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Telarus Studio (00:00)
Welcome to the podcast that’s designed to fuel your success selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto SVP of sales engineering at Telarus And this is Next Level Biz Tech.
Everybody welcome back today. We are talking about beyond the bot. What does that mean? ⁓ it’s beyond the bot advisors shaping the future of customer experience with AI on with us today. We got Billy Houghton from global net connect Billy. Welcome on man.
Billy Houghton (00:31)
Great to be here, Josh. Thanks for having me.
Telarus Studio (00:34)
excited. We got a lot of good stuff. You got some CX and AI and a lot of good things we’re going to uncover here. So before we get to that, ⁓ I want to hear about your life journey. You’ve been in this tech space for a little while. Walk us through your background, though. mean, was it always tech for you? Was it always this space? Did you start out washing boats and then say, hey, man, I’m going to get into this weird cloud CX thing? Or what? What’s the story?
Billy Houghton (00:59)
I mean, Josh, I literally just listen to Next Level Biz Tech every session and that’s it, man. I’ve got it on speed dial. ⁓ That’s right. Yeah, great question. Been in the space. This is my, I guess, 19th operational year in the space. ⁓ Got my original start, actually, so back in college, I was a finance and MIS.
Telarus Studio (01:06)
Pro’s got the affiliate link, all right? I love it.
Billy Houghton (01:29)
student at Stetson University. Loved my college days, but that kind of gave me a little taste of the MIS world. And I had an opportunity to do an internship for my dad’s company back in 2006, where I first officially saw what happens in this industry. Loved it right out of the gate and started my own company August of 08. And I’ve been doing this ever since. A little bit more on the IT side than I started out initially on the telecom side. But yeah, over the past
17, 18 years really just evolved throughout the IT stack and learning a number of different gaps that clients are trying to solve and understanding how technology goes together to deliver those outcomes. So, quick background. Yeah, and I guess that brings us to 2025, which is where we are today.
Telarus Studio (02:23)
I love it. I love a good journey. Yeah, you’ve had a great journey. I think over the years, it’s just been cool to see you kind of get into what I would just say, crazier and crazier stuff. And so it’s going to give us some good meat for the conversation.
Billy Houghton (02:39)
Yeah, it’s funny to look back at how not only my career but also just the market has evolved. ⁓ And maybe it’s just me learning how industries work, but ⁓ you start out thinking that your value to organizations is around expense audits and finding dollars for them. And then you eventually realize these organizations are trying to out-innovate, out-compete their competitors. And you can deliver a
immense amount of value in helping them drive that initiative. And so that’s really what’s fueled ⁓ our growth here at GlobalNet. That’s what’s helped us to ⁓ serve clients in a more valuable capacity.
Telarus Studio (03:18)
So I think you bring up a good point and the message is as I’m learning this stuff, as I’m teaching this stuff, one, new things are coming out and it’s changing, right? So there’s no, I can rest and I can just run this playbook for an obscene amount of time. I think.
If you come off of that, the customers are always looking for insights. I think things that are hard to find on their own. So how do you then stay proactive? How do you stay ahead of the curve? How do you ready for these new insights? As we think about getting towards CX and AI and kind of stepping that way.
Billy Houghton (03:53)
Yeah, that’s a great question. So I think continuing at Josh is paramount. I see a lot of my peers keep running, you mentioned, running the same playbook that they did 20 years ago. And I think customers are wanting more. I think customers are wanting specialists, subject matter experts, and advisors that understand what their pain points are throughout their entire stack, whether it be their infrastructure, whether it be their cybersecurity, whether it be the customer experience and the CX product space.
You know, I continuing at is huge for me. was just, I don’t know if you saw Josh, the ⁓ there was a Tampa Bay cyber AI event on Friday. And so I sat there for it was an eight hour session. And I’m getting to sit under people like Bryson Bort or Bernie Dunn talking through the Fair Institute or talking through what other CIOs in the Tampa Bay market are seeing from a cyber risk perspective.
Just sitting in peer groups like that is some of the most insightful ⁓ wisdom that I’ve gleaned in this industry. And so I try to do that, Josh. I feel like it’s once a week where I’m in sessions like that, just absorbing and listening to greater minds that have bumped into not only problems that are market-wide, but the folks that are putting solutions into place. I’ll give you an example. So one of the CIOs in that room
⁓ They just implemented ⁓ cyber risk quantification methodology in their work. And they ⁓ had an application running a server ⁓ on TLS 1.0 and they’ve been trying to get rid of it as the rest of the market would advise from a security perspective. But due to application constraints, they had to keep it in production, had to accept the risk. They moved into a quantification approach and they were able to document if this not, or when this not if.
