Airbyte was born in the open. What started in 2020 as an open-source data integration project grew into one of the most widely adopted tools of its kind, trusted by global enterprises like Rakuten and Carlsberg and by fast-growing leaders like Mercury and Perplexity. The AI era gave Airbyte a chance to imagine a second act and launch a new product — a context layer for AI agents — alongside its original business and community of 27,000 developers.
“We went to market with our new product faster because Octave holds our messaging and qualification logic. When we teach Octave, Octave guides all the tools in our GTM stack and all our teammates via Claude. Those new capabilities immediately let us tackle a larger TAM and maintain high growth in the AI era.”
Airbyte needed a way to size their new TAM, score accounts, and quickly go to market with personalized messaging across ads, emails, phone calls, content, and more. But their new ICP (AI and platform engineering teams) was complex, and classic technographic and firmographic scoring wouldn’t cut it.
Mario Moscatiello, Airbyte’s VP of Marketing, turned to Octave to go to market faster.
Today, Airbyte uses Octave as its source of truth for qualification and personalized messaging across 10+ tools, including Clay, Salesforce, Instantly, Nooks, Common Room, Gong, and Vector.co. Airbyte built its business on the idea that data should flow to wherever it's needed — and with Octave, its GTM knowledge now works the same way.
Messaging, qualification logic, and customer insights flow from one source of truth into every tool and every rep, compounding with each conversation, and improving outputs wherever judgment or personalization are needed:
Wall-to-wall GTM improvement
Airbyte uses Octave in their inbound engine, outbound engine, lifecycle campaigns, content marketing, new hire onboarding materials, and more. Octave also started spreading through the organization via the MCP in Claude, where sales reps can access context to independently qualify or create personalized outreach within Octave’s guardrails.
Natural-language lead scoring
Airbyte is able to score leads and accounts qualitatively, using content like website copy in addition to firmographics. This makes it possible to qualify prospects against a complex ICP, as well as qualify them into nuanced audiences for highly personalized messaging.
Insights
Airbyte’s marketing and product teams can learn from their customer conversations to improve their go-to-market messaging, ICP definitions, and competitive differentiation. Octave analyzes Airbyte’s Gong transcripts and syncs the findings to Airbyte’s data warehouse for direct querying, and creates Suggestions for how to update Airbyte’s messaging when there are gaps.
The results?
- Faster time-to-market as Airbyte expanded its TAM to include a new ICP.
- Double the meeting conversion rates thanks to personalized messaging.
- And an empowered team of BDRs that generates double the pipeline of the average BDR organization, spending less than 20% of their day on manual tasks, down from 60%.
“Octave started spreading within our organization when the MCP launched. It empowers every single BDR to have access to this technology in their day-to-day, which is amazing for me as a leader. I can teach the system, and then I don’t need to worry about reps using it for scoring or personalization, because I know there will be consistency.”
Immediate enablement
Keeping Octave up-to-date via Suggestions and MCP
Airbyte’s first step with Octave was to populate the Library with messaging, value props, product information, target segments, personas, competitors, differentiators, typical objections, and more. This source of truth lets Airbyte’s team and tools use the most fresh, consistent product information.
With the new AI product, and a dev team shipping at lightning speed, Mario and Airbyte’s Business Development Manager, Justin Bangay, keep Airbyte’s positioning up to date in Octave via intelligent suggestions and the Claude MCP.
Mario says, “If we launch a new feature, I can easily tell the MCP in Claude to update our Octave library, playbooks, and agents to reflect our latest product features. Octave is amazing at editing copy at scale. I had a Claude session open to refine the positioning of our new product, and could just rewrite sections in Octave using the context.”
“The beauty of Octave is how easy it is to update. When we refined our new product positioning, we were able to revamp our playbooks and product entity in 15 minutes.”
Octave also auto-suggests updates to the library based on realtime customer calls. It annotates Gong call transcripts to understand what prospects and customers are talking about — like competitors that keep coming up, pains certain personas are facing, and value props that land with one segment but not another.
