Monday.com aims to simplify work processes in Asia

For Dean Swan, Vice President & GM, APJ, at monday.com, the concept at the global software company is utilizing the monday.com platform to move from a work management platform to a work execution platform for customers.

It’s been almost two months since global software company monday.com opened its new office in Singapore. Serving as the company’s strategic hub for Southeast Asia, the new office also marked the long-term strategic commitment across Singapore and the APAC region.

In an interview with CRN Asia, Dean Swan, Vice President & GM, APJ, at monday.com (Monday) stated that while the regional headquarters remains in Sydney, Australia, which is their third largest market globally, Southeast Asia is their fastest growing sub-region in the broader Asia market and is also the second largest region for Monday.

“I anticipate that it (Southeast Asia) will definitely overtake ANZ and become sort of the largest part of our region. We've got about 1,000 customers in Singapore alone, and if you have a look at some of these organizations, we've got companies like Brother International, Unilever International, CloudMile, and so on,” explained Swan.

Swan also pointed out that one of the reasons for their growth in the region is because of the ease of use of the platform, which has had a very strong value proportion in the market for work management software.

“We get utilized across over 200-plus industries, as many use cases in that instance. So, Monday is a very broadly utilized platform. That level of accessibility and then being able to utilize Monday across so many industries is a strong growth for us. What we've seen is that Monday is, over time, going upmarket. So, firstly, starting off with something that really appealed to small and medium enterprises, and obviously Asia has got such a significant concentration of small and medium enterprises, so we're very accessible for that space. But then going upmarket into larger organizations, larger enterprises, has also been fueling our growth,” said Swan.

AI and the customer ecosystem

According to Swan, Monday’s customer base is made from the smallest customer right up to the largest customer. For example, when working with SMEs, the focus will be on enabling them to unlock productivity and scale in their business through automation and through some of the things that Monday does.

“At a global level, our fastest growing segment is the top end of town, which is the enterprise. So, as a listed company, we publish that, but our fastest growing segment is what we call the 50k plus customers and contracts,” said Swan.

Given the competition in the industry with larger vendors and startups offering similar services as well, Swan pointed out the Monday’s core mission is to democratize the power of software.

“How we do that is not just by building a platform that people love to use, but a platform that anybody can build any application irrespective of their technical expertise or their level. So, that's why the core of it is Monday is easy to use, easy to get started. So, that is our mission. And interestingly enough, I think where you will see Monday standing out even more so in the future is taking that mission and applying that to AI. So, allowing any organization to be able to build AI in the core of their work or to build AI agents in a very accessible way,” he said.

Explaining more on the use of AI, Swan stated that the focus will be on using natural language to start creating software or using natural language to create AI agents.

“So, with AI, the interesting thing is there's a big gap around the capability available in the market versus the impact that organizations are experiencing and the value that they're getting out of those AI investments. And again, when you look at the market, the LLMs, there's so much availability. You've got ChatGPT and Gemini, and you can make a very long list of the capabilities that's available in the market. But it still requires that technical capability to bring it together in a meaningful way. Many people are using their ChatGPTs or whatnot just to do information retrieval and information search.”

“But what about really applying the AI into your day-to-day work, or into your actual workflows? And being able to do that in a meaningful way, that's where organizations typically need specialized talents, or they need to have budget to be able to do that. And I think that's our value proposition in the market is to say, well, we make that accessible.”

“We bring it in a way that using natural language, an SME can create their own AI agents. Or using natural language, an SME can use AI to build software or to build dashboards or to build reports and so on in a very simple way,” said Swan.

From work management to work execution

For Swan, the concept at Monday is utilizing Monday as a platform that's moving from a work management platform to a work execution platform.

“When people work in Monday, they've got all of their tasks and what of those can you hand off to AI, right? Can the AI actually take that over for me and start doing it? So as an example, in our own business, we've got salespeople that when they want to reach out to a new customer, they've got to do research, right? They've got to figure out, is this a company? So that's a task and that's something that we're handing off to AI. So, AI is automatically going out there and identifying what can be done”

“On top of that, we're now using AI, and we have built this capability into our CRM offering where the AI agents can then actually reach out to the prospective customer and set the appointment automatically because we find that that is also a task that there's friction in. It doesn't add a lot of value to the seller and also with the customer. The customer just wants to speak to someone, and they want to book that quickly. So, a low-level task around the appointment setting and we're using AI to do that already.”

“And in the same way, we've built that capability into our CRM offering where CRM is no longer a system of record exclusively, but it's actually adding value to the sales process where the CRM is actually starting to do the work for you,” he concluded.