July 12, 2021 • 20 mins
Episode 11, we speak with Colin Teubner Director of Customer Solutions at airSlate & SignNow. Colin talks about airSlate and their mission to provide easy-to-use, no code, end-to-end automation to empower individuals and business teams to digitize business processes on their own by eliminating manual and expensive document and/or paper-based workflow processes. If your business is still utilizing traditional paper-based processes for signatures, contracts, or proposals you are going to want to listen to this podcast!
Learn more at www.airslate.com or www.signNow.com
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Episode Transcript
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Play the King (00:00):
This podcast is sponsored by OMI the company
that makes CRM Work! Today,We're speaking with Colin
Teubner Director of CustomerSolutions at airSlate and
signNow.
Colin Teubner (00:14):
I'm Colin Teubner the Director of Customer
Solutions at airSlate andsignNow.
And that's the team that helpsour customers get up and running
with the product after they signon and also helps them evaluate
it before they sign on.
I started at airSlate about ayear and a half ago.
My experience is in the BPM andworkflow software industry.
(00:36):
For a number of years, I've beena product manager and also a
sales engineer in that part ofthe software industry.
Play the King (00:42):
So Colin airSlate has been around for, I
want to say around 11 years nowunder a different name, then
there was a rebrand in 2019, youcame from within the industry,
but you must have seen somethingwith this company that made you
think, okay, there's somethinggoing on here.
Talk to me about the state ofthe market.
Like just the landscape here.
What is it that excites youabout this product right now?
Colin Teubner (01:04):
So one of the things that I always noticed
when I was at other BPM andworkflow software companies,
customers constantly had tointegrate e-signature among a
number of other things that theyhave to integrate, but
e-signature was one of them andit was expensive and painful and
e-signature, it spans corporateboundaries.
So people are having someelaborate processes internally,
(01:25):
and then they need to send somedocuments up to get signed.
And so I realized that that wasa gap and airSlate was combining
workflow and process managementwith e-signature capabilities.
And that seems like a reallywinning combination.
So I think that's whatinterested me initially,
Play the King (01:42):
When you say expand corporate boundaries,
when you say that can you givethat example?
Okay.
So within an organization,people trust each other, they
know who each other are.
Are you describing a process bywhich you can sort of extend
that, that boundary of trust, Iguess, to other organizations
where it might not have existedbefore?
Like how would you describethat?
Colin Teubner (02:01):
I would say you've got the boundary of trust
inside a company.
That's exactly right.
And so approving decisions,workflows inside organizations,
those can happen within anenterprise application, or I can
just send somebody an email, youknow, I can click a button to
approve some of these expensereports.
I don't need to sign anythingbecause of that trust that you
mentioned, when you talk aboutspanning company boundaries and
(02:24):
let's use an example where theydon't typically use e-signature
when a retailer, a big retaileris ordering products from big
manufacturers, they usesomething called EDI, which is
electronic data interchange.
So it automatically placesorders when the stock is
reaching a certain level, likecar manufacturers do that with
their suppliers to EDI is reallycommon, but to support that, and
(02:48):
you have to put a bunch of legalagreements in place beforehand
and sign them because there isnot that level of trust.
The supplier can't necessarilytrust that just because the
manufacturer sends some data, awire, they're also going to pay
their invoice.
And that's why you need papercontracts to support that
digital process.
So you can do that, right?
You can have a system and youcan have paper contracts that
(03:10):
support it, or you can havee-signature where you are just
signing the contracts involvedthat you need whenever there's
not a trust relationship.
So you sign those electronicallyas part of the flow.
So we're not going to crush EDI,right?
I mean, when people have thesegiant enterprise systems that
need to be integrated, they'reprobably still going to do it
that way.
But the vast majority ofdecisions and approvals that are
(03:33):
happening across companyboundaries are much smaller.
So being able to just get ane-signature as part of the flow,
and a lot of times they're,one-time things too, you know,
you're signing for a loan orapproving the release of your
medical records, to yourdoctor's office, you don't need
a long paper contractingprocess.
You just need to get thesignature on a boilerplate
(03:55):
document and move on.
Play the King (03:57):
So when I think about the landscape where you
guys are operating, you know,there are some long-term trends
that have been pushing us inthis direction for years, like,
you know, over a decade, if notmore.
And then it seems to me that inthe last year, you know, with
everything that's going on withremote work, I imagine those
trends have accelerated.
Could you talk about some of thewider stuff going on that sort
of makes this the right momentfor a company like this?
Colin Teubner (04:18):
You're absolutely right, certainly in the last
year, our business startedgrowing more quickly.
Everybody pretty much alreadyknew about e-signature it's been
around for awhile.