When Octave sees a strong enough pattern it suggests an update to Airbyte’s messaging, and Mario and team can accept or reject them. For example, in a 2-week period, over 20 of Airbyte’s conversations included complaints about their competitor Fivetran, specifically that its usage-based pricing model gets unpredictable and expensive at scale.
Octave turned this insight into a new suggested line in the Fivetran competitive entity in Octave, reinforcing that Airbyte differentiates on the predictability of its pricing. This lets agents and reps use the new messaging right away, without waiting for an enablement session.
Mario says, “We’re able to discover and act on new value propositions much faster. Octave discovers new messaging points in real time conversations, then immediately suggests an update to Airbyte’s canonical messaging.”
Mario and team can click into the suggestion to see which companies and people voiced this concern, on which dates — as well as go straight to the transcript source.
Scoring
Qualifying leads and accounts with qualitative data
Airbyte relies heavily on scoring to direct sales reps’ attention to the highest-priority inbound and outbound prospects. It also pushes highly qualified leads into ad audiences via Vector.co.
This scoring powers a daily destination for BDRs to see their next steps with top-tier accounts, with pre-written emails and call scripts. Lower-scoring prospects receive automated sequences. Octave’s qualification not only prioritizes opportunities, but uses judgment to place them into audiences that Airbyte wants to serve specific messaging to (via Octave Playbooks).
Airbyte’s new ICP was nuanced, and needed Octave’s qualitative judgment for scoring and TAM sizing. “We needed to figure out how many companies met our target criteria,” says Mario, “But our ICP definitions were quite complex. We couldn’t just score with +/- 5 points based on industry and size. We needed an agent to go through a company’s website and more, then infer their fit. Octave let us score in that way.”
When Airbyte scores a company with Octave, they use:
- Octave’s website scraper
- Same-day research about company news, feature launches, blog posts, job postings, and more (either with Octave’s Deep Research agent or provided via Airbyte’s own)
- 1st-party data and signals from Common Room, including website page visits, product telemetry, Airbyte integration usage, and more
- Classic firmographics and technographics
- CRM context
- and more…
To score an individual, Octave also provides their LinkedIn profile data and incorporates any additional runtime context Airbyte provides.
Octave compares these qualitative and quantitative inputs to entities in Airbyte’s Octave library, like the natural-language descriptions of segments and personas. This scoring is ready out of the box. But Mario goes a step further to weight the scoring attributes. To do this, he adds Qualifiers to each entity: questions that qualify or disqualify, with an assigned light/medium/heavy weight for each. These questions are created quickly using Octave’s AI refinements.
Sample Qualifiers:
- Whether the company is strictly on-prem — Airbyte is cloud-only, so this is a disqualifier. (This evidence comes from a company’s website and regulation information, but also technical job descriptions, deployment documentation, public product architecture, context from government contracts, etc.)
- Whether the company has an operating model with high complexity and variability. (Octave seeks to understand a company’s transaction volume, seasonality, and application integration needs.)
- Whether the company needs to integrate business systems like CRM, support, billing, ecommerce, and data platforms. (This evidence is found in vendor case studies, job descriptions, help documentation, technographic detection tools, and technical docs.)
- Whether the company is hiring certain roles in AI and data infrastructure.
- Whether AI is only an internal capability for the company, or a core product it sells.
- Whether the company looks like a consulting firm.
Airbyte builds scoring agents in Octave for different Airbyte products, linking them to specific Octave entities for context.
Because it can use nuanced qualitative judgment, Octave also qualifies leads into 5-10 playbooks that serve different messaging tied to different persona pains and Airbyte products.
Some playbooks are oriented around event triggers, for example:
- Large companies that are using an Airbyte Pro free trial and have completed their first successful sync.
- Self-hosted users that are scaling fast and would be a good candidate for a managed solution, assuming their business meets certain Qualifiers
Others are oriented around sectors or business needs, such as:
- Companies building AI agents as their core products or internal workflows and therefore have an integration burden
- Data infrastructure team leaders in regulated enterprises
Like with persona and segment entities, Airbyte’s Playbooks also have a set of Qualifiers that a company needs to meet before being included.
BDR efficiency
Turning BDRs into superhumans
As a highly technical marketing leader, one of Mario’s missions at Airbyte was to turn the BDR organization into what he calls “superhumans.”
