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Deep Learning with PolyAI
PolyAI's CEO/co-founder Nikola Mrkšić and team invite guests to candidly discuss trends and tech in AI, voice throughout the enterprise, and nailing the customer experience.
Deep Learning with PolyAI
Why are CX leaders stuck on the sidelines of AI?
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In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI, Nikola Mrkšić sits down with Bill Staikos, Founder of Be Customer Led, to unpack why many CX leaders are still on the sidelines of the AI conversation — and what that means for the future of the function.
They explore how AI is reshaping the “interaction layer” of customer experience, why traditional CX metrics like NPS are no longer enough, and how leading organizations are starting to tie CX directly to revenue, cost, and risk.
The conversation challenges CX leaders to think bigger and make their function into an outcome-driven engine for business growth. In an AI-driven world, the leaders who understand that shift will have a much bigger role to play.
Unfortunately, most CX leaders are not in the AI conversation, which is kind of bizarre to me, right? Because when you think about like text analytics, it's old tech, but it's AI, it's a form of AI. But CX leaders never talk to the business to say, well, I've been using AI for 10, 15 years. Here's how. Right. So I think that CX leaders have a real opportunity, a really big wedge to get back into that conversation.
SPEAKER_02Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI. Today I have the pleasure of hosting Bill Stikus, who is the founder of Be Customer Led, and he spent more than 20 years helping companies really transform their CX functions. Bill, welcome to our podcast.
SPEAKER_00It's wonderful to be here. I appreciate you having me on, Nicola.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. And look, I think maybe to kick off, I just saw your post on LinkedIn about kind of like the different categories of vendors that are automating customer experience. And, you know, it feels to me like we're rewriting the taxonomy every two weeks, but I think it'd be really interesting for the audience to hear how you see the different efforts and strands of kind of like companies trying to make a change in customer experience.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think, you know, look, there's there's an incredible amount of investment right now, it seems, in being sort of the interaction later with your customer, right? And I think that's wonderful because one, you can quantify that much more easily than you could in other areas, at least today. Number two, I think it's also from a customer perspective, it's valuable because no one calls a context center to like give them like an attaboy or an at a girl, right? Like no one calls like you, you've got a problem, you need it solved, right? You need progress in that problem. So like if you can create a better experience by through through a better interaction layer, I think that you can really have it's like a win-win-win. One, certainly the companies out there that are playing in this space, whether it's on like the agentic side or sort of the pure support side or sort of the infra layer, like you can really deliver much higher value. But then number two is you could also achieve sort of business outcomes from an experiential perspective that are incredibly quantifiable and scalable too, right? Which is also a key point. So, you know, like there's kind of like a lot of different flavors to this coming in, a lot of players in the space. It feels like everyone's overlapping like 10, 20 a little bit in there. And to your comment, I think I 100% agree. But again, like I think we'll start to it'll start to shake out a little bit more over the next couple of years as well. And you know, we'll see some winners and losers. I like what's fascinating to me in this is like you know, five years ago we were talking about like the genesis of the world and the five nines and others, right? Like, and now it's like this completely different layer that's coming into play, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, like, you know, if we just like look at that piece, it feels like software at large, be it the hyperscalers or or CRM, yeah, they're coming to the contact center, right? Uh I think Amazon was ahead, right? In that they started a while back with Amazon Connect, but you know, what what do you think about the Salesforce announcement recently? Kind of about building their own CKS and moving away from that, you know.
SPEAKER_00Oh boy, I would we weren't any longer show uh for this answer, man. Look, I think it's look there, I think it's like Salesforce being Salesforce, right? Um I think that they're you again, like I think the value layer is in that interaction layer, it's not in sort of the core system. And you've got these capabilities, and I think like look, Salesforce is knows this probably better than anyone. Like when you capture that data and you've got and you're at that value layer, you make billions of dollars of revenue, right? They've proven that through you know CRM and what they've built over the you know decades. I think that they're just seeing sort of the market shifting and changing and the value layer shifting, and now they don't want to be relegated to the core system view, right? And I think that's kind of where they're playing. Like again, I'm I'm I'm speculating, but you know, I think that's kind of what's happening a little bit. Yeah, so even Microsoft kind of now saying, Hey, we are CRM, but we're also all these other things as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah.
