Bolt-On AI Doesn't Work. Eléonore Crespo, Co-CEO of Pigment, on Why You Have to Rebuild from Scratch
The AI Revolution ShowShow Notes
Finance teams at Anthropic, Coca-Cola, and Unilever have stopped using spreadsheets entirely. Is your business planning keeping pace with the speed of the market, or are you running a Formula 1 race with a bicycle? Alex Theuma sits down with Eléonore Crespo, co-CEO and co-founder of Pigment, the AI performance management platform that has doubled revenue for three consecutive years and recently crossed $100M ARR. Eleanor shares why bolt-on AI is a losing strategy, how Pigment is cutting enterprise implementation from nine months to 20 days, and what it actually takes to build and defend a moat in the age of agents. In this episode, we explore: (02:06) Why Eleanor keeps engineering in Europe and sales in the US (04:09) Crossing $100M ARR with three straight years of revenue doubling (08:11) Why large enterprises cannot just run their business on Claude (10:23) How Pigment pivoted from pre-AI infrastructure to agentic workflows (12:05) Eleanor's three rules: AI-native thinking, moat-building, and speed (22:50) Why two co-CEOs works, and how they handle opposing visions (27:31) Launching a free trial inside an enterprise sales motion (33:10) What people dangerously underestimate about execution and great teams
The AI Revolution Show is the intelligence podcast for B2B software founders navigating the platform shift, the founders building through it, and the founders already on the other side. Hosted by Alex Theuma, founder of Shift AI Events. Subscribe so you don't miss the next episode.
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