Telarus Studio (05:49)
Yeah.
Billy Houghton (05:50)
breach happens, we’re looking at about an eight to nine million dollar liability. And as soon as they quantify that, I believe that application and the server was sunset in a very short time. But just hearing approaches like that, it helps me think through how to advance organization success. And so I love continuing ed. That’s a lot of, ⁓ you know, that’s a lot of where I go to market to stay proactive and ahead of what’s coming.
Telarus Studio (06:16)
Well, there’s two really important things that I don’t want people to miss in what you said. One, yes, continuing Ed, I’m a diehard on this, right? It’s just days, nights, weekends, whatever, like the brain just has to keep learning ⁓ or we’re not challenged and we’re gonna turn to mush. Plus it’s just fun. And so it makes it easier. The second piece though is that I think people underestimate the power of this, you could argue that this is a little car
And when you get out and put yourself in these CIO groups and you learn something and you meet somebody inevitably, you know, replace that with whatever. I went out and I learned this thing and inevitably I needed to talk about this thing. ⁓ Or I learned about what a customer is going through and inevitably I’m going to be in another conversation with another customer and they’re looking for guidance. People need to know what other people are doing. Not because we got to follow the herd, but
everybody’s afraid to do something. You know, the old adage, right? Like nobody ever got fired for buying AT &T back in the day or IBM or whatever, right? It’s so, it’s so different now. And I think
with what you’re talking about when you say, well, hey, know, Mr. Bank, ⁓ I was just at the CIO group and I was talking about this guy doing quantitative risk analysis ⁓ for a risk that he was accepting on TLS. Are you going through anything similar like that? And they go, so you know your stuff? I mean, it’s just instant.
It’s certainly it’s great networking, but what credibility that that lends and ⁓ things that you can just share with other prospects, right? I think it’s such a unique way to get yourself engaged with other customers. ⁓ So that’s a conversation that you can use 100 times over, I would think.
Billy Houghton (08:04)
It totally is, Josh. And the reality is outside of just being able to sit at the table from a credibility perspective, the likelihood that that other organization says, you know what, we’ve got that same risk and we’ve been telling our exec team, we’re so concerned about the TLS 1.0, how do you get past this hurdle? We’re concerned about it. And so a lot of times those issues that folks are solving
The rest of the markets got the same problem. And that’s the part that I’ve seen is a lot of these hurdles are market wide. They are not the only group trying to solve this. And that’s the piece that ⁓ I love the opportunity to have, you know, plurality of council helps advance progress and the more wise leaders you can put into rooms and think through different ways to approach problem solving. ⁓ It only advances organizational success. I odds are Josh,
that new group that you’re talking to, they’re probably battling the same thing.
Telarus Studio (09:06)
You say, that needs to go in my quotes thing. Plural, plural, whew, I need more coffee. Plurality of council only advances progress. That’s, man, if I wasn’t such a cold and dead inside, I’d shed a tear right now. No, that’s beautiful.
Billy Houghton (09:09)
Hahaha
It’s Monday morning.
That’s what you guys do. mean, that’s the benefit of the Josh LaPrestos,
you and your team, and we do it back and forth, but we sound insights off of each other. And I love that. I love that about our relationship with the engineering bench on your team. That’s what you guys do so well. We can push and pull how we see problem solving. And so I think we practice that on a regular basis. It makes our relationship so fruitful.
Telarus Studio (09:49)
I love it. love it. ⁓ Let’s think about this then. All right. So we’re easing into CX transformations. ⁓ You’re out there helping people modernize. Let’s talk a little bit about ⁓ how do you approach CX transformations a little bit differently, maybe your process from start of discovery to delivery. And then where does the ROI come in? How do you figure that out?
Billy Houghton (10:11)
Yeah, that’s a good question. So on the CX space, ⁓ as you start thinking through technologies, ⁓ whether it be conversational AI or the CX space as a whole, ⁓ I tend to start from identification perspective. I always start, you know, I think it’s part of my DNA. You can’t, you can’t, you have to start identification before you can move into analysis. Analysis feeds assessment, assessment feeds response, response feeds monitoring every time.