SPEAKER_02No, I think it's really interesting because you know, really when you look to look at like the three tectonic plates, there is like the communication channel. So let's let's say CCAS. I think that as people realize their voice is not going anywhere, that is dominant and will continue to be dominant, then the question becomes, you know, now that we have technology to power it with technology, not just with human labor, it touches the second tectonic plate, which is human labor, right? That's where we get to automate, that's where I'd say we play and uh all of our like legentec competitors, where it's like, hey, can we like build things that meaningfully do much of that work? And in that we're really eating the labor cost and the BPO cost. Yeah, I think the ones that I always thought had the pull position are the like soft sales force and other dominant systems of record, be that like EMRs in healthcare, etc. Because that thing is really the operating system of that company, right? And I think that for the longest of times people thought that like CCAS has a right to win, but the truth is they're not really part of the workflow, they are the utility company that just provides yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Look, I I think the CRMs are in a great place to win. I mean, certainly given Salesforce's scale, right? I think that they're gonna they're gonna have a meaningful impact in this space. I I don't mean to kind of like minimize what they're trying to do or doing, it's there, and there is a big fight. Like it comes down to like, you know, can other players that are kind of coming up in the marketplace can they scale more quickly than Salesforce can innovate, right? Yeah, like and that's the trade-off. Like when I was in banking at Chase, like yet in, you know, this is going back, you know, 10, 15 years, it was like the fintechs, they were innovating more quickly than a a Chase could, but Chase had scale in consumers, right? So like similar dynamics sort of in play here.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, no, totally. And you mentioned kind of like owning that interaction later, right? And I mean, I think that's like a very, very good observation. And it's really kind of like making it an inter interaction rather than just like finding a way for it for there not to be an interaction with a human, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. I mean, when we were talking a little bit before we got on, right, Nicola, like I am such my personal philosophy is that we should be using these capabilities to amplify humanity in a way, right? If we're using these to just push customers further away and deflecting or whatever other words you want to you want to use, like for me, that doesn't deliver a great experience. And in fact, it could exacerbate an already unpleasant one if you're calling in and you're already upset about whatever that might be you're calling in about, and then all of a sudden you're dealing with an AI that's keeping you from getting your problem resolved in the right way. You know, I always say, like, don't turn AI into a cheaper human, actually turn it into a solution that's going to amplify and improve the experience.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that like to me, like as I got into this space and learned a lot about it, it really becomes also that that transformation becomes about debotifying the human themselves, right? Because any scaled operation, they've made the human so constrained that you know they know what they need to do to help, but maybe they're not allowed to say it. Maybe because of some regulation, they have to like go around in circles and tell you that your account wasn't denied, but that you work into it and they're dodging it because you know you could sue them if they said something that is wrong. And you look at all that and you're like, oh my god, right? Like it's like much of customer experience is already so like designed towards minimizing risk, yeah, from that as you start using AI, maybe you have a chance to redesign some of it, right? And then those unlocks are really big. But how do you think about like justifying by value, right? Because I've seen everything from customers that just justify really well and then tell me about all the extra benefits they got to those that maybe are like keeping cards close to the chest because they didn't want a software vendor to know that they've achieved a lot, or maybe we haven't. Maybe we just added slop on top of their purpose, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think it comes down to a little. So so one, I think the the value calculation is there, right? Like let's be clear, right? Like, and whether that's you're speeding up calls, right? Or or having more calls, you know, more calls and you're and you're decreasing the sort of the time of each call, whether you're deflecting sort of a call altogether, um all of this, if that's sort of the the use case you're trying to achieve, super measurable, scalable, and and quantifiable. And there's real value there. I mean, the ROI is is off the charts, right? If you think about like the average phone call costing four bucks, an escalation probably more, let's just say 150 to 250. An executive escalation could be a thousand bucks plus, right? So, like if you're taking that cost out of your out of the system, the roi is pretty clear. We wouldn't be investing in technologies like yours or others if if the cost wasn't clear. I think that as a former buyer, I will say like I was always a little hesitant to share ROI with my partners because my the the pricing conversation totally changes right now. Like if I 10x the cost, then it's like, you know, I don't want to be charged, you know, 4x, you know, when the when the renewal comes up. But I also think like we need to be thinking differently about the metrics that we're using to to quantify value when these functions are already in place. So like your traditional average handling time or deflection rate, etc. That to me, like these old ways of uh of working or thinking have to have to evolve for sure.