And most of them kind of knewthat they needed it.
A lot of small businesses havebeen, oh yeah, I should get that
e-signature thing, but hadn'tgotten around to it.
(04:39):
And the pandemic forced them toget around to it very quickly.
So we obviously saw a big spikein interest right at the
beginning of the pandemic, butthat's interesting sticks around
because once you've automatedprocesses, you're not going to
go back to the manual way ofdoing them.
In fact, we find that peoplehave 10 other things that they
could automate once they havethe software in their hands as
(04:59):
well.
Play the King (05:00):
Let's talk about those things.
You mentioned how the softwarecan compliment EDI.
What are some ways thatcustomers are using it first
Colin Teubner (05:08):
Before I list these cases, I want to say that
really every industry and everycompany has at least some use
cases for this kind of software,certainly for just automating
processes in general, and alsofor e-signature specifically, or
the kind of document generationthat we do.
But I think there's certainindustries that have adopted our
way of automating processes morequickly than others, partly
(05:31):
because of the organizationalboundaries that we talked about
before.
And it's also partly becausethey may already have kind of a
paper oriented mindset and weallow people to keep the concept
of paper as they move thosedocuments around and sign them
during a workflow.
So some of the main industries,I alluded to one already, which
is healthcare.
(05:51):
The example of releasing yourmedical records, new patient
paperwork, and onboarding.
There's a ton of processes andalso healthcare as a whole has
some very large players, butthere's a lot of very small
businesses in the healthcareindustry, your doctor's office
or dentist office.
A lot of times, those arebusinesses with fewer than 20
(06:11):
employees.
And so they hadn't previouslyhad some big it department that
was going around automatingstuff.
And again, with the pandemic,they needed to quickly get rid
of those clipboards with paperthat they hand off to people
face-to-face and start gettingdocuments filled out
electronically another one'seducation.
And so we have some biguniversities that are using
(06:32):
airSlate to manage a lot oftheir processes that go to the
students.
And also some of the processesthat go to faculty, particularly
contract faculty.
So again, things crossingorganizational boundaries, you
know, students are part of theuniversity, but they don't have
accounts on it, university,enterprise systems.
So, I think it's just almosttraditional for students to be
(06:55):
signing documents that they sendinto the university.
So e-signature is a great fitwith students.
then we also have in fact, twodifferent universities who are
generating contracts for adjunctfaculty, which is a process
that, you know, part of thereason that really needs to be
automated is because they haveto do 30 or 50 or a hundred of
them all at once each semester.
(07:16):
It's not something that's spreadout over time because of their
semester working.
So automation is a huge winthere.
We can generate the contractsand route them for e-signature
all on the same workflow.
The third industry that I'llmention is construction.
And I think this is a neat one.
So again, a huge interorganizational workflows
construction companies dealingwith a homeowner or a building
(07:38):
owner, multiple differentsuppliers and probably like an
architect or an engineer and thepermanent authority, the
authority having jurisdiction,wherever they are.
And so we have, um, someconstruction companies, multiple
different ones in differentareas of residential
construction that areinteracting with all of those
(07:58):
different constituencies usingdocuments.
So if you imagine going out tosomebody's house and getting the
measurements for the roof andclicking a button and generating
a quote for the homeowner, amaterial order for the roofing
supplier and permanentapplications for whatever city
you happen to be in at the timewhere that house is.
So again, generating a lot ofpaperwork.
(08:21):
If you're interacting with agovernment, you're not allowed
to say, Hey, we don't want tofill out that form, just take
this data.
You still have to send them theform.
And so those people are, if theywant to automate, they're forced
to use a method that lets themkeep that form in place and fill
it out automatically.
Play the King (08:38):
That's interesting.
So can we, can we dial in, maybeto one of these organizations
you use them as an example, I'llsuggest the adjunct professor
contracting set up, you know,we're talking about, you know,
from the client side, from thevendor side, from the partners
side, you know, just take methrough it, like, how does this
work and how it help, how doesit help people save time, save
money?
Colin Teubner (08:57):
Yeah.
I mean, I think it'sinteresting.
And the adjunct professor one isa great example.
I already kind of alluded to thefact that, you know, because
they have to do so many of thesein such a short amount of time,
it's really painful for thepeople who are participating in
the manual merchant of thatprocess.
So you've got staff preparing abunch of contracts and you've
got a person of authority at theuniversity who has to sign them
(09:19):
and then send them off to theadjunct professors or the
contract instructors, you know,a lot of times in software and
we have to do big ROI studiesand try to prove out the
benefits.
But I would say, you know, thiskind of automation plus
e-signature project, most of thetime, the benefits are pretty
obvious to the people who areexperiencing that painful manual
process today, they have seriousissues.
