.
11:41The enterprise option gives you things like a reporting hub. It gives you custom authentication controls, custom SSO and different authentication methods. And we also support things like data isolation and private cloud for enterprise customers so for example if you have to have your data hosted and processed in singapore we can do that for you with the private classroom for enterprise so as you get more complex your infrastructure requirements may get more complex and um we can support all that uh no problem and who would be some examples you don't have to give their names or whatever but you know maybe some examples of enterprise level clients that you're working with and i'm curious about kind of their customer journey, what that looked like, you know, how did they roll it in?
12:29And then, you know, how has, you know, if they're looking at the outcomes they were hoping for, how is that being realized today for them? Yeah, we have. So interestingly, the mix of industries that use our product is very diverse and we love that. So we're a very cross industry applicable product. We have some very happy customers in pharma, in construction. Construction has been a fantastic use case because good meeting notes and construction mean hedging your litigation risks. And then I can give an example of one of our larger customers is a company called MyGSOP Cube. It's a very large project management, project control consultancy with a few thousand and consultants based out of Europe, but also with a section of that company in the United States and other parts of the world.
13:21They've been a big and happy user. And essentially, they started with basic meeting notes and then moved on to tasks. They're very project management oriented. So tasks is very important for them. And then soon, we expect they'll start to take advantage of the rate information. So risks, issues, really project PM, PMO-specific information. So they've really kind of slowly absorb the value set that Assembly provides. And they've been very, very happy with that. Also PMI, the Project Management Institute is a customer of ours, and we've had some great collaborations with them. It happens that mine and my co-founders, Gil McClef's background is in management consulting.
14:03And so we're very much into program management. We really like to digest the meeting and give you the actionable details beyond that. But it's interesting. We continue to find interesting and highly valuable use cases that our customers bring to us with a tool like this. It's a frontier product. It's a frontier area. There's a lot of interesting new use cases that are now just formulating. But it's something now, as you said, it's obvious you have to have it in your life. And I absolutely agree. Yeah. So you guys have had some really great growth over the past five years. Where is Assembly going now over the next few years?
14:41We'll continue to grow. We will continue to be a leader in meeting notes automation. We'll do a great job at servicing global corporates. So we already support over 40 languages with our product and also mixed languages. We're very unique in that. So if your team speaks like English and something else on the meeting, like English and French, which is typical in our company and for global teams is generally pretty universal these days, we will support that really well. And we're the only product to do that. So supporting global teams continue to be a leader in meeting notes automation. And then we'll also start to expand out of just core meeting notes into doing more with tasks and task management automation, as well as more contextualized insights that can dispend beyond meeting notes.
15:31You can think of meeting notes as kind of scratching the surface, but we will start to give you more and more value out of the meeting that you have. Always focused on saving you time after the meeting and enhancing your outcomes post-meeting. Excellent. All right. So someone that's been listening to our conversation, the website is assembly.ai. That's S-E-M as in Mary, B as in boy, L-Y dot A-I. When somebody goes there, Artem, what would you recommend that they do? So two things. First of all, hit the trial. There's a free trial. No obligation. You can get into it, sync with your calendar, and you're off to go.
16:07There's no downloads. There are no installs. The product is completely online-based. It works purely SaaS. And so you can be up and running in a matter of minutes with assembly, literally minutes. Very, very easy. So that's first. Second, if you're from a larger company, security and privacy is your concern, of course, as well as it should be. We have on our website a trust center. So if you go under company and you look, there's a link to a trust center. This is our area of our website where we have collected all of the relevant information about how we deal with privacy and security, including very detailed documentation.
16:43So you can peruse that and then engage with our team for any additional questions. Yeah. All right. Again, Artem Corrin, you're the chief product officer and co-founder at assembly.ai. That's the website, assembly.ai. Artem, thank you so much for joining us. And yeah, I'll tell you, hey, keep doing your work to make life easier for those of us with busy schedules, lots of Zoom meetings and being able to manage that a lot better. So as someone whose life is dramatically impacted by new tools that are available to us now that, you know, weren't available to us in the past. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.
17:31Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com slash guest. If you're a listener, I'd love to shout out your business to our whole audience for free. You can do that by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or join our listener Facebook group. Just search for The Thoughtful Entrepreneur in Facebook. I'd love even if you just stop by to say hi. I'd love to meet you. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day.
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From the publisher
Key Points from the Episode:
- Introduction of Artem Koren
- Sembly: AI meeting assistant for Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom
- Features: Automatic meeting notes, task identification, app integration
- Unique aspects: Participating in meetings, personalized meeting notes
- Time-saving benefits for individuals, teams, organizations
- Account options: Personal plans to enterprise-level solutions
- Enterprise clients' outcomes in pharma, construction, etc.
About Artem Koren: Artem Koren is a dedicated advocate for leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance human experiences and foster positive transformations. Currently associated with Sembly AI, Artem plays a pivotal role at the forefront of applied natural language understanding. His work is instrumental in establishing a harmonious collaboration between humans and technology. Artem's passion lies in exploring the potential of AI to enrich various aspects of human life, emphasizing a symbiotic relationship between innovative technology and societal well-being. Through his endeavors, Artem Koren strives to contribute to the evolution of AI, steering it towards applications that bring about positive change and benefit humanity. About Sembly: Sembly is a cutting-edge Software as a Service (SaaS) platform designed to enhance the efficiency of meetings for individuals and teams. The platform employs proprietary AI algorithms to transcribe and analyze meetings, converting spoken content into valuable and actionable insights. By leveraging advanced artificial intelligence, Sembly goes beyond traditional meeting tools, offering a transformative approach to gathering and processing information. The platform's transcription capabilities facilitate easy access to meeting content, while its AI-driven analysis provides users with critical insights, enabling more informed decision-making. Sembly stands out as a powerful tool in streamlining communication and collaboration processes, ultimately contributing to increased productivity and effectiveness within professional environments.

