Quantive enlists generative AI to help improve business strategy for enterprise

Generative AI isn’t just about writing text or creating interesting images — it can also serve as a foundation for business strategy and decision-making.

That’s the direction that strategy execution vendor Quantive is taking for generative AI: Using it in a way that will help organizations make better decisions. The company was formerly known as Gtmhub and rebranded in December 2022.

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Quantive raised $120 million in December 2021 to help build out its platform, which it positions as an automatic objectives and key results (OKR) tracking platform. Some of that funding was used to help acquire privately-held AI vendor Cliff AI in June 2022. The technology from Cliff is now being integrated into the Quantive Results platform, which provides organizations with AI-powered capabilities to better understand, manage and track key performance indicators (KPIs) and OKRs for business strategy and execution.

“Cliff AI is really a platform for identifying anomalies in very large sets of time-series data,” Ivan Osmak, Quantive CEO and cofounder told VentureBeat. “With that, we built this ability to track enormous amounts of business data, identify trends and make predictions.”

Quantive today announced a new set of AI-based capabilities to help business users build, manage and track OKRs. The updates include integrations from technology built by Cliff, as well as OpenAI models including GPT-3, hosted on Microsoft Azure.

The OKRs and KPIs of business strategy

A key part of modern business management practices is having metrics to measure success.

Beyond just stating that a company wants to make more money or grow its customer base, OKRs help clearly define details of precisely what a company wants to achieve. OKRs are also backed up with metrics to accurately track how an organization is progressing to those objectives. Multiple firms are active in the OKR tracking platform space, including Asana, Ally IO and WorkBoard.

Among the challenges with OKR tracking is understanding where to start. This is one of the issues Quantive is aiming to tackle with its new AI-powered updates. One new feature helps users initially define OKRs with AI-powered suggestions. The AI can recommend how objectives can be identified and help set them up in the Quantive system.

While OKRs define an organization’s objectives, there is still a need to detail what specific initiatives will help meet them. To address this, Quantive now includes an AI-powered capability to help organizations accurately detail and align initiatives to match up with objectives.

The OKRs of generative AI

With all the different capabilities and data that the Quantive platform provides, there is much for a new user to learn.

To help reduce the learning curve for both new and existing users, a new “Ask Quantive” chatbot-style feature uses the power of an OpenAI model hosted on Microsoft Azure to answer questions and help set up OKRs.

“Right now our customer success teams are using this,” Osmak said of Ask Quantive. “It has been trained on everything that we have ever said about our software OKRs, which is quite a lot of things.”

Osmak noted that OKRs have long been used by organizations of all sizes to help achieve success. When it comes to larger organizations, scaling OKRs can be very complex, as there is a lot of data to deal with. AI plays a critical role in correctly identifying the right target goals and keeping initiatives aligned with them.

“The traditional way of dealing with the complexity of OKR scaling is to simplify things and make it more minimalistic, but I don’t think that solves the problem,” said Osmak. “I think it’s more about contextualization, summarizing what’s important and removing noise from the signal, and AI helps us to do that.”