(09:41):
There's things falling betweenthe cracks.
And then sometimes it's not justabout time-savings or sort of
stress savings at that crunchtime.
It can also be error rates orcompliance concerns.
And if you accidentally send oneadjunct, contract with a much
larger salary than you meant tooffer them, you may get stuck
(10:02):
paying them a larger salary.
And so those kinds of errors canbe very costly.
And then likewise, I mean, withcompliance concerns, you're more
worried about like, if you're asmall doctor's office and you're
worried about HIPAA violations,you're worried about huge fines
or even getting sent to jail.
And in the case of those smalldoctor's offices, we do offer
HIPAA compliant processes.
And so you can use air slate ina HIPAA compliant manner to
(10:25):
manage that patient data that'scoming in.
And that's big peace of mind forpeople as well.
Play the King (10:30):
That's Interesting.
I imagine maybe you don'twantthe attorney writing out 50
different contracts, they can doit once and then, and then
somebody else can, can put ininformation that, then feeds out
into those 50 differentcontracts.
Colin Teubner (10:44):
You're right.
Anytime you can save attorneytime is, usually a pretty big
dollar savings as well.
The attorney can just kind ofmanage a template of a contract
and we can fill in the data forall the different times that
gets sent out.
We also have a contractnegotiation capability.
So you can use that contract asa starting point and the
counterparty can make suggestionchanges and you can go back and
forth and review it.
(11:04):
And then again, as with ourother use cases, once you're
done with that, it's justimmediately sent for
e-signature.
So even for a little bit moreflexible processes that aren't
so automated, you can, you canhandle them.
Play the King (11:15):
It seems like you guys, as a company have
really leaned into that because,you added signNow, then, this
library of legal templates, tensof thousands, it seems like,
that use case is pretty popularamong your clientele.
Colin Teubner (11:29):
Yeah, that's right.
Well, you had legal, which wasour, another one of our
portfolio companies that offers,as you said, tens of thousands
of legal templates, and maybeyou don't need the attorney in
the first place and that's aneven bigger savings, but, um,
you know, a lot of people ofcourse still work with them, but
us legal is a big time saver anda starting point for
contracting.
And then, you know, you mightreview or tweak those templates
(11:50):
and then put them intoautomation.
Play the King (11:53):
Totally.
So let's say you are speaking tosomebody who is working to bring
their company out of the paperage and implement the solutions
you guys offer.
What are some things they needto sort of think through before
they implement that change?
Like what, what are they, whatare you, what do you hear from
people and need to sort of getthem thinking about before this
happens?
Colin Teubner (12:13):
I think the biggest thing is just figuring
out the scope of the firstproject that you do with
airSlate.
Sometimes people are thinking ofit very narrow-minded, they're
thinking just about e-signatureand they're missing some
opportunities for automationlooking at where is the data or
the information on this documentcoming from, or the document
itself, is it in one of yoursystems, you don't need somebody
(12:35):
to drag and drop an upload itinto our tool.
And then on the backend,likewise, is there some place
where you need this data to go,even if it's just put it line by
line into a spreadsheet thatgives you the ability to do
reporting on it later on andthat kind of thing, or if you
upgrade one of your enterprisesystems or change them, then you
can upload that spreadsheet intothe new database and have a good
(12:58):
head start on having your data.
So that's on the small side.
Sometimes people also think toobig.
They're trying to imaginecompletely automating some
entire piece of their business,and you can do that over time,
but you need to bite it off intosmall chunks primarily so that,
you can just, after a month ortwo, you start seeing some value
from the automation and then gofrom there.
(13:18):
The great thing about softwareand any kind of software is it's
easy to change.
And so that's why people doagile development and it's
better to just even throw awaysome work you did, as long as
it's in the pursuit of having abetter automation.
And so we encourage people tobite off a reasonable chunk at
the beginning and then plan onexpanding it as they go.
Play the King (13:41):
Got it, got it.
So airSlate started 2009, as Imentioned as a PDF editor.
And so clearly in the last 11years, like some really serious
additions to that, thosecapabilities it's now like you
wouldn't recognize that that,that first, that first iteration
I would imagine, but talk to meabout the scope of this and
(14:01):
where you see it going in thenext, say five to 10 years.
What are the next stages for,for airSlate and signNow?
Colin Teubner (14:07):
Is just kind of expanding what we have.
You know, airSlate's already gota huge library of bots.
One of the things that we wantto do is make it so that you
don't need a separate softwarepackage to go do the
integration.
So we're trying to have bots forthe systems our customers are
using.
So a big part of our work isalways just the steady expansion
of that library of bots.
