Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studio in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by My Global Presence, the award winning Atlanta public relations agency that elevates brands and non-profits through authentic storytelling and national media campaigns. Find them at myglobalpresence.com. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is gonna be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, My Global Presence. If you want global visibility and meaningful impact, go to myglobalpresence.com. Today on the show, we have the president with PRIME-TIME Systems, David Figueroa. Welcome.

David Figueroa: Hey. Thanks, Lee. Thanks for having me today. Appreciate it.

Lee Kantor: Well, I am excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about PRIME-TIME, how you serving folks.

David Figueroa: Well, we’re an AI led operating system and really focused on leaders and leaders within organizations that have to understand what’s happening to their business in real time. How are their operating models being constrained? How how are they maintaining their forecasts, hitting their revenue goals, and maintaining the people within that structure in a cadence that breeds success?

Lee Kantor: So what’s your backstory? How’d you get involved in this line of work?

David Figueroa: Well, you know, Lee, I have been leading a commercial engines and practices for over 20 years as as a leader, as vice president. And the last role kind of a CRO termed as a commercial director. And I’ve seen different businesses and different organizations and different industries, all within the same constructs of the same challenges. So it brought me to understanding, well, how can we leverage artificial intelligence to better operate and understand what we need to, uh, the data objects that we need to have in front of us every day in order for us to make intelligent decisions that steer the business and the people involved.

Lee Kantor: So what was happening before AI? How was this being addressed?

David Figueroa: Well, before AI, we would have countless meetings, right? Whether there’s Zoom teams, whatever your medium, you have countless meetings with your extended leadership team, your individual contributors, all to understand what are the what’s the subject matter at hand? In order for me to make a decision to release X or to move the ball forward, or to handle some certain Problem or issue in my business. So as leaders, we spend a lot of time just trying to understand the root cause. And then how does that how does that affect my operating model, my strategy, my forecast, my functional requirements, my strategic goals? And you assemble a narrative around your business in order for you to understand the direction. Where’s the North Star? How are we getting there? What are the pathways and are we on or off path?

Lee Kantor: So as a leader of an organization pre AI, what made you the right person to build the AI engine behind something like this? Are you a technologist too?

David Figueroa: That’s a great question. You know, I think today pretty much a good majority of folks are starting to become more and more technology focused or engineering focused. It’s funny because I was having a conversation with a sales leader, a very large organization, and he was telling me about something called SQL. For those who are who are listening that understand technology, that’s. It’s really technology, technology turn in terms of coding and engineering developing. But now it’s somewhat nomenclature for us, all of us to kind of do. So I did come from software and I was fortunate enough to have a purview to the back end development, engineering, architecture, design, um, GDPR and security processes. And that led me to understand, well, I don’t necessarily, while I don’t have all the chops, we’ll say, you know, I could build a team and I also have a great asset in artificial intelligence. So when you couple great leaders, great thought and domain expertise, along with artificial intelligence, your ability to accelerate to market is great, especially if you understand the subject matter at hand, which I really do.

Lee Kantor: So, um, is what you created, what you started to create? Or was this something that has evolved into what it is today?

David Figueroa: Well, if the question is, do we organically grow that’s ever lasting, we will continuously innovate and consistently provide enormous value to our customers and clientele. Therefore, the marketplace, uh, from when we started our development and to what we have today. Yes, we’ve learned a lot of great lessons along the way, but the core of what we’re trying to solve and what we are solving is a very systemic issue that’s prevalent today in, in, in, in organizations at different scales. When we start to think about what AI is actually doing today, um, there point solutions for the majority and what they actually do. If you don’t have a strategy, if you didn’t go through a process of evaluating, um, how you’re deploying that AI and the value and return on investment, it’s going to provide for you. It oftentimes just exacerbates the cracks that are already there. It’s an accelerator. So if you really didn’t have, um, your business and, and where you’re resolving and kind of putting the AI in place, um, you’re actually seeing that you’re spinning your wheels. Sure. You’re getting more time back and you resolve some tedious efforts, but what do you really lifting for your organization? What are you really lifting for your operating model now?