SPEAKER_02So I think it'd be probably very interesting for our audience. Like you sit down at a party with someone and they tell you that they're like a CX leader, right? And like what's the first metric you're interested in? Like, what do you ask them? Like, you know, if they told you two, three sentences around like, how's it going? What are you what are you running? Like, what do you want to know?
SPEAKER_00I would say, well, maybe a couple, it's not maybe one thing, but I would say, like, you know, how's the relationship with your CIO organization? Your product and your chief product officer. I'd think about like kind of governance and like engagement internally from an outcome perspective, like I wouldn't be like, oh, how have you improved CSAT or MPS over the last year? I'm I'm thinking like, how did your organization help, you know, plug the leaky bucket? And what did that what what did that amount to? Right. Or, you know, your company wants to drive revenue. I'm making it up 10% this year. What experiences are you creating or helping your product organization or COO organization create to help achieve that number and accelerate that strategy? So, like those are the questions I would be asking to understand. You know, are they just survey only or are they really like accountable to helping grow the business?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's almost a gauge of seniority, what you just said, right? Because it's like, how do you fit in the general company objectives and the governance? I I mean that, you know, to be like a classical, you know, cynical Serbian guy, it's like the relationship with the CIO, that question is basically like, can you even do anything at all with newer kinds of technology, right?
SPEAKER_00Exactly right. Like, yeah, yeah. Totally right.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00But I think that's but this is where I mean, and that conversation has changed, right? I mean, I think five years ago I wrote a post and paraphrasing, like the most important cop as a new CX leader, you have two really important lunches or coffees to have. One your CHRO, so you can connect CX and EX, employee experience, and the other is with your CFO, right? The last 12 proven, like, yes, you still need to quantify and drive business outcomes, but like, how is all this technology fitting together to deliver a better experience versus achieving results in the silos of your organization, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, I mean the CIO, we're living in an era of like the rise of the commercially minded CIO who I think many of them are the future CEOs of those companies, right? And I've seen them do things for us as we implemented where they just take over the conversation. And often, I mean, I have huge empathy, and you know, we started the company selling to business leaders, right? So customer experience, the reporting line mostly of the of the chief operating officer, and to this day, that's our like champion, right? Increasingly, as AI became hot, and we as like you know, I don't know if you know our Genesis story, but we're basically three deep learning researchers that started company long before it was clear that this was gonna happen. So prep, but then you know, very quickly post-lm, we ran the first LLM powered large-scale voice agent for a regulatory industry. Uh, the I think the the thing we did with PGE was the first like heavyweight complex LLM powered thing. But what I found really interesting is that that business buyer used to have to move mountains internally, and the CFO would be an ally, exactly like you said. And between those two, it would live the tech corg almost didn't want to touch the CX org, right? Like my joke is like, is your phone working? Cool, you can log into Salesforce or whatever you're saying, working, cool, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, buy right, and that's kind of like where a lot of those transformations ended up being led by SIs, by other kind of like vendors who people who could do what you are doing and talking about, kind of like maybe put together a whole like business case for a 200 million dollar investment into new technology, new piping, like DPO contract renegotiations, like hugely complicated things. Do you think with AI? Because like I think that like that CIO being part of the conversation is really important for new AI technologies to get in. I think the fact that the other large software vendors are getting more entire, both like systems of record and hyperscalers, is good because they are the ones that work in tandem with that CIO. But in this new age of AI, is it actually easier to prove that value? Because I don't think it is. I think it's just as hard as it was before.
SPEAKER_00I think it depends on where you start, right? Like, like the super quantifiable spaces for me are where there's direct interaction with the end customer. So I think like immediately my brain goes to sales, it goes to service, right? And those are like really important interaction layers from an experiential perspective as well, because having the most conversations with your customers as an example. The digital space, I think, is a really interesting next kind of phase where you can start to orchestrate in real time digital experiences based on AI, right? Like literally, you know, changing rates on a website, changing, you know, nudging a customer down a happy path. Eventually, even like now, like, you know, creating real-time sort of like changes to a website or an app, like so that customer, you know, based on like you know, friction detection, so that customer can go achieve, you know, whatever the job to be done is. So, like to me, like that's where like you'll start we're starting to see more and more impact. One, because it's there's just a lot of data around these in these areas. There'll be sales and service still largely human-driven, and that's and it's all very quantifiable. So now as you get into like spaces like the CFO organization, or you get into spaces, even sometimes operations, right? Like it we forget like product and fulfillment back up are are connected, right? So like we'll start to get smarter about those connections inside the walls of the company, and then how do we apply AI to measurably improve those areas? I just think right now, like it's the interaction layer is super easy to quantify, and that's kind of where we see a lot of these capabilities turning up.
