AI’s Rise: Chaos 🤯 & Genius Solutions ✨

THE RISE OF AI IMPLEMENTATION CONSULTING
The increasing complexity and challenges associated with integrating Artificial Intelligence tools into large businesses have spurred the emergence of specialized consulting firms. “AI, paradoxically, increases the demand for professional services,” states Efrat Rapoport, a former Salesforce executive and co-founder of June, a newly formed company dedicated to streamlining AI implementation. The industry’s response to AI adoption has been a surge in hiring, a trend Rapoport and her team believe is inefficient and overly reliant on specialized expertise.

JUNE’S FOUNDATION: LEARNING FROM PAST EXPERIENCES
The founding team of June – Efrat Rapoport, Ohad Hen, Barak Goldstein, and Idan Tsitiat – previously operated under the banner of Bonobo AI. Launched in 2017, Bonobo AI developed a voice-to-text service utilizing pre-transformer language models. Salesforce acquired Bonobo AI two years later, and the team subsequently contributed to Salesforce’s AI initiatives for several years before embarking on their new venture, informed by firsthand observations of customer struggles with AI integration. This prior experience directly shaped their approach, recognizing the critical need for a more accessible and effective solution. The initial $20 million pre-seed funding, led by Time Ventures (Marc Benioff) and supplemented by investments from Michael Dell, Aaron Levie, and George Kurtz, underscored investor confidence in their vision.

ADDRESSING THE “SAASAPOCALYPSE” CHALLENGE
Despite anxieties within the software industry regarding the potential displacement of businesses by AI – often referred to as the “SaaSpocalypse” – no company is currently relying on “vibe-coding” a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system for a Fortune 500 enterprise. The reality is that any AI model deployed within a corporate setting must seamlessly interact with platforms like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Databricks, Workday, and a multitude of other data management systems. “Before AI can create value, someone has to deal with legacy systems,” Rapoport emphasizes, highlighting the fundamental obstacle: fragmented data and complex workflows across these established platforms, compounded by years of accumulated technical debt.

AGENT TEMPLATES VS. REAL-WORLD INTEGRATION
While building an agent template might seem straightforward, the true challenge lies in its operational functionality within a complex organizational environment. Rapoport poses a critical question: “How does an agent know how to operate when you have 10 duplicate [database] fields that say the same thing, and different teams are using them?” June’s platform tackles this issue head-on by meticulously scanning a company’s existing systems to understand its business processes, pinpoint bottlenecks, and subsequently build optimized, agent-powered processes to replace them, automatically notifying teams through the company’s communication channels.

A STEP-BY-STEP ROADMAP FOR IMPLEMENTATION
June provides a comprehensive, automated roadmap for successful AI agent implementation within an enterprise. This roadmap details the specific steps required, such as “Remove these duplicates. Connect to this data source.” Users can then initiate the process by simply clicking “build” on each task, allowing June to automatically execute the necessary changes within the organization. This hands-on, guided approach significantly reduces the complexity and risk associated with AI integration.

CASE STUDY: CMG’S AI IMPLEMENTATION JOURNEY
Paul Akinmade, Chief Strategy Officer at CMG, a major U.S. mortgage lender, quickly adopted Claude Code, but encountered significant roadblocks when attempting to integrate it with Salesforce. Akinmade’s team spent weeks struggling, consulting architects and forward-deployed engineers, without making substantial progress. June intervened, offering Akinmade’s team a clear view of deployment opportunities and a safe environment for implementing agents, even before the official launch between June and CMG.

JUNE AS A COMPLEMENT, NOT A REPLACEMENT, FOR FDEs
Rapoport views June as a complementary tool to Forward-Deployed Engineers (FDEs) and consultants. However, she anticipates that customers may be drawn to June primarily for the opposite reason: to avoid the need for FDEs altogether. Akinmade’s initial reaction to piloting the tool at CMG perfectly encapsulates this sentiment: “If your product requires FDEs, I don’t want your product. I’ve already done that and I’m getting annoyed by it. I don’t want a black box. I don’t want something only certain people can figure out. I want an easy-to-use tool.” This feedback validated June’s core value proposition.