https://youtu.be/9KhyJgt2mic
Laszlo Balassy, CEO of ActiveGraf, is driven by a mission to help businesses become scenario smart, enabling faster, smarter decisions through real-time analytics and democratized data visualization.
We discuss the ActiveGraf Framework, a tool designed to align strategic objectives, identify key drivers, and enable dynamic, interactive models to accelerate decision-making and reduce sales cycles. Laszlo shares impactful use cases, such as shortening a global software firm’s sales cycle by 50% and enhancing food safety analytics for a fast food chain. He also highlights ActiveGraf’s future, including the integration of AI to simplify predictive and prescriptive analytics, making these tools more accessible to businesses of all sizes. He emphasizes the transformative potential of democratized analytics to help organizations optimize operations, demonstrate value, and achieve sustainable growth.
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Become Scenario Smart with Laszlo Balassy
Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast. And my guest today is Laszlo Balassy, the CEO of ActiveGraf, a software company on a quest to democratize analytics, accelerate decisions, and reduce expense. So ActiveGraf allows visually modify Excel-based data models in PowerPoint without involving teams of analysts and analytics, I guess. Laszlo, welcome to the show.
Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here, and especially given our past of having known each other in our previous lives, it's especially a pleasure to be here with you today.
Yes, but you're not here because we have connections from previously, you're here because you have a great business and you have an exciting story to tell to our listeners. So let's start. I like to start this show these days. What is your personal “Why” and what are you doing to manifest it in your business?
Yeah, so my “Why” is to leverage the power of analytics for the betterment of humanity. It sounds very grandiose, but in effect, it's not. It really started with simple ideas of if we could calculate things live in a situation, we could make much better and faster decisions. Today, my business is mostly, our business at ActiveGraf is really mostly shortening sales cycles for people that are making technical sales and things like that and using analytics to do that client work. But one example of using analytics for the betterment of humanity and making better decisions is a use case we made called the HR use case.
Back when I was at Citi, whenever there was a market downturn, they basically almost arbitrarily said, this half of the room, okay, you go home. And that's it. And why was that? The reason was that board members have a fiduciary responsibility. And when they're cutting costs, nobody could ever blame them. But in six months time, when the markets turned, they'd be trying to hire back the exact same people or very similar people, maybe not the exact same people. And I thought, God, there's gotta be a better way. And we developed this use case called the HR during a recession use case. And the clear thing is that if you look at keeping people who seem to be excess staff, it actually comes out as a calculation to be better to keep them even for 9 months, 12 months, 18 months than it is to get rid of them, pay severance and all of that. And I feel that if more people had access to analytics and calculations like this, the world would just be a better place.
We'd make better and faster decisions. So that's the kind of my “Why” is really to democratize that and make it easy for anybody to use even more sophisticated calculations.Share on X
Yeah, that's cool. So you had this experience, I think you explained in our pre-interview that when you're an investment banker, you would have loved to actually be able to demonstrate the sensitivity analysis, what the scenario analysis that you were talking about, and the team had to go back to the office to develop it in real-time,...