SPEAKER_02100%. I mean, I you know, I've always had these three pillars, and I've always, you know, that there's growing revenue, there's cutting costs, there's improving customer experience. And I'd say that for all of our customers, we do at least two of those, right? And sometimes all three, but the revenue ones are the easiest to quantify. It's where sales happens faster. It's mostly sales, right? Because we're like taking appointments, we're like placing hot bunk holes for following through on any order or something like that. So those have been super like easy for the stakeholders to get by and for because you know a dollar earned is better than a dollar saved, and every company has a leaky bucket, right?
SPEAKER_00I've there no company on earth has solid revenue and and no leakage, right? So, like from an experiential perspective, like I like any rue role that I've been on the industry side, that's exactly where I start first. Like, show me how the dollar kind of flows through our systems and how does each how does that touch from the customer all the way back out? And that to me is is super important to be able to identify and map out because then you can then say, okay, from an experience perspective, here's where there's friction and here's where we're gonna go focus. Like it's an it's an easy way to prioritize. So I love that. The other things that I would say, like, you know, from an experiential perspective, like risk is another big category, and certainly what you guys are doing helps reduce risk. But then also, like, how does culture improve as a result of the of these capabilities? Right. We're giving time back to people, or we're we're upskilling them because now the calls are different, right? You've changed the shape of the interaction almost as a result, right? So, like, what's happening there now? And I I think there's real sort of value there that I think it's tough to quantify, but but I think is happening, and I think we need to be paying more attention to it.
SPEAKER_02That's a really good point. I mean, I really like the way that you're outlining it all as like the whole like you know, money flowing through the customer journey, et cetera. Because I feel like there's probably two categories of companies. I feel like the one you're describing is probably in the minority, right? But it's really where they should be thinking of it as fulfillment, right? And like you mentioned like the chief product officer. I mean, in tech companies, we always have CPOs in there, but hugely important role, but but you know, we ship product, right? And I think that's very much like our notation. But when you look at like the real world economy, there isn't always really like a product product, because like everything's a product, but if you're like you know, if you're yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It really depends on what you're doing, right? But I feel like for the other companies, the contact center became that like failure management, and it's like deal with it, right? Like, are you picking up fast enough? What's your SLA? Are 90% of the people getting served within one minute? AHT is measured more so to control the BPO, not overcharging, than anything else, right? Employee experience, they don't even care, right? Although really they should because it will directly impact how good those goals are. Feels like where you kind of like move shift closer to your worldview, and I think hopefully with AI, we we've seen our champions get promoted and promoted and very quickly start to kind of like you know, often now we have a large retailer we're working with, and we did the usual things like where is the order, like a few other things, right? Even like branches of the of the retail shops, right? And then we started doing outbound calling for customers that haven't placed an order or have expressed some interest but haven't actually do it. And the ROI just spiked, right? And basically, because they have more time, they're starting to kind of like just reach out and do more of what the rest of the company used to do, and they don't have enough sellers there. They have sellers for those clients that are definitely gonna buy, right? But kind of like the elasticity of how far you extend that service really changes, and then they make a lot more money. But do you because I mean I'm curious how you feel about the whole like evolution of a CX leader? And do you think that the silos get around a bit and they all become product, or is it kind of like more of you know Yeah, that's a good question.