And so I start ⁓ through checking out interdependencies. So what are these groups doing with their business processes? ⁓ What data sources and who is touching these data sources and how are they dependent on one another? If we can understand that, which a lot of organizations believe it or not, have not defined or do not have a full grasp of. If they can wrap their arms around their business processes and who’s doing what, where and when. And you can just put that on paper.
whether you build a data flow diagram or you just whiteboard this out, you can then start understanding how you can optimize those data sources so that once you move into conversational AI or if you’re just trying to do AI as a whole. So if we step outside of the CX space and just say, hey, how do we use AI to glean business intelligence? There’s a job I did. ⁓
year and a half ago, somewhere in there, two years ago. And it was really comical because you’re looking at it going, okay, this is, if you don’t have these data sources defined, your outputs are going to be wrong. And as that organically happened, you start realizing the value of starting with identification first. If you cannot identify, you cannot report successfully. And I think that piece, getting your clean data,
in, it starts letting AI deliver the outcome that organizations are looking for. And so from that, yes, to your point, you get to build some KPIs, some ⁓ success criteria on how you’re judging, did we actually solve the business outcome we’re looking for? And so we try to do this upfront. And again, implementation and then monitor, come back on the backside and say, from a monitoring perspective,
all of the enterprise objectives we set out to hit. Did we actually hit them? Do we have dashboards and can we get reports that are showing that the success criteria actually was delivered? ⁓ So that’s one of things that we do, I think really intentionally is we sit on the backside, Josh, of a sale and we do not walk away from it until those success criteria hit. And if they’re not hit, we have mapped that in a contract with a supplier and we go back to supplier and say, until these contracts requirements are met.
client’s not delivered, we need to keep going. Ultimately what that ends up doing is the client ends up getting the CX they’re looking for. And so it’s essentially accountability throughout the deployment process. So does that answer what you’re looking for there?
Telarus Studio (13:15)
Yeah.
I love it. you want to, so now that you’ve kind of, I think you’ve established a really good framework that one step feeds, feeds, feeds very serially. Can you walk through maybe, ⁓ walk through an example with the problem the customer had and kind of how did you walk through those and, and kind of get through those steps?
Billy Houghton (13:34)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s a great question. yeah, I think I’ll pull on just a job that happened about a year ago. ⁓ Customers looking for improving their patient experience. they’re looking to, ⁓ they’re looking to, their reviews were pretty low. And by low, I think they were abysmal, according to executive team. ⁓ And so they said, we’ve got to fix our patient.
feedback. And so they looked at their processes and a lot of them were disparate, a lot of them were siloed. And so again, kind of jumped back in and said, who’s doing what where what applications are these dependent on? Where does the patient intake come in? And, and we map that all out. From that we said, okay, if we put these tools in place, we can knock out I think in that case is around 40 % of self service that we could deliver to the org.
So these are patients that are coming in trying to schedule appointments, trying to change appointments, trying to check insurance, trying to check referrals, ⁓ trying to check access hours, things of that nature. And they’re coming into ⁓ the organization really 24-7, but the question is, is the organization meeting them there 24-7? And so they’re having to staff 24-7, which is expensive. And the org is simply asking, are there digital tools that can do this more reliably? Less money.
And if so, can it improve our customer experience? And the answer to all those is yes. so, yeah. And so that was the backdrop of that use case. And you’re pulling at that point, you’re pulling ⁓ the human side together and ⁓ you’re pulling that into the business process and you’re essentially evolving their technology stack in the midst of that. Yeah.
Telarus Studio (15:31)
When you go through a situation like that, mean, why do you think customers struggle so much to try to figure this out on their own? Big orgs, smart people, they’re saving lives for a living. mean, what is the breakdown? Do we just get to see the whole picture at a more clear view and they’re down in the trenches and the customers don’t get to see that? I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but what’s your perspective as…
where you’re able to help some of these transformations versus what they’re not able to accomplish prior to that.
Billy Houghton (16:06)
Yeah, you know, the question I always go back to, Josh, is how many times have they done this?
And I think that’s the for me, that’s been what my clients have found so much comfort in is a lot of times Josh, they’ve never done the technology stack they’re looking at. And I will tell you as just as an individual, ⁓ it’s scary ⁓ doing, you know, anything that you’re venturing into for the first time. There’s the fear of the unknown. ⁓ And then you compound that with.
