Ep.128 The Gen AI Revolution Expanding Customer & Agent Experience! with Jason Lowe
Welcome to the book um cast designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. Who’s your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus And this is Next Level BizTech.
Everybody welcome back. We’re kicking off a new track here. We’re actually working about Gen AI. Hi, the Gen AI revolution, expanding customer experience and the agent experience. We’re going to dive in here today with nobody but Mr. Jason Lowe, our ex and AI solution architect in our studio again, man. Thank you. Good luck.
JLo, we got a lot here. Let’s get rolling, man. So we had you on a while back. We were talking workforce management and lots of good stuff. There’s lots of nuggets and up. If you guys haven’t seen that, go back, go listen to that episode. And we talked a little bit about kind of your backstory then. Let’s talk about since that’s lots of stuff cook stuff with AI, I think about 3830 goes by before we talk about soccer with AI. But but what would you say since the last time we talked to talk had you on? Well, it’s one of the most compelling things that you’ve seen in AI. And how has that impacted your work? Wow, really, I think probably be just the pace of innovation and basic things are happening. I mean, it’s just it’s dizzying. Like you say, it’s something where we can do constantly monitoring because new innovation are happening so fast and a lot of the laws, they’re all centered around in around dual productivity, but you can see see going to affect other tools in the future. And so it’s important to just kind of just pop on it so that you can recognize the opportunity when it comes. But that’s really probably the biggest thing I know it’s more of a summary note than an individual note, but just that pace of innovation and it’s slowing down. I mean, it’s going faster than more and more and the innovation scale is going straight on. Is there you look back at all? It seems like every day, every every there’s a little innovative, but I mean, is there one that comes out at to you out at where you go? Oh, my gosh, okay, that that use that that’s that’s going to change that I’m going to see that kind of make cuts way in. Is there anything that’s jumped out at to you? I think recently, just in more time within the last maybe month and a half. There have been a lot of advancements on what are called autonomous agents and and really think that the CX experience is going to go changed because voice even NLU and LP are getting harder. They’re being influenced by AI, Gen AI is being used to used in them. And in some cases where the guardrails are really, really strict and things are being put in place to really make sure that the AI is not saying something wrong. The Gen AI is being put in as a sap bot. They’re a danger there. But you know, it is still just going to happen. Now you couple that couple phenomenon of these autonomous agents age are kind of all kind of lines of an AGI type in type, right? You’re going to give this AI an ability to reach in and do things somewhere via API hooks. And so the whole voice bot minor capability stuff doing little integration is to CRMs or ERP are checking the status and saying something to some caller or, you know, that type of that tough is going to start expanding because these bots are going to become capable and they’ll be able to do more things and reason and get a little innovative and solving problems. It’s going to be really interesting to see things unfold in the future. So before we dive into some of these more Gen AI, Gen AI CX related things, I want to hear a lesson learned and learn. Oh, take us back something that you stubbed your toe on and crap, never gonna do that again or or just a great mentor. Give us share this group a lesson learned that you kind of keep with you. Okay, there was an article on LinkedIn that actually kind of backs this up and I’m going to come at it from one angle and then go at it back around to the other angle. When I was younger in my career here, I was so much focused on the technical that I was not was not on the soft skills side of items. And one particular mentor who I was working with, I will forever be grateful for for because he’s the person that got me into science engineering to begin with. We have a personality profile pro study thing and from a tech from a perspective, it showed that sales engineers and a really good avenue for me to be in and this was anything that I had not ever really ever truly considered. And it was a little bit of a splash, a cold water cold splash in the face getting into it because suddenly, you know, my technical acumen and my ability to be really quick, can do things wasn’t good enough. And I had to really develop those people skills, those soft skills and do those type those things. But by the same token, okay, get really good at that. And I find that I’m not spending time really keeping my soft shock on the technical side of things. And so for people that are in these technical advisor positions, which, you know, the technical advisors by using more and more SE like, I mean, let’s let’s call it is it’s, you know, just being just one that points people in the right direction is not going to be enough.