Lee Kantor: Are you finding that, um, maybe some of the C-suite leaders are looking at AI kind of as a blunt instrument. They know they have to deploy it. They know they have to have their people leverage it. But it just it to me is, is doesn’t kind of make sense to just say, okay, let’s now lean into AI where every group within your business, every team is going to have a different way of leveraging AI. Your sales AI solution is going to be different than your finance AI solution or your customer service AI solution or your HR AI solution. Like how do you create a holistic operating system that makes sense company wide?

David Figueroa: That’s a great question. And in fact, that is actually a challenge that we resolve. Now, we don’t go down into the detail in terms of you spoke about functional AI. And then once you get to that functional department, we’ll call it sales, and you start to go down to like, well, let’s get on calls and let’s get voice of customer. Let’s throttle our GTM model with our marketing. I mean, there’s so many slices of where you can actually deploy and sometimes substantially I, but quite frankly, it can get very loud and very noisy quite quickly. And what we’ve done here is we actually sit as an operating layer. So we don’t really displace your CRM or your ERPs or your project utility tools. We actually sit above them as an orchestration and revenue governance program. So the way we look at artificial intelligence is the assessment and the compounding propagation of technology. In order for you to garner real time insights very quickly and have data that drives your decisions. So when you think about Prime and Prime, by the way, is an acronym problem requirements influence money and metrics and execution. We believe that those those dimensions is what we call them live in every organization, and they’re bidirectional internally and externally as you work with customers.

David Figueroa: So when you think about the landscape today in the marketplace, today, we’re deploying AI in many fractional methodologies. And sometimes those fractions may or may not, um, reveal a value that either directly reports to your bottom or top line, or they’re giving you some sort of lift with your resources. So the question that leadership has to have is you’re, you’re absolutely right. Li AI is kind of being been deployed. I think leaders now are learning a little bit of not following, um, the shiny balls and the loud whistles and they’re starting to really reconcile. Understand? Well, hold on a second. Let’s be a little bit more deliberate. So, um, we’ve kind of stayed away from the point solution. Uh, we get asked all the time, Can you do this email automation? Well. Surely we can. But that’s not what we’re trying to accomplish. Uh, those are table stakes. What we’re looking at is more org wide around revenue. And I think that is where the unlock starts to take place. When we start to leverage artificial intelligence, to really understand what you have to do, where you need to go, and how it impacts the business.

Lee Kantor: So what typically is the pain that brings you into a conversation? Is it the first time that they get their bill when they thought they were paying $100 a month, and then they all of a sudden realized that maybe they weren’t?

David Figueroa: Well, there’s there’s two typical arguments. Well, there’s much more, but there’s two centralized, uh, subject matter that I would, I would lean into. And the first would be, well, how am I really going to get value from my art, for my AI. What’s my ROI? And then then Prime comes into the room like, well, what is the system that we can actually deploy? And I feel value leaders are our personas. Those are the individuals who use a prime. It doesn’t roll through the entire organization to the principals and the tenants and stuff like that come through. But the other is sometimes in the market, especially in the lower mid market, SMB market, they don’t really have an AI tool. So when you think about what Prime can do, it can actually sit on your leadership team, um, to sift through all that great data that you have, whether it’s Excel files and PDFs and orders and all sorts of stuff and start to reconcile your business and streamline, um, how you look at your revenue and commercial engine.

Lee Kantor: So you help them kind of decode that.

David Figueroa: That’s right. So we bring it in and Prime looks at I said like prime the the acronym is actually how we look at things. And then we start to compartmentalize that around the subject matter of, of, or the functional areas that are necessary in order for you to operate sales, delivery, finance, accounting. And it doesn’t matter like you’ll call a sale perhaps. A deal, we’ll call it an opportunity, but we’ll map all those data objects because that’s the hardest part. The hardest part is reconciling data. And that’s what we do really well. We reconcile the data, we put the objects in place, and then we allow for artificial intelligence layer to look through that and tie it into one story.