“Machines are really good at spotting patterns, telling you that certain copy will convert better for certain reasons. Humans are better at building relationships. When you combine the two, you get great results. The average BDR spends 50-60% of their time qualifying lists and crafting emails. Our mission at Airbyte was to bring that down to less than 20% of their time so they can spend 80% of their time meeting people. Octave is what really made that possible.”
“BDRs used to take hours to research midmarket and enterprise accounts, creating an account plan and making sure they’re targeting the right people. This has dropped to 30, 45 minutes with AI. With Octave, it’s virtually zero.”
Airbyte built a centralized system for BDRs where reps can wake up in the morning to see the top accounts they need to touch today, across inbound and outbound. Octave powers the qualification and personalization for messaging. The emails are in their inbox, and cold call scripts with the 3 things they need to say personalized to a lead, so they can just open the dialer and start.
“Without Octave, we would have had to build an insane amount of infrastructure and stitch together 20 Clay tables just to get to the same level of work.”
This has greatly sped up the efficiency of the BDR team. “With our system and Octave, our team can now book double the pipeline of an average BDR organization,” says Mario.
In addition to this centralized outreach system, Airbyte’s BDRs needed scoring and personalization for one-offs. For example, if they saw someone at an event and wanted to send them an email that was super relevant to their company, they wanted to tap into Octave context. This was possible with the launch of Octave’s MCP in Claude.
“With the MCP, many more people at Airbyte are using Octave. They can qualify a hundred companies they found, or write a personalized sequence ad-hoc,” says Mario. “My BDR team is way more independent now because we’ve trained Octave and Octave guides them.”
Personalization
Happier prospects, more relevant conversations
Airbyte had tried a range of AI-generated writing solutions that didn’t produce differentiated copy. Mario says, “We tried everything under the sun. We’re big fans of Common Room for signals, and we also tried a Clay agent built on ChatGPT and Claude, and a number of other agent researchers. But the copy looked the same, because they weren’t grounded in Airbyte company context — who we are, what we do, what our ICP is, and how we differentiate from competitors.”
The secret weapon in outbound, Mario says, is first-party context. “What integrations are they using with your product? What pages on your site did they visit? When we combine this with Octave’s library, we can infer someone’s use case and what really matters to them.”
They use all this data with Octave to write highly personalized messaging in Clay, pushing it to Instantly for campaigns — or to prepare custom call scripts for reps.
“The relevancy of our emails have gone up, so our email reply rates have gone up,” says Mario. “When our reps are having conversations with prospects, prospects are genuinely happy about how relevant the conversation is. That’s why we have a super high pickup rate and conversion to meeting rate on the phone – because we’re talking about the right thing with Octave’s context.”
“We've seen a 50% to 100% increase in pipeline per BDR since using Octave.”
Data warehouse sync
Call intelligence, queryable in Airbyte’s data warehouse
Octave’s Gong transcript annotations are synced to Airbyte’s data warehouse. Rather than a black box for qualification and personalization, Airbyte can own their intelligence in-house and deploy agents against it.
This also lets business users across leadership, marketing, product, and sales better understand how Airbyte is landing with prospects and customers. With a new AI product launched, they can use Octave’s annotations to look for key features and problems to be solved.
It comes with 150+ powerful out of the box extractors to help spot new objections, pain points, competitor differentiation opportunities, and more. Airbyte’s team can also ask custom questions, like “What coding languages do our customers use?”
Octave can find the answers with a customizable search on past and future calls, across all (or some) calls, emails with customers, and other channels.
“We like that Octave is an open system instead of a black box. Octave provides the ingredients to understand our conversations with prospects, and we can own that intelligence in our warehouse.”
Airbyte's story has always been about moving data to wherever it creates value — first for analytics, now for AI. Its go-to-market runs on the same principle. By making its messaging, ICPs, and competitive knowledge a living system in Octave rather than static documents, Airbyte turned institutional knowledge into something every tool, agent, and teammate can act on.
That's what let a company with 7,000+ customers and a thriving open-source community launch into an entirely new market at startup speed — and it's the same playbook Airbyte will run for whatever comes next.