A lot of times if they make a wrong decision, it’s their job on the line. And so organizations have a little bit of what happens if we do this and goof up. And so I think having, I think one of the reasons organizations lean on the advisor channel is because this is not the first time we’ve done it. ⁓ This is all we do, rinse, lather, repeat all day long. And I think that’s the value that
We like to say that we deliver confidence in that process for our clients. Not because we are confident, but because the process that we’ve done so many times has proven the outcomes are there. And so by delivering those day in, day out, it delivers a layer of confidence to orgs to know we’ve mitigated risk. ⁓ We have not only done either the right RFP or the right screening process, but we have ⁓
the right supplier and the right solution in place. And so that is the, ⁓ to me, that’s the confidence layer that they gain through a partner.
Telarus Studio (17:48)
I love it. That’s an awesome answer. And I think that’s probably one of the best value props of the advisor I’ve ever heard defined. I think people under, people don’t, people don’t articulate that enough. I don’t see advisors articulating that enough when we’re kind of seeing that initial pitch of like, why should I work with you on this project? Like I’ve been doing this for 20 years, you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that kind of thing or whatever. I’ve been in technology 20 years. So I love that.
People need to not forget that. It’s a great lesson.
Billy Houghton (18:19)
Yes, Josh, what’s your take on how to do you think that time in the market is sufficient? So if I say, hey, Josh, I want to work for your org as a consultant. I’ve been in the industry for 19 years. Do think that that metric is sufficient for having the street creds to do a conversational AI or an AI initiative? ⁓ Or do you see kind of a different angle on that?
Telarus Studio (18:48)
it’s a great question. I think it’s, I think there’s the right range that resonates with the right people, right? If you come in and say, Hey, I’ve been doing this for two years. you seen enough things now you could have been doing this for two years and see nothing but crazy transformations. And so then it’s founded. But I think when you say, I’ve been doing this for 19 years, I think it, and I’ve done this for XYZ amount of customers. And I’ve seen this paradigm shift, this paradigm shift, this paradigm shift, and
I’ve seen customers like you struggle with this and this is how we’ve helped them with that transformation. People are going, ⁓ he’s, he might have the keys to the playbook here. He might be able to do these things in a way that we, you might’ve just short-come to what they were taking nine months to do. So absolutely. ⁓ I think that’s a, it’s a perfect story to mold to, your earlier point. Hey, we’ve done this before.
Billy Houghton (19:21)
Yes.
Telarus Studio (19:42)
We see a lot of these things. don’t always, I don’t, can’t say I’m sitting here with my miss Cleo crystal ball, but all I can tell you is what everybody else has struggled with. And this is how we help them solve it. Are you like,
Billy Houghton (19:53)
Yeah, and
I think the AI space for me, so my disclosure to clients is I’ve not been doing AI for 20 years. I’m not going to tell you that I have. ⁓ I fully disclose, hey, here are the jobs I’ve already done. At the gate, here’s the industry I’ve touched. Here’s the outcomes I’ve affected. And you can come look at the product. ⁓ I think it’s better to just disclose this is a new technology that we’re all encountering.
That event that I was in in Tampa on Friday, you know, the hands raised on who is trying to grasp AI was 100 % of the room. This is a newer technology to the entire market. I think giving full disclosure of, this is a new, I don’t want to say uncharted, but it’s an early stage, you know, from a market penetration perspective, it’s an emerging technology. So there’s emerging technology risk that you need to assess. There’s data security risks you need to assess.
And there’s a vendor risk. ⁓ The vendor risk, I still think, is going to be one of the largest areas for risk assessment that orgs need to consider. ⁓ You can go into Silicon Valley and get startup funding as an AI company, right? I can throw golden.ai behind my domain and instantly have a crazy valuation. But does that mean that I’m actually
going to be here five, 10 years from now. And I’m curious if, from a vendor risk perspective, if organizations have quite assessed what the long-term stability of some of the market players presently are. And so I think there’s due diligence that needs to happen, both on the org side, on the funding side, on their tech stack. So yeah, what’s your thoughts on that? you, do sensors can…
Telarus Studio (21:44)
Well, it’s a great,
we saw this early on. ⁓
We saw this early on when there was a pile of people coming out of Y Combinator, know, in the winter batch and the summer batch, just companies coming out left and right, right. So inevitably where you’re going, I don’t feel like these companies understand how to make a product and how to make a profit and how to sustain versus, Ooh, that’s great. They’ve got a great model. They understand the simplicity of product, right? Build for the user and it will work for the company, right? Because the people have to want to use it totally different approaches. So I think, you know, it,
It’s the funny thing is, is it’s just not different. It’s not as different of a paradigm shift as people think it is because we’ve seen maybe not this exciting, but we’ve seen paradigm shift after paradigm shift after paradigm shift. call it digital transformation. call it modernization. We call it rip and replace cost op, whatever it might be. This is still the same playbook to run, right? What’s the problem that we’re trying to solve? And we are going to bring you vendors that
We know we can put our rubber stamp on, right? We’re not going to give you the fly by night three employee option, because they might not be here for your thousand org company in six months. we will look at those. W what we will say is how about I bring you three tried and trues and maybe one wild card, right? I, you know, I think that’s a great way. seen a lot of advisors do that lately of saying, look, these are, these are three big dogs.