Lee Kantor: And then you kind of create a bespoke system for each client.

David Figueroa: That’s exactly right. We believe that service as a software is where the market is going, because the use of AI and the ability and access to to create your own application is daunting. It’s just out there. You can use a frontier model to create anything you’d like to create, quite frankly. The question is, is what value is it going to drive and how far can you take it? And where’s the persistence in the memory? How is it actually knowing your business and maintaining the criterions that you know to be true? You can train models, but that is daunting. And then maintaining it is very, very painful. So what we believe is with Prime, you sit next to your leadership team and you have data that is ingested in real time that helps you manage your organization and solve real time problems that are long and short term.

Lee Kantor: Now, when you begin an engagement, do you do you shoot for kind of a quick win? Is there a place you usually go for a quick win?

David Figueroa: Well, you know, I do believe in wins and I believe everyone needs to win. Uh, value for the customer, ourselves and their customers. That is the right paradigm for success for the construct. But quick wins, I would say, would be those who have already spent an enormous amount of dollars chasing AI couldn’t find the real way out. The second would be those who are looking to deploy strength in AI, where you don’t have to have this pilot graveyard and experiment on all these low friction tools that give you great speed in sending an email, for instance, but very little value back to your organization. When you start to go fast, you start you start to think, oh man, I’m gonna do so much better. The organization is going to grow at a high speed of rate, and my resources are going to have a better work life balance, and I’m going to deploy here. And then all of a sudden, like you said earlier, you end up spending more than you thought you were going to spend. And at the end of the day, you realize that I actually spent more time than I thought I was going to spend, which is opportunity cost, right? People don’t really evaluate is, well, great, you paid $100 a month, but how long did it take that person that owns that in your business to build it to where it’s functional for your business, that understands your functional area? Well, that let’s just say it took 30% of their time over two months. Well, what that 30% could have been used to go do something else that was revenue generating or customer success or whatever you want to call it. That’s opportunity cost. So your AI that you’re deploying in these small fractions that you’re looking for lift, are actually costing you a lot more than you think it is.

Lee Kantor: So as a rule, do you believe that the first move when deploying AI is to aim it at revenue or some form of revenue generation?

David Figueroa: Well, uh, Biasoli, I would say yes, because that is the scope of my of my expertise and my world. Right? Commercial engines, uh, from, from, from the front, all the way through, pull through to delivery and revenue recognition is what I do best. Uh, but no, I would actually recommend that any leader who’s, who’s entertaining AI to stop and to think of the strategy. Diagnose the function. Outline the value and the expected return. Then experiment. Then execute in that order.

Lee Kantor: So the advice is to kind of look at things holistically and then. But at some point you have to experiment, right? You have to pick some low hanging fruit to try this on.

David Figueroa: Absolutely. And experimentation. While I’m a big proponent of experimentation, 100%, you know, just find a space and in a place that’s, that’s safe, know how to fail quickly, um, know when the, the, uh, the fine milestones where you can figure out, okay, this, this is actually trending in the right direction or not, uh, but absolutely develop a plan and it could be in micro and macro levels, right? You can say, well, I’m going to do a pipeline. Talking about sales pipeline lift. And then I’m going to use my frontier model to build these nice cool widgets. And basically what was buy, which is now AI tools. I used like nice funnels and pie charts that have, you know, all sorts of great ratios and percentages that I want to look at every day, but that that may or may not help you. The question is, is it actually increasing your pipeline or are you moving things from top funnel to mid funnel mid-funnel through the bottom of the funnel? Is your win rate increasing? Is your velocity through the sales process increasing? What exactly are you trying to solve? And that is the unlock. Once we can think we can fractionalize an effort. I’m going to put this particular AI agent to run with my sales guys and record the calls and give them coaching feedback. Um, and then I’ll create an email and it’ll send it and ship it or whatever it’s going to do. And it sounds very cool. Like you have much better data. You have another, um, form factor. You also have artifacts that are created as a byproduct of that exercise, all of which are great. But what did it do at the end of the day?