And you’re going to have to really develop both sides of the eyes. And the article I’m referring to on LinkedIn was something and I’m sorry, I can’t tell you exactly who did the study, but they did a big survey of a lot of corporate workers. And many people actually felt that people skills are going to be the more important set of skills moving forward, because big AI and AI’s capabilities to do this did from a coding perspective and planning and strategic perspective is going to make so that that the raw technical skills, while still very important, are going to become less and less important for it’s going to be important to have these really great, great skills coupled with a solid technical base for people that want to influence in this space in the future. Okay, so let’s talk, let’s talk about the discussion. We’re talking about productization, we’re talking about the angle that the anglers have in this the best that the customers are facing. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity to get this right and capitalize on this. So talk to me about what you’re seeing out there so far. And with all the productization and the option in the community, what is the opportunity for partners to continue this?
I think probably one of the great thing, Chris, that I’m seeing so far far is activity and a desire to learn and a desire to figure out how to help their customers with AI’s as far as the partner community is concerned. And that’s and that’s leading to them just simply starting to ask some questions and start a little like to they may not know exactly what they’re doing. I mean, it’s so nice that a lot of technology advisors unless they’re really keeping up on things, they’re going to they’re struggling with it because it’s it’s an appeal that’s fraught with all sorts of sort, you know, pitfalls and things like that, like, even though it’s not really, but they think it is. And so they’re a little scared or scared has, okay, let’s not use the word scared, let’s share the hesitant to go and go this new area and try and experience with their customers. But it’s starting to happen. Even if they are that way, that what’s happening to me is I’m getting a lot of phone calls from partners saying, Can you help me? You help us because I asked a few questions, suddenly, I find my customers really, really, really interested in implementing a plan where they can, can you step in? And can you help you? And that’s, that’s where the Telerus engineers and core really helps out is because we can sweep in and we can help these partners and back them and white label as label them and stuff like that to make sure that their code that gets served. But, we’re starting to have these conversations. I think that the perspectives will certainly change over time, time. And I think that technology advise you right now, probably one of the best things that they can do, do is come into this situation looking at it from a twofold perspective, not just the notion that everybody’s focused on right now, which is always, let’s build it and see what we can see with it and see if we can get a positive ROI. That’s a meritable cause to trust it into this and see if we can create efficient fees and make things better and contribute to bottom line. That’s great. But now there’s also this, so the actor of what else what do we do with this thing we’ve built built and this is the analogy that I always refer to Josh, you’ve heard me refer to this dozen times, I’m sure but Downton being a favorite TV show of mine in the very from the episode they’re dealing with a phenomenon of piping a electricity to the kitchen and nobody knows why you know, why are you going to put electricity in this kitchen. That’s because the people that work in the kitchen had not envisioned the gender they’d not envisioned the mixer they’d not and they’d not even the microwave oven never even conceived the possibility of electricity being able to drive these rifles that would make things more efficient and easier for people in the kitchen. That’s where we are right now we have a lot of companies that are looking at their use cases that are a blender right they right they could build this internally and would there be a positive ROI or end up saving some time and help them out them out. Yes but why don’t you take that blender in vendor in and sell it to other people. Yeah this is the perspective that’s missing people need to do a parallel effort right go in for the wind visual efficiency go in for what we do after we’ve made this and figure out how to your addictize it and make it profitable for a bull funny. Yeah paradigm shifts you you think about that and what did people tell you can read about this what did people tell Henry for Henry right early on I have my have some carrots I’m fine why would I need a car right right and then you know the inevitable like double you know I guess the there was the book I was reading he’s like there’s this there’s a problem with manure in the street of New York and the stench and you’re oh maybe we’ll look at this car thing you know so you know there’s these paradigm shifts and did did anybody did the guys at Blackberry that thought thought we don’t care that jobs is coming up with a touchscreen like people like but the buttons give them the buttons you know being in the middle of them paradigm shifts I think it’s hard to see that you bring up kind of some really good points of the point yeah so let’s fast forward find these five cases find them now I’ll find out where we can test it and try it prove it and then this thing just spirals by right and I love it as long as we’re going to blame that obviously doing a bang-up job uh and and the gold rushes here so we love we love in the the mines we love having the the picks pick your role here in the gold rush uh and I think a lot of those a lot are here.