(14:28):
Another thing I just alluded topreviously is the idea of
change.
Of course, it's easy to changesoftware now, but there's some
more features that we can add toairSlate.
That'll make it even easier forour flow creators to handle
change as it comes, to be ableto evolve a process and change
how it works as you go.
(14:49):
And then the last one, you know,of course talking about AI
capabilities and there's anumber of services that are
relevant to documents, some ofwhich are already available in
the market, you know, OCR orintelligently recognizing the
contents of a document.
Even if that document is animage, instead of text
detecting, what type of documentsomething is.
(15:11):
And then applying a setup we'veused on a previous document,
that's similar, even if the newdocument is not quite the same,
AI can detect the fact that it'sof the same type or matching the
same template with slightlydifferent content and apply that
set up.
Certainly translation is a bigone and we all have seen Google
translate and other onlinetranslators.
(15:31):
So being able to tie those kindsof services into document
automation can be very powerfuland also, analysis of the
meaning of the documents.
And also the structure of thedocuments can let you further
automate things.
B ut one thing that comes intowhich we haven't really been
doing as much but could get intois somebody sends you an email.
(15:52):
Are they, are they happy?
A re t hey angry with you?
And you might want that to go toa different person or follow a
different process depending ontheir a ttitude.
So those are just some of thethings off the top of t he head!
Play the King (16:03):
Been relatively modest in terms of, uh, telling
us who you work with and thingslike that.
I want to give you anopportunity to sort of talk
about some of the partnershipsthat you guys have are just to
give people a sense of thebreadth of companies that are
using your product.
And I'll, I'll mention OMI, ofcourse, having a partnership
with you guys and, you know,that's, that's why we're talking
today, but could you possiblytake me through some of those?
Colin Teubner (16:21):
Yeah.
So am I as great, and I thinkthat's a good one to talk about
part of our goal, or I thinkwhat we kind of want to see for
our customers is for them tofeel comfortable using the
airSlate software themselves,however, you know, frankly,
there's a lot of them that don'tfor various reasons, it might be
that they just feel like they'renot technical and don't want to
(16:42):
learn.
It might also be that they justfeel they don't have time.
So maybe they understand theairSlate just fine, but they're
saying, yeah, this, this tool isgreat.
And please build this for me.
And so that's where OMI comes inas a, they offer a service to
come in and set up and configureyour automation flows inside of
air slate without you having toinvest a ton of time.
(17:04):
And that's both as a projectservice, which is great for
getting people up and running aswell as an ongoing managed
service, where you have acertain number of hours from
them each month for them to comehelp evolve your flows like we
were talking about with change.
So that's really a importantpartnership across the
partnership spectrum.
We also have a number of techpartnerships with companies like
(17:27):
Salesforce, where we're in theirapp store.
And a lot of Salesforce usersare pushing Salesforce data into
airSlate to get documentsgenerated and signed.
So there's a lot of those.
And then we also have somesoftware vendors that are
building capabilities aroundairSlate.
There's one product calledNewLaw, which is a law firm
practice management software.
(17:48):
And that it's not totally onairSlate, but it uses airSlate
again for document generationand e-signature capabilities.
So that's just a couple ofexamples, but again, there's a
broad spectrum of partnersfilling different needs.
Play the King (18:01):
Excellent.
And I just want to mention aswell that, to learn more people
can go to signnow.com orairslate.com or both.
Colin, I really appreciate yourtime today.
Any closing thoughts for us?
Colin Teubner (18:13):
Yeah.
One closing thought is all ofthese workflow automation tools.
They're all about creatingcustom software.
So people have various packagedsoftware that works fine,
whether that's Gmail orMicrosoft word or Salesforce,
and they're finding someshortcoming in that.
That's why they look for anautomation tool that does
exactly what they need.
(18:33):
It's custom software.
Now, up until recently, you hadto write custom software by
paying developers to write codethat was pretty rigid.
And if you didn't have thosedevelopers within your own
company, you know, that it wasreally expensive to go hire them
every time the change needed tobe made.
So every software like airslate, you know, there's,
there's tons of other workflowtools out there.
They all make kind of the sametrade-off, which is that you
(18:55):
narrow the universe of what youcan build with it compared to
custom code and an exchange.
If you get a much faster buildand a build that can be done by
less technical people.
So those two things are thethings to look at when you're
evaluating this kind ofsoftware.
What can I build with thesoftware?
What, how is the universe ofwhat you can build in trunk
(19:17):
compared to custom code and whois going to be doing the
building?
Some tools that call themselvesworkflow or low code, are still
for developers.
They're just like developerproductivity tools.
airSlate is meant for thebusiness analyst.