Lee Kantor: And that’s the bottom line. A lot of people, I think, get enamored with the data. Like the data is the victory and not the money.

David Figueroa: Exactly. It’s it’s really around data is fantastic. Don’t get me wrong. That’s a good goal. Like I have insights I didn’t have before. But then what? Like you really need to think about when you strategize and you find that you’re going to accelerate using artificial intelligence or superintelligence to go and resolve a particular pain point. Well, what is the value of resolving that pain point, and how does that conditionally pinpoint or map right back to my either my spend or my gain? That’s how I think of things. Lee right. We wanted to look at, well, well, how does that affect my revenue? Or how does that affect my costs? Or how does that affect my opex?

Lee Kantor: Right. And all that is kind of dollar focused rather than task focused. And a lot of people, I think use these tools and they think they’re winning because look how many more leads we have. Or look how many more, you know, leads are in the funnel, not how many more people bought what we’re selling exactly.

David Figueroa: Or how much more is my rep being able to call or do because of the effort that I’ve done and therefore increased my funnel, my outreach, my pipeline. Correct. And, you know, one thing that Prime does is in, in, in one prompt, you once prime is loaded with your data and one prompt, it will not only tell you the data and why the let’s say you asked, how am I trending to forecast? And it just gives you all this stuff, gives you all this data, but then it tells you recommendations and then it provides you an action. And then it says, do you accept the action? And if you accept the action, it holds itself accountable and you accountable so that you can actually see if that outcome is tracking to the success that you were looking for from your earlier prompt.

Lee Kantor: So it’ll help you make a pivot and tell you if that pivot paid off.

David Figueroa: Correct. And give you a plan, an artifact that articulates why you made that decision. So let’s say that it’s a decision that is impactful or influences a larger decision for a leader. They’ve got to take that to their internal stakeholders or external stakeholders, a board. Whatever advisors, you actually have the data that says, this is why I’m making this decision. This is what leads me to believe this. Here’s my, my, my, the initiative, little or big I that I’m looking to invest into or allocate time and resources to. And here’s why. And this comes directly from your data objects. We spend a lot of time and money resources around Anti-hallucination for that reason.

Lee Kantor: Now, do you have any advice for the leader that’s like say is on your prospect list? What are what are some of the questions they should be asking people like you in order to know if that you know, they’re recommending a solution that’s going to be effective. What are the go to questions that will help them glean if this person knows what they’re talking about?

David Figueroa: Well, it’s very difficult. That’s a large, large question because it takes different shapes and forms depending on the scope of the of the conversation.

Lee Kantor: There’s a lot of folks out there. It’s the Wild West. Now, like you said, this has kind of made it that anybody can sell something related to AI nowadays.

David Figueroa: So true. So the first thing I would ask is how how is it built? What is the back end? A lot of am I get a little technical here, Lee, so forgive me for just one second, but if you think of how people build AI, a lot of AI are what’s called wrappers. And those are very simple to build. The ones that are deeply embedded, uh, with security protocols, processes, sophistication around how data is handled in transit and at rest, uh, back end support. Once you get further on and you understand what the AI, how the AI is actually grounded, then you actually have a little bit more visibility. Okay, well, there’s been some investment here. This is actually not just a spun up AI thing that lives on a website, actually has drivers and processes and protocols and protections around me and my people. So in my data. So that would be my first question that I would ask is vetting the technology? The second question that I would ask is, um, how am I going to determine success? And that should be fairly, fairly quick. Well, um, you say X amount of time. Cool. Um, and is that compounding or is that a one off? Um, well, I have this effort that I’m going to put into it. How often do my people have to live to build your system? How, what is the lift that I’ve got to do for my organization? In order for this to be effective into my organization, it’s going to take a lot of insight, a lot of development. And that is really those, I think, are the 2 or 3 objects that I would look at first, because you can buy an AI tool that’s very inexpensive, but it’s going to take your people months upon, months upon months, and you got to pull people from different departments in order to make it smart.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there a story you can share that maybe illustrates what it’s like to work with you? Just don’t name the company, but maybe share the challenge they came to you with and how you were able to help them get to a new level.