All right so let’s talk about uh let’s talk about some of the struggles struggle so you talked about some about discovery discussions right so we’re we’re talking CX we’re talking gen AI we’re talking that can impact but when you’re in when discussions what are some of these symbols that partners are coming in looking my customers are struggling with this talking to the customers they’re looking at the struggles with this around the alien experience in the context hon what are you seeing well I think probably probably outside of the possibility of chatbots app influence it’s going to have I think a lot of people are wondering how else it can be used you they’re not quite recognizing these other tools that are there and efficiencies that can be brought to bear and everybody’s kind of hyper fipes on one of two things one how can we replace the agents in the contact counter and that’s why they’re coming at it from a bot perspective because they want to cut down on labor but then then all right what if the call actually does get through get can we do to make sure that we’re reducing the average handler time as much as possible and so there’s a lot of AI technologies and i’ll drive that and make it so that agents are more conservative so from a cxc perspective it really is it’s a it’s not it’s the fold focus right let’s see how we can save costs but if it does get through to our large cost center how can we make it so it makes us as little as possible that kind of thing what’s a love discovery questions and we’re always about the questions all right i’m a partner i’ve never sold this before but i’ve been in our three four things that we talked about i want to go jump in i’ve been this ai as a leg in i see again agent experience whatever they come in what’s the what one or two questions then you would encourage a partner to ask that would cover a need like that like see if there’s a need like that that ai is a big buzzword it’s starting as we record this now there’s something to be a little bit of that you know you know far side of you know there’s a little bit of back lap back is the word ai but in the business commission it will always have that impact and especially right now because people are still trying to figure out how to use it how do you just going into a conversation saying artificial intelligence will get a contradiction rolling so if you walk into the door and you say hey i want to talk about your ai a dyad and roadmap or your plan play ai within your company what is it you know how are you going to adopt ai where are you going to you got ai um is that is something that you have considered what are your competitors using you with ai that you haven’t have that you’re worried about because you know in one year josham yachty the number of companies that are used looking to implement ai to keep up with the bones is because their competitors are doing it doing in 2023 the microsoft work trends survey right 35 percent 2020 or 79 percent personally there’s this wholesale shift of everybody in business is looking around for now and see exactly fomo and see and not only observations of what the other people are doing but showing if it’s having a positive impact on the way that the way doing business so much so that there are so the companies right now and i’m thinking of one in particular they’re issuing press releases to the general public to a net that they’ve incorporated official intelligence capabilities to make things better and so and suddenly all of their competitors are serious press release and going oh man what do we have to do now now they don’t know how it’s been implemented and notice that their competitors have said we’re use ai and it’s going to be amazing amazing share prices shoot up oh my gosh yes say that’s all you got it out you got easy to do press release now holy holy uh okay okay uh let’s go go uh maybe surprises you’re in discovery calls you’ve done a lot of these out of recovery discussions right that you and the broad you and the team as you’re hopping into these that maybe some people they do say they want to go down that road ai ai related to cx ai related i infrastructure ai related to whatever whatever the need might be is there any trends or misconceptions once you you get to that conversation with a customer trends or misconceptions and the customs in the mind right now trends or trend conceptions in the customer’s minds maya would say that they are most suspicious the roi thing we’ve already talked about the octa a little bit but it’s worth emphasizing so they are hesitant there’s two things going on going they’re a little hesitant to expand to it because they’re not sure if there’s going to be there’s positive roi the second thing is they’re a little hesitant to expand to it because ai is innovating so fast so that they wonder if they start innovating anything right now something else is going to have to go a little further down the road and so there’s almost kind of like this little this a pause going on not um which doesn’t need to happen because the engines that are being leveraged for these are for these are intelligence you know models as they improve the process they build around them are going to improve and so it’s up to us as technicians the advisors to just communicate to them look at them let’s let’s work with what we have what we now which is just going to get better and if we can we positive roi right now it’s just going to be more positive as we move forward so how do you how do you help you him what is it that creates that light that goes off for them to because this is such a batch of legos where okay there’s 85 possibilities they’ll call out one or two those one or those might not you know uh might not be relevant to that specific customer but the most what’s the most it’s the most of way to continue that talk and draw out the ways that lazy the roi is it is it around tasks that they have that are done manually and have you thought about automating audits y and z like well where do you see that see that as that conversation goes to the next school where do you see i think you just touched on it just now um it’s opening their minds to the vista what it would be like if the most rote and mo pain and laborious as you know less efficient tasks were actually able to be automated you know that the strydle right now is automation at