Somebody who's good withspreadsheets, but not a coder.
And so, you know, I think wereally hit a sweet spot of being
(19:37):
able to do a lot of verypowerful processes with document
automation and also having, youknow, relatively non-technical
skill skillset that can be usedto go build these things.
And so that's, that's really oursweet spot.
This podcast is sponsored by OMI the company
that makes CRM Work! Today,We're speaking with Colin
Teubner Director of CustomerSolutions at airSlate and
signNow.
Colin Teubner (00:14):
I'm Colin Teubner the Director of Customer
Solutions at airSlate andsignNow.
And that's the team that helpsour customers get up and running
with the product after they signon and also helps them evaluate
it before they sign on.
I started at airSlate about ayear and a half ago.
My experience is in the BPM andworkflow software industry.
(00:36):
For a number of years, I've beena product manager and also a
sales engineer in that part ofthe software industry.
Play the King (00:42):
So Colin airSlate has been around for, I
want to say around 11 years nowunder a different name, then
there was a rebrand in 2019, youcame from within the industry,
but you must have seen somethingwith this company that made you
think, okay, there's somethinggoing on here.
Talk to me about the state ofthe market.
Like just the landscape here.
What is it that excites youabout this product right now?
Colin Teubner (01:04):
So one of the things that I always noticed
when I was at other BPM andworkflow software companies,
customers constantly had tointegrate e-signature among a
number of other things that theyhave to integrate, but
e-signature was one of them andit was expensive and painful and
e-signature, it spans corporateboundaries.
So people are having someelaborate processes internally,
(01:25):
and then they need to send somedocuments up to get signed.
And so I realized that that wasa gap and airSlate was combining
workflow and process managementwith e-signature capabilities.
And that seems like a reallywinning combination.
So I think that's whatinterested me initially,
Play the King (01:42):
When you say expand corporate boundaries,
when you say that can you givethat example?
Okay.
So within an organization,people trust each other, they
know who each other are.
Are you describing a process bywhich you can sort of extend
that, that boundary of trust, Iguess, to other organizations
where it might not have existedbefore?
Like how would you describethat?
Colin Teubner (02:01):
I would say you've got the boundary of trust
inside a company.
That's exactly right.
And so approving decisions,workflows inside organizations,
those can happen within anenterprise application, or I can
just send somebody an email, youknow, I can click a button to
approve some of these expensereports.
I don't need to sign anythingbecause of that trust that you
mentioned, when you talk aboutspanning company boundaries and
(02:24):
let's use an example where theydon't typically use e-signature
when a retailer, a big retaileris ordering products from big
manufacturers, they usesomething called EDI, which is
electronic data interchange.
So it automatically placesorders when the stock is
reaching a certain level, likecar manufacturers do that with
their suppliers to EDI is reallycommon, but to support that, and
(02:48):
you have to put a bunch of legalagreements in place beforehand
and sign them because there isnot that level of trust.
The supplier can't necessarilytrust that just because the
manufacturer sends some data, awire, they're also going to pay
their invoice.
And that's why you need papercontracts to support that
digital process.
So you can do that, right?
You can have a system and youcan have paper contracts that
(03:10):
support it, or you can havee-signature where you are just
signing the contracts involvedthat you need whenever there's
not a trust relationship.
So you sign those electronicallyas part of the flow.
So we're not going to crush EDI,right?
I mean, when people have thesegiant enterprise systems that
need to be integrated, they'reprobably still going to do it
that way.
But the vast majority ofdecisions and approvals that are
(03:33):
happening across companyboundaries are much smaller.
So being able to just get ane-signature as part of the flow,
and a lot of times they're,one-time things too, you know,
you're signing for a loan orapproving the release of your
medical records, to yourdoctor's office, you don't need
a long paper contractingprocess.
You just need to get thesignature on a boilerplate
(03:55):
document and move on.
Play the King (03:57):
So when I think about the landscape where you
guys are operating, you know,there are some long-term trends
that have been pushing us inthis direction for years, like,
you know, over a decade, if notmore.
And then it seems to me that inthe last year, you know, with
everything that's going on withremote work, I imagine those
trends have accelerated.
Could you talk about some of thewider stuff going on that sort
of makes this the right momentfor a company like this?
Colin Teubner (04:18):
You're absolutely right, certainly in the last
year, our business startedgrowing more quickly.
Everybody pretty much alreadyknew about e-signature it's been
around for awhile.
And most of them kind of knewthat they needed it.
A lot of small businesses havebeen, oh yeah, I should get that
e-signature thing, but hadn'tgotten around to it.
(04:39):
And the pandemic forced them toget around to it very quickly.