David Figueroa: Yeah. You know, I have. Thank you for that, Lee. I had, um, a business approach us and my advisor said, Dave, you know, where, where do you live? And I said, what do you mean? He says, well, you know, you’ve been in big business. It sounds like you’re talking about the 20 to $100 million level, talking about margin erosion and leakage and, you know, EBITDA, things of that nature. Is that the audience that really needs you? And I was like, yes, absolutely. They have sophistication, complexity, and a lot of resources. He says, well, how about the folks that don’t really understand what you’re talking about but really need your help? Wouldn’t that be more valuable? And that was an awakening. Shortly thereafter, I was approached by a customer that said, I just need help. Only had about 15 employees. Just need help putting my stuff together is this I don’t. I know I do pretty well with you about 10 million, maybe 15. I’m not quite sure, but he’s like, I do pretty well, but I just I don’t know where to grow. I built this from the, from the ground up with my with my boots tied up strong and my own hands knocking on doors and, uh, what, how could I, how could I get better here? So Prime actually helps him as a, as a tool that sits as, as an extended leader, um, brings in the data, helps them understand what’s happening. Uh, we’re early with him, but you know, Prime is in this first six months, good prime in its first year is great Prime in its 18th month. 20th month is excellent because it learns and it’s consistently getting better with the data. And now also the users are starting to really understand how to leverage the questioning, the prompting, the. And that’s another thing. You don’t really need to be a prompt engineer to use Prime. You just need to be able to ask the questions around your business in the right way.

Lee Kantor: Now, do you have any advice for folks who are. Selling a product like yours, something that gets better over time and that may be. When you start with them, they see something, they see kind of the sprouts of what could be, but it’s really the true value is going to happen over time. It’s only going to become more valuable over time. But if they don’t start, they’ll never get that payoff down the road. So you’re an expert in this space. What are some sales strategies you would have for folks out there who sell a product similar with the same kind of challenge?

David Figueroa: Well, the first thing I would say is don’t sell help. If you’re if you’re, if you have a technology that you know can help someone, help an organization that can help the money, start with how you can help, not how you can sell. That’s first and foremost. The second thing I would recommend is to think about their lives, their business, their every day. What do they wake up on Monday morning thinking about and how can you help them think less about that problem so they can focus on thinking on something else that will drive further value for that organization. Those are the two largest components, I think, that you would need to be successful. And I’m I’m undergoing that every day. Uh, one of our tenants is a learner. We have to learn and I’m learning every day. And so that’s a, I think if you are willing to learn. You’re willing to help. I believe good works lead to good product.

Lee Kantor: And then what are some of the ways that you and PRIME-TIME Systems, uh, share the knowledge with the people that matter to you?

David Figueroa: So the question is, how could I help others? I’m sorry.

Lee Kantor: Well, I’m, I’m assuming based on what you said, that that’s how you go to market. So I’m just asking, what are some of the ways that you help the ecosystem that you serve? You know, that’s all.

David Figueroa: Every engagement that I take, I try to provide value. Every engagement. I believe that context is extremely important. Time is something that’s probably our most valuable, if not, well, it is our most valuable asset. So if you’re going to give me the time and provide me your your time. I’m respectful of that. So my goal in that discourse is to provide you some value and hopefully extract some value. But I try to provide value. So at every interaction that we have here at my, whether it’s me or someone else on the team, it’s around, how could I be of service? How could I have be of value? And what value can I offer you in a contextually enriched manner, succinct and, um, and try to continuously improve our relationships and, and grow and growth can be in many different ways, can it?