SPEAKER_00I think people love their silos. Um, they're a comfortable place, right? Like the COs, CIO's got theirs, you know, CIO CTO, CF et cetera. For me, I think the comp like when I see like a company get it and leveraging these sort of, you know, let's still call them emerging capabilities, it's the ones that are connecting the silos versus like the like the term that I there's a couple of terms that I really deplore. One of those is like breaking down the silos, like it doesn't happen. Like it's like omni-channel, like okay, folks, let's move on, right? I think that are connecting horizontally, though whether that's a business or a product, you know, product-led companies are great examples, right? Like, you know, think of a bank. So I have auto, I have home lending, I have credit card, et cetera. These are all lending products. Like you can underwrite, you create an underwriting layer across all three of those business lines, right? So, like, and then leveraging cap like, and there's a journey that you go through. So, like if you can leverage sort of AI to kind of help a client sort of go through that underwriting journey, you can solve a lot of problems and and reduce costs, right? Because you're you're scaling on. So, like for me, I think it's about sort. How do you connect the silos and start thinking about these capabilities more horizontally across the organization? And where can you where can you scale horizont from a horizontal perspective?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. You also mentioned, I think previously, that really high-performing CX function should be driving a percentage or two, I think, of like the revenue of the company. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
SPEAKER_00I for me, that's like I'm trying to change the conversation, right? And I think that that one to two percent for me is about changing the conversation more than anything, right? So like I look at CX as an outcome function, not a reporting function. And right now, unfortunately, too many CX functions are reporting functions, right? I do my my quarterly MPS and I deliver a PowerPoint to the business and we look at themes that are impacting MPS. Okay. Well, I can't show outcomes at scale, right? It's usually because either as an organization, I don't have enough people, so I'm spread too thin, I'm measuring too much, maybe, and that's largely through surveys, or I'm I'm not fixing enough, right? So, like, so for me, like the one to two percent maybe is more of a benchmark, but like, you know, some years it's higher, some years it's lower. Like, you know, I've I've doubled that in some years in in different organizations. But I I to me, like I'm trying to change the conversation around think in financial terms, not in experiential terms of MPS CSAT, customer effort. Like these are these are reports. These, you know, that you don't, and by the way, as a CX leader, I have no control over an MPS. I can I can measure it, I can ask the question, but I've I have no control whatsoever over that screen.
SPEAKER_02Yep. No, no, I've I I I've had that many, many a time where you know our deployments have both benefited and not benefited from like changes that are happening, right? Sometimes you start measuring something and you uncover a whole, you know, a new slew of problems that just weren't prominent. They were there. They just weren't prominent, right? And then you start automating and you realize that there's a myriad of things that people are complaining about. But those few metrics that were reported on every year, yeah, very deliberately or not, never reported on that. And that, you know, almost like this AI gets blamed for that. It's like, well, actually, you know, you should probably fix this. And the upstream positive impact to the company might be like 50% more revenue, right?
SPEAKER_00Totally right. Right. Like, look, and like I've been lucky to work at a lot of big companies, right? There's always at the same few levers that show up again and again and again, right? Like retent, we talked about them before retention, expansion, cost of serve, risk. Like, and when you quantify the impact of fixing some of the top drivers of customer, of like whatever the friction is impacting the customer, it always lands in that kind of range, right? And if you do well and you focus on the right problems, yeah, I think I think you have an opportunity to impact that one two percent. Like at a large bank that I used to work for, we took the top 52 complaints by volume. And each week we sat down with the CEO of the mortgage business and we we started at the top. And we said, here's the root cause, here's what it's costing our company, here's how it shows up from an experience perspective for our for our borrower and customer, and here's the owner of that. What's and we brought them into the room. The first meeting was super scary because they thought that they were gonna get fired because they had the most complaints in their business. But what they the CEO goes, what do you need for me to fix this problem and make it go away? Because it was cost millions and millions of dollars, right? So, like once you have that, once you change that frame and you say, How do we fix this and what do we need as a business to improve? Like fundamentally changes the way and perspective of of leaders across the organization.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, like, you know, the whole like voice of the customer, you know, surveys and you know, millions and millions spent on like figuring out what customers want. When you when you spend like, you know, if you think of like one of those largest of banks in America, I think like reliably three to four hundred million calls a year, right? Yeah. And that's like, hey, you can ask whatever you want, right? And I think where we've had a lot of success with RAI deployments is that, you know, I understand why they didn't launch those initiatives. The humans are overworked. Maybe they don't even work for them directly, right? If you can't, if you want to run 10 parallel experiments, which is nothing for an org of that size, but still, if you wanted to make sure that you asked that question often when it comes and it comes in frequently, that means a lot of people have to kind of like have in their back pocket an A or B flip. And like rolling that out to a human org, you know, I think of like, you know, the kind of like chef's roll call in a restaurant, it's like you have three minutes tonight. Well, if they ask you about this product, say this, but you guys say that. And that two seconds later, no one's listening to anything, right? So it's really hard to roll it out. And with AI, you can do it like you can program it into the AI system and then get like, you know, a lot of our new dashboards. I was just looking at one of them, like you see the trend and then you see the confidence interval, right? And that, like, you know, I my my my soul things when you know, see a book with Gaussian processes from my PhD there, and I'm like, finally, we can actually give people like a simple visual way to know whether something is a statistically significant thing, but like a lot of them that just never get done. I think you doing that is really kind of like you're taking on the mantle of COO, right? Or I think you know if it's a CO, it's not just traditional CRTs, right?