So we obviously saw a big spikein interest right at the
beginning of the pandemic, butthat's interesting sticks around
because once you've automatedprocesses, you're not going to
go back to the manual way ofdoing them.
In fact, we find that peoplehave 10 other things that they
could automate once they havethe software in their hands as
(04:59):
well.
Play the King (05:00):
Let's talk about those things.
You mentioned how the softwarecan compliment EDI.
What are some ways thatcustomers are using it first
Colin Teubner (05:08):
Before I list these cases, I want to say that
really every industry and everycompany has at least some use
cases for this kind of software,certainly for just automating
processes in general, and alsofor e-signature specifically, or
the kind of document generationthat we do.
But I think there's certainindustries that have adopted our
way of automating processes morequickly than others, partly
(05:31):
because of the organizationalboundaries that we talked about
before.
And it's also partly becausethey may already have kind of a
paper oriented mindset and weallow people to keep the concept
of paper as they move thosedocuments around and sign them
during a workflow.
So some of the main industries,I alluded to one already, which
is healthcare.
(05:51):
The example of releasing yourmedical records, new patient
paperwork, and onboarding.
There's a ton of processes andalso healthcare as a whole has
some very large players, butthere's a lot of very small
businesses in the healthcareindustry, your doctor's office
or dentist office.
A lot of times, those arebusinesses with fewer than 20
(06:11):
employees.
And so they hadn't previouslyhad some big it department that
was going around automatingstuff.
And again, with the pandemic,they needed to quickly get rid
of those clipboards with paperthat they hand off to people
face-to-face and start gettingdocuments filled out
electronically another one'seducation.
And so we have some biguniversities that are using
(06:32):
airSlate to manage a lot oftheir processes that go to the
students.
And also some of the processesthat go to faculty, particularly
contract faculty.
So again, things crossingorganizational boundaries, you
know, students are part of theuniversity, but they don't have
accounts on it, university,enterprise systems.
So, I think it's just almosttraditional for students to be
(06:55):
signing documents that they sendinto the university.
So e-signature is a great fitwith students.
then we also have in fact, twodifferent universities who are
generating contracts for adjunctfaculty, which is a process
that, you know, part of thereason that really needs to be
automated is because they haveto do 30 or 50 or a hundred of
them all at once each semester.
(07:16):
It's not something that's spreadout over time because of their
semester working.
So automation is a huge winthere.
We can generate the contractsand route them for e-signature
all on the same workflow.
The third industry that I'llmention is construction.
And I think this is a neat one.
So again, a huge interorganizational workflows
construction companies dealingwith a homeowner or a building
(07:38):
owner, multiple differentsuppliers and probably like an
architect or an engineer and thepermanent authority, the
authority having jurisdiction,wherever they are.
And so we have, um, someconstruction companies, multiple
different ones in differentareas of residential
construction that areinteracting with all of those
(07:58):
different constituencies usingdocuments.
So if you imagine going out tosomebody's house and getting the
measurements for the roof andclicking a button and generating
a quote for the homeowner, amaterial order for the roofing
supplier and permanentapplications for whatever city
you happen to be in at the timewhere that house is.
So again, generating a lot ofpaperwork.
(08:21):
If you're interacting with agovernment, you're not allowed
to say, Hey, we don't want tofill out that form, just take
this data.
You still have to send them theform.
And so those people are, if theywant to automate, they're forced
to use a method that lets themkeep that form in place and fill
it out automatically.
Play the King (08:38):
That's interesting.
So can we, can we dial in, maybeto one of these organizations
you use them as an example, I'llsuggest the adjunct professor
contracting set up, you know,we're talking about, you know,
from the client side, from thevendor side, from the partners
side, you know, just take methrough it, like, how does this
work and how it help, how doesit help people save time, save
money?
Colin Teubner (08:57):
Yeah.
I mean, I think it'sinteresting.
And the adjunct professor one isa great example.
I already kind of alluded to thefact that, you know, because
they have to do so many of thesein such a short amount of time,
it's really painful for thepeople who are participating in
the manual merchant of thatprocess.
So you've got staff preparing abunch of contracts and you've
got a person of authority at theuniversity who has to sign them
(09:19):
and then send them off to theadjunct professors or the
contract instructors, you know,a lot of times in software and
we have to do big ROI studiesand try to prove out the
benefits.
But I would say, you know, thiskind of automation plus
e-signature project, most of thetime, the benefits are pretty
obvious to the people who areexperiencing that painful manual
process today, they have seriousissues.
(09:41):
There's things falling betweenthe cracks.
And then sometimes it's not justabout time-savings or sort of
stress savings at that crunchtime.
It can also be error rates orcompliance concerns.
