InvestorFlow at Dreamforce 2023
September 28, 2023
Thank you for engaging with InvestorFlow at Dreamforce 2023. This year’s event took place from September 12 to 14 in San Francisco, and InvestorFlow was proud to have been a big part of the Salesforce ecosystem during the world’s largest software conference.
On Tuesday, September 12, InvestorFlow Chief Strategy Officer HK Lee sat down with Kleiner Perkins CIO Moustafa ElBialy to discuss digitalization, applied data science, and AI in the alternative assets industry, as well as the changing role of the CIO.
“The old role of an IT person was always service-oriented,” said ElBialy, pointing to implementation bases and call centers that eventually gave way to more layers of depth added to the role. “Basically, digital transformation, cybersecurity, and, in the end, of course, AI helps the CIO role to flourish.”
ElBialy added that AI has been in our lives for much longer than we realize. “Everything that we use every day for the last years has been AI search or an AI product,” said ElBialy. “Our Instagram feeds and TikTok feeds are AI products.” E-commerce, home-based apps, Amazon and dating apps are all AI, he added.
“But I think an exciting transformation right now is going from an AI engine that is an autopilot-suggesting algorithm and shifting the focus toward AI as an autopilot,” said ElBialy. “We have co-pilots within InvestorFlow within products like Lean, like Figma, like Loom, to better use technology and ask the right questions and get the right answers that are actually relevant to us.”
As ElBialy explained, underneath productivity applications such as Excel sheets and PowerPoint presentations, there is a robust database, but all the data is typically siloed and fragmented. AI in technology such as InvestorFlow “will be able to do the defragmentation of all this information to present it to us in a way that’s actually relevant to us.”
On Wednesday, September 14, InvestorFlow VP of Marketing Jason Martial joined Mari Parziale, Solutions Engineer at ICONIQ Capital on stage to share ICONIQ Capital’s journey with InvestorFlow.
Since ICONIQ was founded in 2011, its AUM has grown to more than $80 billion. “Our focus is to be one ICONIQ,” said Parziale. “This means that as we work, we can remove silos and work as one team instead of individual teams. And in order to do that, we have to get out of manual processes.”
Centralizing data has also been important to ICONIQ. “Everybody has access to live data, but the change management is so difficult—nobody wants to change the process,” said Parziale. “So when we think about implementing solutions in our team, we have to make sure it’s something our business team wants and gets excited about, so they’re happy to move on in the journey.”
Three functionalities of InvestorFlow helped ICONIQ with this process, explained Parziale:
- Smartlists, which enables the company to replicate Excel in Salesforce.
- Interaction, a custom solution that automatically captures essential information in one place.
- Email plug-ins, which make it easy to not only correspond but also gather notes immediately after a meeting without leaving the InvestorFlow platform.
“These capabilities convinced the business to the changes,” said Parziale. ICONIQ was able to reduce the amount of administrative time spent so the team can now focus on building relationships with its network. “Getting out of Excel was also a big deal,” Parziale added. “Now we have all our data in one place and have removed silos.”
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