least as far as very simple automation tools are the most simple automation tools it’s effective because you take something that is very well defined and you can make it repeatable and that’s where efficiency is more and if we’re implementing automation capabilities at a most basic level where people are having a hard time making the leaking is when there’s some sort of a human that has to make an observation and make a decision based on that observation in order to make that process work and there are a lot of processes where that is the case what people don’t realize is that now that may i can do that observation and help make that decision so the things that are repeatable that maybe have a have an influence those are starting to come the things that we can tackle with a with a now and that’s where you may you the big leap with the customer just ask them look in a perfect world if you could take any sort of a sort of away from your personnel that right now they’re spending way too much time on but is absolutely necessary but you can’t but you figure out a way to take it away from the way because they need a human to do it can we talk about that is there a possibility that ai could help out here the answer is increasingly becoming yes to that question of that everybody should go ask that question like i think we will all be baffled at the full answers i’m baffled at the answer and i see customers saying now um you know we’re at the spot where i think we get the we get the benefit of seeing the collective of all of these conversations happening so we understand how to push them forward because everybody’s struggling with the same thing so let’s cap its eyes on it and give them ideas is this hit does this hit does this hit so i love that talk trick highly encourage everybody to go go have a level of the conversation and that will develop things that you can then continue to bring back we can help you with okay uh let’s talk about what’s to win here so so walk through an example well i love to ask how did you get brought in what the tech stack or or the or this problem before and then how does it can kind of emerge differently after i’m going to talk about one specific use case um that i like to bring like to because it is rather effective in implementation there was the company that wasn’t sure about the advancements that bots could make they they were thinking that it was more along the lines along i’m talking about voice bots on phone calls phone were thinking it was still along the lines of lines you know presser say one presser say two type of a thing they weren’t sure what else would do with it and they came to us and they actually said okay listen we have a ton of calls that are going to this subset of agents of agent and we had to figure out how we could become more efficient and we found out that 80 percent of the calls that are causing into this group are are what’s the status of my shipment okay and so how can we somehow manage so that things are more efficient and they’re looking at for like a human operations thing like saying we pop up immediately when the call comes in and it gets to an agent some sort of a sort and it shows if they have any shipments they share on the way so that the agent can address it right us but that’s where we were able to talk to them and kind of mink their eyes up and say you know listen i’m calling delta airlines the status of stuff all the time the first thing that happens is it says thanks for calling delta airlines welcome jacob i see that you have a flight scheduled for tomorrow at 9 pm is this something that you are looking to change or something or something and it’s like oh it’s like whoa light bulb why don’t why all the callers if they have a shipment coming in just a really quick one-liner line says what their ship shipment status is and see what happens happen and so think about changing things in for voice bot IVR where our first thing that happens is they call in recognize their phone number reach into the gents RP see if they have a statement on the way or if they were placed in order recently get status of that and then tell them not to greet them and before even asking them what they’re looking to do just say the quick line line i see you have a shipment that is expected to be delivered on deliver this date what can what you with and suddenly 80 percent of the calls are going to go away because the first thing we’re going to hear when they call in then is a voice telling them the status of their shipment and when it’s going to be delivered pretty big use case right there it just got it just give it a little bit differently yeah i see yeah if we look back over the last five plus years what surprised me in a lot of these discovery conversations is we make assumptions about how things are being used or we make assumptions that the customers already thought me through now i already have the most efficient i’ve already thought through all those legs and i think and you really ask i’ve learned some of the things when we’ve done some runs deep dive cx things and we’ve sat sex to an agent or listen to kind of what an agent does because even sometimes even what the manager thinks versus what the agents do even that’s not that’s and so i i love i hear partners talk about um hey i called in and here’s how the experience was or it’s well aware that that’s going on and the customer could say no that’s not how it’s happening well i just did it did you that not you know so that’s such a value add i think and it helps the elders be differentiated against somebody that that may not come in with that much that wonderful information so i’d love to see what it’s actually like i think the side of that sometimes on the customer system uh okay so so let’s talk let’s talk um some some for partners right uh you’ve been out there leading a beating bunch of tracks lots of evangelism lots of what to think about ai how to use a you run a great track on that so that’s