Lee Kantor: And don’t you also produce a podcast that helps share some of this information?

David Figueroa: Yes, sir. Absolutely. We, we have something called the revenue intelligence. So the thesis is basic today. Leaders have a conflict and it’s within the leadership room. A factional leader from sales and a functional leader from delivery. Functional leader from whatever your product is. Or if you’re in construction, for instance, your leader, your project managers, but they come into the leadership room and they have all these great insights from their technology that they’ve deployed within their functional area. But yet they, the North Star starts to get fuzzy and some of them are recommending, well, let’s move the North Star. So now we have to change direction. Some of them are thinking about the operating model, how it constricts their operating model. Or we have to change the way we do things and not all the time. Is that true? And what got you to the dance to begin with? Well, you should be thinking about is how I maintain what we have and how do I get faster, larger, quicker, not necessarily lift and shift. So I think that is a problem when you have leaders from different functional areas with all of these great insights and with now the tools in our new era are is creating a collision that is the revenue integrity gap. So we bring on leaders. Our first season, we brought on leaders from $100 million enterprise CEO, a half $1 billion enterprise COO, the CRO from another business that’s global. And you know, what are the challenges that they’re seeing with artificial intelligence and the adoption there to this next season that we’re going on right now is really interesting to me because that first season’s working on the business. This next season is working in the business. What happens when a strategy and, um, like a function, we’re going to go all in on AI or we’re going to do this AI and we’re going to deploy it here and there.

David Figueroa: We expect this. What about those people that have to kind of own it, the Social security number is attached to the initiative. Little I or big I. So that’s next season. We’re going to explore and I. And the hope here is again around value. Uh, we, we promote the podcast. We’ve got some really good traction and we get great feedback, but it’s really to help a listener that’s challenged with some of these concepts that they can get a takeaway, save the podcast, refer back to it as they go and deploy against whatever they’re trying to do. That to me is value. You know, Lee, I had this one feedback, uh, email that came in from New York. He ran a 25 or 1 to $25 million business out of New York. He’s a COO. And he says, Dave, I listened to this episode and what this fella said was extremely impactful. And then you said, yeah, it’s just a gratifying a glorified scoreboard. He says that hit home. I spent a year and a half with Claude. Not to say anything out loud, but Claude and I’ve been developing all these great things in Claude code, and I have these widgets and these tools, and it’s getting faster. And I’ve got seven guys underneath me, and I’ve deployed, and every one of them are using it. My revenue is still going down. And I realized that I was looking at the wrong thing. And that whole year and a half that I spent working on all these cool things, it’s just a scoreboard. It doesn’t tell me how to run the place.

Lee Kantor: Yeah, I mean, that’s it. I mean, you have to look at it holistically. I think like you’re recommending. I mean, that’s the only way to do it. Otherwise it just becomes basically a toy for smart people.

David Figueroa: Think of it like. Think of it like a knob on your radio, your most impactful knob is your on and off, and your second is your volume. But then you could put all these other things on to make sure that you’re locked into radio acts, you’re locked into your favorite rock station, you’re locked into your favorite country station. And those are additional buttons and they make it easier for you so you don’t have to tune through all the frequencies, all the channels, but you’ve got to make sure that if you put 14 buttons on there, do you really need 14?

Lee Kantor: Yeah. The treble, the treble level might not be serving you.

David Figueroa: Exactly. Exactly. Now, is there value in it? Sure, sure, sure. But is it like going to help your radio experience, and is it going to make it safer for you to drive so you’re not touching any buttons while you’re managing at 55. I don’t think so. I think that’s probably something I would leave with your audience is just that think think in those terms. Is it cool? Is it a want to have or is it a need to have?

Lee Kantor: Well, David, if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, what’s the website? What’s the best way to connect?

David Figueroa: It is prime-timesystems.com. And my name is David Figueroa.

Lee Kantor: Good stuff. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

David Figueroa: Lee, I want to thank you so much for your time and the opportunity. Have yourself a fantastic day.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.