And if you accidentally send oneadjunct, contract with a much
larger salary than you meant tooffer them, you may get stuck
(10:02):
paying them a larger salary.
And so those kinds of errors canbe very costly.
And then likewise, I mean, withcompliance concerns, you're more
worried about like, if you're asmall doctor's office and you're
worried about HIPAA violations,you're worried about huge fines
or even getting sent to jail.
And in the case of those smalldoctor's offices, we do offer
HIPAA compliant processes.
And so you can use air slate ina HIPAA compliant manner to
(10:25):
manage that patient data that'scoming in.
And that's big peace of mind forpeople as well.
Play the King (10:30):
That's Interesting.
I imagine maybe you don'twantthe attorney writing out 50
different contracts, they can doit once and then, and then
somebody else can, can put ininformation that, then feeds out
into those 50 differentcontracts.
Colin Teubner (10:44):
You're right.
Anytime you can save attorneytime is, usually a pretty big
dollar savings as well.
The attorney can just kind ofmanage a template of a contract
and we can fill in the data forall the different times that
gets sent out.
We also have a contractnegotiation capability.
So you can use that contract asa starting point and the
counterparty can make suggestionchanges and you can go back and
forth and review it.
(11:04):
And then again, as with ourother use cases, once you're
done with that, it's justimmediately sent for
e-signature.
So even for a little bit moreflexible processes that aren't
so automated, you can, you canhandle them.
Play the King (11:15):
It seems like you guys, as a company have
really leaned into that because,you added signNow, then, this
library of legal templates, tensof thousands, it seems like,
that use case is pretty popularamong your clientele.
Colin Teubner (11:29):
Yeah, that's right.
Well, you had legal, which wasour, another one of our
portfolio companies that offers,as you said, tens of thousands
of legal templates, and maybeyou don't need the attorney in
the first place and that's aneven bigger savings, but, um,
you know, a lot of people ofcourse still work with them, but
us legal is a big time saver anda starting point for
contracting.
And then, you know, you mightreview or tweak those templates
(11:50):
and then put them intoautomation.
Play the King (11:53):
Totally.
So let's say you are speaking tosomebody who is working to bring
their company out of the paperage and implement the solutions
you guys offer.
What are some things they needto sort of think through before
they implement that change?
Like what, what are they, whatare you, what do you hear from
people and need to sort of getthem thinking about before this
happens?
Colin Teubner (12:13):
I think the biggest thing is just figuring
out the scope of the firstproject that you do with
airSlate.
Sometimes people are thinking ofit very narrow-minded, they're
thinking just about e-signatureand they're missing some
opportunities for automationlooking at where is the data or
the information on this documentcoming from, or the document
itself, is it in one of yoursystems, you don't need somebody
(12:35):
to drag and drop an upload itinto our tool.
And then on the backend,likewise, is there some place
where you need this data to go,even if it's just put it line by
line into a spreadsheet thatgives you the ability to do
reporting on it later on andthat kind of thing, or if you
upgrade one of your enterprisesystems or change them, then you
can upload that spreadsheet intothe new database and have a good
(12:58):
head start on having your data.
So that's on the small side.
Sometimes people also think toobig.
They're trying to imaginecompletely automating some
entire piece of their business,and you can do that over time,
but you need to bite it off intosmall chunks primarily so that,
you can just, after a month ortwo, you start seeing some value
from the automation and then gofrom there.
(13:18):
The great thing about softwareand any kind of software is it's
easy to change.
And so that's why people doagile development and it's
better to just even throw awaysome work you did, as long as
it's in the pursuit of having abetter automation.
And so we encourage people tobite off a reasonable chunk at
the beginning and then plan onexpanding it as they go.
Play the King (13:41):
Got it, got it.
So airSlate started 2009, as Imentioned as a PDF editor.
And so clearly in the last 11years, like some really serious
additions to that, thosecapabilities it's now like you
wouldn't recognize that that,that first, that first iteration
I would imagine, but talk to meabout the scope of this and
(14:01):
where you see it going in thenext, say five to 10 years.
What are the next stages for,for airSlate and signNow?
Colin Teubner (14:07):
Is just kind of expanding what we have.
You know, airSlate's already gota huge library of bots.
One of the things that we wantto do is make it so that you
don't need a separate softwarepackage to go do the
integration.
So we're trying to have bots forthe systems our customers are
using.
So a big part of our work isalways just the steady expansion
of that library of bots.
(14:28):
Another thing I just alluded topreviously is the idea of
change.
Of course, it's easy to changesoftware now, but there's some
more features that we can add toairSlate.
That'll make it even easier forour flow creators to handle
change as it comes, to be ableto evolve a process and change
how it works as you go.