partners want to get deeper into this what do you recommend where do they go go what’s the advice for them to kind of stick on tune with all of this moving target yeah well i think the education events that taventras does are kind of our minimum bare minimum i mean keeping key on things is certainly a way to go go i think engaging the ag players engineering resources is a great way to go because we get paid to keep on this stuff better than they can but we’re at the point now where they do need to at least have sort of a light touch finger on the fingers of the industry and what’s happening and where are you going and as ai is related to this or how this relate this ai is that people they just have to just like keep up headlines they don’t necessarily need to clean the depth they’ve got to have a good idea of what’s going on at certain source like for example how many people know that china has declared basically a basic old war on the united states by saying we’re going to be the word about x manufacturers for the orders by the end of 2025 you know botan dynamics and tesla robotics and a few other companies are going to object object but if you haven’t heard about that you know you’re not forward forwarding enough to think all right right what kind of providers do i need to look at till there’s some sort of robotics thing can i incorporate this into my customers stuff if you don’t if you don’t know what’s coming coming you’re not going to be able to strategize and prioritize for it coming up in the future like for example the first contract for robotics as a service was signed a couple days ago robotics robo service ras not ass ras it’s coming great let me do one it’s on its way yeah i know yeah other analogy great but or or accurate oh yeah thank you but i’d say you know subscribe to some newsletters that’s just like quick hits things like things neuron you know things like it’s like rundown these are these are the really quick hit newsletters that give you the gift they take 30 seconds to scan screw and they give you some headlines as to what’s just doing and you can easily envision how it’s going to affect the products that you work with when moving forward all right so you’ve got you’ve so you’ve dropped i just want to recap the readings because i think there’s a ton we’ll see if we miss if i’m missing anything so i think obviously yes selfish self engage your engineers we love to have we love uh seconds you gave some great kind of resources that they can go to leverage social media so it’s best capacity for those type of things get out and and and this guy at a telerus event get out and see our solutions team at an event listen listen to some of these events that we run obviously then we’ve got the the and we’ve got the telerus university you can go plug in through a ton of modules and modules a lot of great stuff um in there as well and and i can’t leave out uh solution you get in if you haven’t you haven’t a solution view and view assessment in contact center in ai and security and cloud you’re missing out because i think it it it walks you through some of those steps of conversation and if anything um what i’ve seen some partners that love to do to get to do catered is they’ll just get in there and run in there and and kind of read through the output and go oh okay you know that’s even that’s own interesting talk track data and some analytics that the team that’s kind of put together in that um i’m missing i know that’s like 85 things i’ve there is there 86 or is that it’s a good no i i think that i think and i’m glad you brought up the qsa and asf and took the words right out of my mouth don’t necessarily just generate it for your credit for murr you know generate it for yourself for your so much knowledge and so much in research contained in those kensai documents that partners should read it for themselves absolutely love it uh let’s see all right see uh final thoughts here so two things are gonna do things either a we’re gonna do do best again it’s just gonna be you and i and i in a couple months whenever we get on next or it’s gonna be pop it elon’s uh robots uh emulating you and i and that’ll be doing the podkin the put uh next two years i mean we can’t look out one guy for 24 months with this stuff because it’s so sustained right now but innovation innovation may be looking most uh most forwards for you and and how does how does our team play a role in that i think that there’s such a inflection point in business i mean not not just this is about human history but in business and that
we have no idea what the landscapes look like in 24 months there’s just no way to tell wait um innovation will continue and you know all of these innovations that are happening with jana and these newer technologies they’re happening primarily and i say primarily because it’s still happening in other areas but it’s happening primarily in the individual efficiency space how we’re going to see a start tran we’re going to see a transition start focus on individual efficiency to group efficiency and so that’s where things are going to get exciting the partner community because because now we’re going to have these tools and things that we can work with to try and have a large impact on company company i think the provider landscape is going to change dramatically i think tst’s and other organizations that aren’t actively researching and immediately trying to educate on the channel and incorporate into their product set are going to miss the boat it’s the you know this is why it’s hilarious we’re taking a close look at as many ai per ai as possible because we’re trying to recognize opportunity to bring these providers in and you know innovative new products new technologies how could you see turn around and help our customers incorporate these into their tech stack so that’s where i see thrice really happening it’s it’s going to accelerate another all because the stuff is you know the blenders are going to start getting built the microwave and coins are going to start getting built and marketed we’re at the cusp of that not so the next 24 months is where that’s really going really exhibit itself love it love it hey that’s all i got jay low thanks for coming in man in my stuff as always it’s always fun thank you sir okay okay that wraps us up for today uh don’t forget wherever you’re listening to this spot of this i apple music uh go like ghost gripe so you can get these as they drop at robin’s day we’ll always have good con good for you that you get it before anybody else does so that wraps us up for today i’m today host josh Lupresto svp of sale engineering here with mr jason lowe this has been this has been ai revolution expanding customer and agent experience until next time.