Adobe’s enterprise business has been lucrative for the business, with the company’s $5 billion digital experiences business continuing to grow under the leadership of enterprise CRO Stephen Frieder. Frieder has been with Adobe since 2009 but took on this role in January 2023 to lead the company’s go-to-market strategy for digital media.

With an AI and digital-first approach, Frieder and his team have been able to streamline the presales process, onboard clients quickly, and show immediate results for clients like Tesco and Dick’s Sporting Goods.

Revenue Brew sat down with Frieder to discuss what’s leading growth in his sector and how AI is playing a role in his GTM strategy.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Where are you seeing growth coming from?

The strength of the dialogues we’re having with customers right now is how we use AI to drive through customer experience engagement at a high level—really driving personalization at scale with three main “pillar plays.” One is content supply chain, so how do you produce the amount of content you need through agentic at scale and personalizing it and doing that in a very efficient way.

The second one is what we call customer engagement, so how we drive that engagement and real-time activation, whether you’re at a sports venue or you’re online or at a call center, being able to really understand that personalized experience for you through our solutions and through AI in that area.

Keep reading to find out the third pillar of Adobe’s transformational growth strategy.—LI

Rivian’s much-hyped make-or-break moment has arrived.

The electric-vehicle manufacturer on Tuesday will start deliveries of its second-generation vehicle, the R2 SUV. Company leaders (and investors) hope the product will be a breakout moment that brings widespread awareness to the brand, launches Rivian into the mass market, and drives the company toward profitability. CEO and founder RJ Scaringe has called it “maybe the most important thing we’ve launched to date.”

No pressure, right?

Scaringe has been successful at getting investors and VC firms on board with his ideas. As TechCrunch reported, the three companies he’s founded (Rivian, micromobility spinoff Also, and industrial AI and robotics startup Mind Robotics) have collectively raised $12.3 billion. Rivian, which Scaringe founded in 2009, raised nearly $12 billion in its 2021 IPO, and today has a market cap of over $22 billion. Now it’s time to convince mainstream consumers.

Morning Brew caught up with Scaringe at an event in Utah, just before R2 deliveries were scheduled to start.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve said R2 is the most important launch to date. What’s at stake here?

We’ve spent a lot of time working on the vehicle, but I think it’s clearly not understood that we’re designing Rivian to be a much larger company, [with] a very large R&D budget. We’ve designed our teams around vertically integrating in almost every area of technical importance as we think about it. So we built all our electronics in-house, we built all of our software in-house, we’re building silicon in-house. We built our sensors in-house, motors, gearboxes, power electronics, wiring, everything.

Then we built a direct-to-consumer go-to-market channel, where we built sales, distributions—lots of distribution centers throughout the country, parts distribution, these big million-square-foot warehouses throughout the country, and then a big service network.

So, to do all that intentionally, we’ve spent a lot of money; our OpEx is high. We’re not making money today. And often people say that as if it’s a surprise to us, but we’re building a flagship product only today, and so the way that that all starts to make sense is we launched the high-volume product. And so when you say what’s at stake, it’s like the whole essence of how we’ve designed Rivian has been set up for R2. I think it sounds negative when you put it this way, but the future of the business is dependent on R2 scaling. So it’s very important for us, and we’ve done everything we can to cross all our Ts, dot all our Is on the product, and make sure it’s ready for that.

Learn more about Rivian’s product market launch strategy.—JG

ChargePoint has a long history of helping EV drivers charge their vehicles.

If Jyothi Swaroop, the company’s new marketing and growth officer, is successful, ChargePoint won’t just be known for its EV charging business.

Swaroop joined ChargePoint in May after working for decades in tech and AI, with previous roles at Oracle, Dell EMC, Veritas, and others. Swaroop joined the company as ChargePoint is implementing a three-year transformation strategy; he’s responsible for leading its “global go-to-market strategy, including marketing, go-to-market operations, sales enablement, growth initiatives, partner monetization, and new market expansion,” according to a news release.

“ChargePoint is now no longer about the old-school EV charging. It’s a lot more than that,” Swaroop told Morning Brew. “It’s about our software business, which goes beyond just our hardware into other hardware and manageability, and leverages AI and delivers the value of AI to our customers. It’s about expansion of our driver base beyond our day-to-day drivers—to fleets, to companies. And last but definitely not least, the expanding TAM and the new use cases that are cropping up that are so exciting.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How are you thinking about the role of partnerships in the broader effort to expand ChargePoint’s market and generate revenue? You mentioned a partnership with power management company Eaton.

Eaton is a big one. They’re a behemoth. Their stock just hit an all-time high. Eaton’s product portfolio and ChargePoint’s product portfolio and roadmaps are extremely complementary. Eaton’s in the hardcore, large-scale deployment business for controlling the energy grid for its largest customers, and we are the endpoint business of that…So the use case is extremely simple and easy to understand—the value is easy to understand for the customer.

Now, in terms of how do we actually execute it, Eaton is trying to get into the clean energy business in general. It’s a new expansion market for them, and we are the leaders in this space…That is going to provide a massive growth trajectory for both companies. The interesting nuance, however, is unlike the world of AI and Nvidia, where the returns are immediate, these things are actual physical products that have to be sold, installed, procured. There’s a lot of physics involved. The deal cycles tend to be longer. So it’s not like…we’re going to see revenue tomorrow. It’s going to take a few months to a year to start seeing the big deals land, because that’s just how this works.

Keep reading about ChargePoint’s energizing expansions.—JG

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