(14:49):
And then the last one, you know,of course talking about AI
capabilities and there's anumber of services that are
relevant to documents, some ofwhich are already available in
the market, you know, OCR orintelligently recognizing the
contents of a document.
Even if that document is animage, instead of text
detecting, what type of documentsomething is.
(15:11):
And then applying a setup we'veused on a previous document,
that's similar, even if the newdocument is not quite the same,
AI can detect the fact that it'sof the same type or matching the
same template with slightlydifferent content and apply that
set up.
Certainly translation is a bigone and we all have seen Google
translate and other onlinetranslators.
(15:31):
So being able to tie those kindsof services into document
automation can be very powerfuland also, analysis of the
meaning of the documents.
And also the structure of thedocuments can let you further
automate things.
B ut one thing that comes intowhich we haven't really been
doing as much but could get intois somebody sends you an email.
(15:52):
Are they, are they happy?
A re t hey angry with you?
And you might want that to go toa different person or follow a
different process depending ontheir a ttitude.
So those are just some of thethings off the top of t he head!
Play the King (16:03):
Been relatively modest in terms of, uh, telling
us who you work with and thingslike that.
I want to give you anopportunity to sort of talk
about some of the partnershipsthat you guys have are just to
give people a sense of thebreadth of companies that are
using your product.
And I'll, I'll mention OMI, ofcourse, having a partnership
with you guys and, you know,that's, that's why we're talking
today, but could you possiblytake me through some of those?
Colin Teubner (16:21):
Yeah.
So am I as great, and I thinkthat's a good one to talk about
part of our goal, or I thinkwhat we kind of want to see for
our customers is for them tofeel comfortable using the
airSlate software themselves,however, you know, frankly,
there's a lot of them that don'tfor various reasons, it might be
that they just feel like they'renot technical and don't want to
(16:42):
learn.
It might also be that they justfeel they don't have time.
So maybe they understand theairSlate just fine, but they're
saying, yeah, this, this tool isgreat.
And please build this for me.
And so that's where OMI comes inas a, they offer a service to
come in and set up and configureyour automation flows inside of
air slate without you having toinvest a ton of time.
(17:04):
And that's both as a projectservice, which is great for
getting people up and running aswell as an ongoing managed
service, where you have acertain number of hours from
them each month for them to comehelp evolve your flows like we
were talking about with change.
So that's really a importantpartnership across the
partnership spectrum.
We also have a number of techpartnerships with companies like
(17:27):
Salesforce, where we're in theirapp store.
And a lot of Salesforce usersare pushing Salesforce data into
airSlate to get documentsgenerated and signed.
So there's a lot of those.
And then we also have somesoftware vendors that are
building capabilities aroundairSlate.
There's one product calledNewLaw, which is a law firm
practice management software.
(17:48):
And that it's not totally onairSlate, but it uses airSlate
again for document generationand e-signature capabilities.
So that's just a couple ofexamples, but again, there's a
broad spectrum of partnersfilling different needs.
Play the King (18:01):
Excellent.
And I just want to mention aswell that, to learn more people
can go to signnow.com orairslate.com or both.
Colin, I really appreciate yourtime today.
Any closing thoughts for us?
Colin Teubner (18:13):
Yeah.
One closing thought is all ofthese workflow automation tools.
They're all about creatingcustom software.
So people have various packagedsoftware that works fine,
whether that's Gmail orMicrosoft word or Salesforce,
and they're finding someshortcoming in that.
That's why they look for anautomation tool that does
exactly what they need.
(18:33):
It's custom software.
Now, up until recently, you hadto write custom software by
paying developers to write codethat was pretty rigid.
And if you didn't have thosedevelopers within your own
company, you know, that it wasreally expensive to go hire them
every time the change needed tobe made.
So every software like airslate, you know, there's,
there's tons of other workflowtools out there.
They all make kind of the sametrade-off, which is that you
(18:55):
narrow the universe of what youcan build with it compared to
custom code and an exchange.
If you get a much faster buildand a build that can be done by
less technical people.
So those two things are thethings to look at when you're
evaluating this kind ofsoftware.
What can I build with thesoftware?
What, how is the universe ofwhat you can build in trunk
(19:17):
compared to custom code and whois going to be doing the
building?
Some tools that call themselvesworkflow or low code, are still
for developers.
They're just like developerproductivity tools.
airSlate is meant for thebusiness analyst.
Somebody who's good withspreadsheets, but not a coder.
And so, you know, I think wereally hit a sweet spot of being
(19:37):
able to do a lot of verypowerful processes with document
automation and also having, youknow, relatively non-technical
skill skillset that can be usedto go build these things.
And so that's, that's really oursweet spot.
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