Problem: Grain spent years running their own meeting platform recording bots, but wanted to free up engineering resources for more innovation.
Solution: By teaming up with Recall.ai, Grain could reliably serve their customers while leaving room for growth and innovation.
Grain is an AI-powered conversation intelligence tool that takes notes and provides insights for sales teams, product teams, and customer success teams.
Challenge: Refocus on Grain’s core offering
Capturing audio and video from meetings is a key part of how Grain operates — but it’s not something that can be easily accomplished.
First, the Grain team started by building their own bot to record Zoom calls. It took months to build and required somewhere between 25-50% of a full-time engineer’s capacity for months. The Grain team actually spent years running this bot. They had the expertise, but they were tired of devoting engineering resources to maintenance. They also didn’t have time to keep the bot up-to-date with new features.
Jeff Whitlock, the CEO of Grain, explains, “If you exclude the initial build-out, even the maintenance was substantial because it always felt like there were issues coming up.”
They also wanted to expand their bot to work with platforms outside of Zoom. However, they estimated that would take upwards of 6-9 months to build out, and after the tool was built, they’d have to continue providing maintenance. Managing the upkeep of the Zoom bot was already intense.
They needed a solution that solved 3 main problems:
- Bots are expensive.
- Bots are hard to build.
- The Grain team wanted to focus their time and effort on the things that they are experts at.
“We realized that we wanted to invest our engineering efforts into other areas that could be more differentiating in the market and deliver more value,” Jeff said.
So they started looking for another solution. Because video recordings are a critical piece of how the Grain tool operates, Jeff identified three things they needed in a vendor: reliability, cost effectiveness, and a collaborative partnership.
Solution: An efficient, reliable partnership with Recall.ai
Jeff and the Grain team began their partnership with Recall.ai with Recall.ai only providing Google Meet bots. Over time, as the team at Recall.ai demonstrated their trustworthiness, the collaboration grew.
Now, Grain uses Recall.ai to power their bots on Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams.
Recall.ai checks all the boxes for Grain.
Reliability
Providing recordings reliably is Recall.ai’s core offering. Jeff shared why reliability is so important for their company — and how Recall.ai knocks it out of the park.
“People get mad when they think they’re going to get a recording and then it’s lost. We’ve learned that time and time again. So I really appreciate how seriously Recall.ai takes that responsibility.”
Cost
Building a bot internally is expensive, but outsourcing can be, too. Jeff provided some insights into how our pricing solidified us as the right choice.
“Recall.ai adds value beyond their cost, but we appreciate that pricing is competitive.”
Partnership
Finally, Grain was in need of a partner who could work quickly and flexibly.
“The team at Recall.ai moves really fast,” the CEO shared. “We’re working in a fast-moving industry, so we appreciate how they help us adapt. They’re also incredibly responsive to feedback, which is key for us.”
Result: Time to focus on innovation
Since Grain brought in Recall.ai, they’ve freed up time and engineer capacity to invest further in their areas of expertise. Jeff shared some of the projects they’ve been able to focus on since offloading meeting recording, including:
- Expanding AI note taking capabilities
- Building integrations into CRMs and Slack
- Improving the core functionality of Grain by adding more features to capture insights from data they’ve already collected
“It’s really allowed us to spend more investment on doing valuable things with data, rather than just maintaining the layer of getting data,” Jeff said. “And if you’re on the fence, just know — it’s going to save you time to market.”
The team here at Recall.ai is excited to keep collaborating and growing with Grain for years to come.
