Today’s interview is with Jerry Haywood, who is the Chief Executive Officer at boost.ai, a leading provider of conversational AI for enterprises. Jerry joins me today to talk about if ChatGPT has become the fastest proprietary eponym or generic trademark in history, why chat-first customer service strategy is the future of the customer experience and how those interfaces will not just be text based, how recent and future advancements from ChatGPT, Bard, Ernie, and ANOther LLMs will change things and the what the future holds for conversational AI.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – PegaWorld iNspire: Towards the autonomous enterprise and celebrating 40 years of innovation – Interview with Don Schuerman of Pega – and is number 466 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Pega for sponsoring my podcast for the coming month.

We are fast approaching PegaWorld iNspire which is Pega’s annual conference that will be held at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, NV, from June 11th to 13th.

This year it will be an in-person event, for the first time in four years, and will bring together experts and industry leaders to demystify technologies like generative AI and intelligent automation

They will also illustrate how enterprises can practically apply these technologies to turbocharge productivity, improve low-code app development, and optimize customer engagement.

Check out PegaWorld.com to find out more and, hopefully, I’ll see you there.

Here are the highlights of my conversation with Jerry:

• There is high likelihood that ChatGPT has become the fastest proprietary eponym or generic trademark in history i.e. like Hoover, Kleenex, Google before it.
• Chat first customer service strategy is the future of customer experience.
• Conversational engagement is the future in which we will want to engage with almost everything.
• That does not, however, necessarily mean chatbot first.
• As human beings, the thing we find most natural is engaging in a conversation.
• Think Tony Stark of IronMan talking to his virtual assistant: Jarvis.
• It’s not chatbot first, it’s conversational experience first.
• We will eventually see web interfaces or website interfaces becoming sort of chat-based or chatbot based.
• Currently, the search function of most enterprise websites is generally rubbish.
• Old stat: ~57% of people that call in to an organization do so because they can’t find what they are looking for online.
• The secret hiding in plain sight is Google’s approach, where they present you with a search bar and say…Tell us what you’re looking for or looking to do.
• Voice use cases today, in the main, are quite narrow in scope. But, I think we will that scope rapidly increase over time.
• Don’t try to narrow down the consumer before you find out what they are trying to do.
• Most organisations all they’re doing today is directing you through to the right agent rather than actually understanding what it is you’re saying and then servicing you with full automation thus removing the need for you to go through to a human agent.
• The step change we are seeing right now is really in the broadness of understanding of what conversational technology can do.
• The good thing with the large language models coming out is that in combination with platforms like boost.ai is that speed to success or speed to results goes from weeks taken up by building out that first level of intent understanding and FAQs to now being able to do the same thing in hours.
• So, you can go from zero to better than what is out in the market today, particularly if you have more of a FAQ type bot (which is what most people have on their websites, within a few hours.
• Applying this internally can also produce significant benefits. It can really help make employees more efficient, reduce attrition, increase engagement and reduce ramp time.
• For most organisations, especially big organisations, the biggest hindrance is access to information inside their organisation.
• A few years ago, I went to go and visit a big UK bank to speak about their onboarding process, and found out that their onboarding process was a file of papers that was almost two inches thick that every employee had to go through. Think about the ramp time (three months) and the cost burden thereof.
• A really good example: The biggest insurer in the Nordics has an internal virtual agent and they have over 13,000 intents that they’re managing through that virtual agent. It takes only three people (ex-customer service agents) to run that entire platform and they went live in eight weeks including plugging it into lots of back-end systems.
• Currently, I think the gap to action or effectiveness just got collapsed.
• However, there’s still gaps in the technology. What it’s done is give you a faster bike, but you still need to learn how to ride that bike without falling off.
• Platforms like boost.ai are the guard rails, the stabilisers, the airbags etc that might sit around that that allow enterprise organisations to effectively adopt and take on these technologies and take advantage of that step change, but still do it in a way that allows them to comply with the law.
• I think the biggest lesson over the last three years is probably around leadership, leading remote teams and organisations and both the challenges of doing that and the learning process of what you need to do to be more effective at it.
• Celebrate the small things and not just the big things.
• Jerry’s best advice: 1. Start, 2. Don’t boil the ocean and 3. Remember that statistic where 57% of your customers call you because they can’t find the information they need on your website. That represents a pretty big ROI for most organisations.
• You don’t need customer service if you’re giving the customers what they want before they realise they want it.
• Jerry’s Punk CX word(s): Critical.
• Jerry’s Punk XL brand: Four Seasons in Hawaii.

About Jerry

Jerry Haywood is the Chief Executive Officer at boost.ai, a leading provider of conversational AI for enterprises. He joined the company in 2022, having previously gained extensive enterprise technology experience from leadership assignments at IBM, Cisco, Salesforce, and LivePerson. Over the years, Jerry has gained a strong reputation as a visionary and people-oriented leader that delivers strong business results. At boost.ai, he is devoting his passion and energy to steer the scale up through the next growth phase, while paving the path to becoming a global category leader in conversational AI. Jerry is based in the UK and holds a business with finance degree from the University of Brighton.

Check out boost.ai, say Hi to them on Twitter @boost_ai_ and Instagram @boost.ai and feel free to connect with Jerry on LinkedIn here.

Photo by JOHN BEARBY IMAGES on Unsplash