SPEAKER_00No, no, no, for sure not. All right, like I've been really fortunate to have leaders in my career that push me to think differently. I'm I you know, I try and think differently. Just I mean, just I look at a lot of other industries and what people are doing, not in CX, but in other occupations, and say, how do I then create the parallel in CX? So, like, you know, that I think is a little bit different. Yeah, I think C CX though can be sort of that that driving accelerator in an organization, and uh just but a lot of companies don't see that function that way, partly because again, it's like we'll run the surveys or but like then change the conversation as a CX leader. Like, it's your responsibility. You can't say the business doesn't get it. That's on you as a CX leader, right?
SPEAKER_02So, yeah, yep, yep, yep. How are you how are you seeing like the attitude towards the AI shift over the past two years in CX?
SPEAKER_00I think well, that that's a great question.
SPEAKER_02Everybody has to, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, but like really, like people sit down, are they just tired of how much it's like, or you know, like the real human feeling towards it?
SPEAKER_00I think that there's just a lot of uncertainty, frankly, and what what is it really meant to do and how should we be using this? Be right, because like if you think about like a couple of years ago, everyone was so focused on sort of the efficiency play, right? About a year and a half ago, people were like, Okay, the efficiency play is interesting, but like how do we accelerate growth with this capability, right? So that then changed the conversation again a little bit. Unfortunately, like a lot most, I'm just gonna generalize here, maybe not that's the best thing, but like unfortunately, most CX leaders are not in the AI conversation, which is kind of bizarre to me, right? Because when you think about like text analytics, it's old tech, but it's AI, it's a form of AI. But we but CX leaders never talk to the business to say, well, I've been using AI for 10, 15 years. Here's how, right? So like I think that now we're kind of coming back to the table to say, and that's why I asked, like, how is your relationship with the CIO and and others? Like, we're coming back to say, look, like, how do we not humanize this tech, but like, how do we think about this capability to amplify the employees in the company, or how do we use this capability to amplify the great experiences that we've already achieved as a company, right? Versus holding that you know, customer sort of you know at bay. So I think they that CX leaders have a real opportunity to really a really big wedge to get back into that conversation. I just I'm still not seeing it. I still see a lot of like I'm using AI to like expedite insights or get faster insights. Cares. Like it's if if it's not increasing the velocity of action, it's just a it's right, it's like who cares?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you had to bet, like, you know, 10 years from now, like you look at a contact center and its shape, like how do you think it compares to today's contact center?
SPEAKER_00Definitely smaller. I think that there probably over the next couple of years, I think that there's gonna be like a big coming to Jesus at the enterprise level, meaning that some company is gonna put AI where it shouldn't be, where a human really needs to be the central figure in that in that relationship. Like I come out of financial services largely, like a mortgage foreclosure. Like someone's about to lose past, like, don't put an AI in front of that person, right? But I think that's gonna happen. And I think so, like, I think that there are gonna be always experiences that will require humans and always experiences where you can put technology in front. And as consumers get more comfortable with the tech, you know, I think yeah, that'll be the that that trust factor will continue to increase. So highly highly complex, nuanced kind of problems which require a lot of specialization.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, and judgments. Yeah, I I agree with those. I mean, I think like the other part that that I'm seeing, I'm seeing it even at Polly AI, right? The technical people, and it doesn't necessarily mean that they're like technical by education, but really just people who are able to learn, right, and are willing to learn, are about to have like phenomenal careers because they are the conduits for all of this, right? And we've seen this with a lot of our champions, and they're kind of like tier two agents that are willing to learn and use these things because they become the orchestrators of a virtually infinite workforce that is simultaneously very smart and completely clueless in that it's AI, right? So it can do fantastic things and it can make catastrophic errors all at once, and it's really down to like the judgment of that air traffic control, yeah, and the programmers, and they are programmers, even though they're writing natural language, right? It will be down to those people getting upskilled and trusted, and I think as you say, like betting on the right steps to take in the automation journey. But my read of this whole thing is that we're probably having, you know, it could happen more slowly or more quickly, but I think like the top 10% of the people in a contact center are gonna get paid way more. Oh, like I'm totally 100%. And I'm so excited for that because like the the people working there who are like working day in and out, high empathy patience, they're basically like in the early years of their job when they're on the phones, they're just taking abuse in every other phone call, right? And it's like I just really want that person to have a great life and like you know, a real kind of like back through the organization. And I think like the the other part of that is exactly what you're saying. It's like getting them interested in like the business at large so that they can be COO, CEO one day, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, look, I think you know, this is not my line, but it's a close friend. They always say that your employees' behavior is your customers' experience, right? So, like, so think about sort of those all-stars in the in the contact center today, or anywhere in the company, right? They're they're innovating, they're trying new things, they're being open about sort of different capabilities. They start to understand where the limitations are, where are their own limitations and being honest about those, right? And they're like, then how do I use this to amplify like my value? Like, I totally agree, man. Like, I think that there's gonna be a time, let's just say over the next three, maybe five years, where that's really gonna start to shift more and more, and you're gonna see sort of like this different class of employee start to take shape in an organization. And they're gonna they're gonna multiple, like they're gonna scale themselves, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. Maybe just to kind of like wrap it up, talking about those people that are like learning and trying out new things uh with AI. What is like the most exciting way that you're using AI agents in your kind of like daily work and life?
SPEAKER_00Well, I I pay for chat GPT, I pay the for the pro model. I've been doing more and more with codex. I've paid for Gemini, but that's more because I run my business on Google, so it kind of like has benefits. I don't use Gemini that much. And now just kind of given sort of the like how much has gone to Claude, obviously. Like I've I pay for that as well, not for their pro model, but I do pay for that and start exploring more and more with co-work. I've just I started off with with open AI capabilities. I'm very comfortable with them. I yeah, won't use them like whatever the statistic was. I'm probably like in the 0.01% of users of AI generally, anyway, at this point. So like for me, it's important to play with everything and see what sticks and maybe even use them. Like they're different tools for different purposes, and like I'm just trying to figure out like which one is fit for purpose or the right things.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. I think for us, yeah, we're we're really trying to package up a lot of what can be done with coding tools into the platforms. And that's like, you know, a few bridges too far for the contact center right now. But we're getting pretty close to having an ability to run those experiments that I talked about just with like language, right? And then kind of like feeding that that back into like meaningful analysis back up to the to their bosses and stuff. Because it's really interesting because we see like probably 10% of the people that are really thirsty for it. They've been trying all these tools and we give them something, yeah, and they build it around and we know what we need to build next immediately. But there is like a big chunk of people, probably at least half, where I think there's just this like gear and headlights moment where almost being shamed for not using it, and because of that, they're too afraid to even ask so they can get started. So that cold start is really, really big in a lot of works we work with.
SPEAKER_00I I think that like I in a past life I saw that everybody was given Chat GT. Okay, nobody was using it, but you know, the company's like, great, everyone's got it, you know, tens of thousands of employees, fantastic. Nobody was using it because like either they were afraid that it was going to take their job, and if I put stuff in it, but like them, you know, I'd look across and like someone used into like, what am I have? What should I have for dinner tonight? Here's what's in my refrigerator, okay, fine, but like not really what the company intended. I think that there is like change management and change leadership that really needs to be put into place for a lot of enterprises so all of your employees can start to understand how do I use this in my day-to-day to amplify my work and not and where I use the word judgment before, which I think is just such a critical term. Like, how do I use judgment and my understanding of my job to automate the parts that I can't stand anyway, to give me that capacity and that space, like create learning or more space for learning, maybe in my day-to-day.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yep, yep, yep. No, 100%. Well, Bill, I think we're out of time, but I really appreciate you joining our podcast to everyone watching. Please like, share, subscribe, and look forward to seeing you in the next one.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, look, this was a great conversation. I appreciate you having me on. It was a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, we should do it again. I think that like we need to write out that equation of you know, CX to revenue. And I don't think we got there in this one.
SPEAKER_00So we can spend easily an hour on that one, man, for sure.
SPEAKER_02We'll work that in as well. Thank you. Have a great day.