you know, medium dogs that I’ve worked with. And then this is kind of, let’s call it one up and comer. And then let’s get together after we see all these, let’s kind of scorecard these out and then let’s see what, what makes sense. Right. And then again, back to your, it’s been security in the design. What’s the risk? Well, the risk is this is an awesome technology, but the company’s a little small. So how do we de-risk that? But how do we leverage that to maybe help us advance progress in whatever AI CX initiative is?
in a way that self sustains and if a piece of this table, of a leg of this table goes away, does the table still stand? I think that’s kind of how we look at these.
Billy Houghton (23:59)
Yeah, that’s a great thought. I’m going to borrow, there’s a gentleman I work with. going to do a shout out to Cameron Webster. He’s one of the greatest data scientists I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside in my career. And he, I’m going to steal his metaphor. He was talking about building a shower and AI being that shower, right? So you walk in, wants, you know, four heads in the shower. They want the full,
sauna type experience, they want the shiny ⁓ faucets, all of the perfect tile, they want the perfect pitch. ⁓ You think of a master shower. What they don’t want to do is they don’t want to look behind the walls and talk about piping. They just want to focus on what’s there and what’s shiny. And the concern is if you go into this without properly building the proper pipes, the proper water supply, the proper engineering behind the scenes, you’re going to turn all four of those heads on.
And it’s going to do what? Dribble, dribble, dribble, you go, what do do now? What you do now is you have to pull the wall apart, fix the piping, engineer it properly, and then you can have your experience. And the hard part that we as advisors have to find a way to bridge is how do we bridge AI into the enterprise objective? How do we get an executive team to recognize that spending time on the piping?
is make or break on whether or not that shower experience is exactly what you’re looking for. And if you blend that into what you’re talking about about vendor risk, if you build the right foundation and you do implement a wrong vendor for whatever reason, having that foundation properly built is much easier to just simply pull that vendor out, put the right vendor in. What’s not easy is to pull those metaphorical walls apart.
pull all the tile off, pull all the piping out, fix that and start from scratch. And that’s, I just had a job in Delaware where I was trying to coach a team on that and it’s a very hard message to communicate. It’s not a popular one. ⁓ But I do think that by building that foundation, it helps mitigate some of that vendor risk.
Telarus Studio (26:09)
Yeah.
Agree? Agree. Put in the work.
Billy Houghton (26:17)
Yeah.
Telarus Studio (26:18)
I think that’s a good, you know, it brings up a good, how do we get into these conversations? I’m a big discovery. We like to talk about discovery questions, right? So to get yourself into that, you know, we want to get to meaningful AI conversations. How do you, how do you not just make your discovery questions about chatbots and skews and things like that? What’s the, what’s the Billy’s favorite discovery questions that have been the best kind of conversation advances?
Billy Houghton (26:47)
I always start business process, Josh. I always do. Let’s talk to your business process. Talk what your departments are doing. It’s not super fun. It’s not the most exciting conversation, but it’s where the operations are happening. It’s where the workflows are happening. So I always start there. Through that, I have found that it enables you to find where automation can fit best.
It helps you see where they are manually repeating the same steps over and over and over, taking one spreadsheet from one department, handing it to the next as stop gaps where their ERP breaks down. And it’s those areas that you have the most opportunity to say, hey, what if that manual process that you’re repeating and that this department’s repeating and that this department’s repeating, what happens if those all went away?
And they say it’s not possible. And that’s where the value comes in. So I start business process. find manual steps that are repeated. That helps me walk into where you can automate. And in my experience, not only improve their business process, but the whole subject and title of today’s conversation is customer experience with AI. It totally feeds right into the customer experience because as that business process reduces its time to complete,
What happens to the customer experience? They say, it only took one day. It’s been taking four days for this deliverable. How’d you guys just do that in 24 hours? Bingo, digital transformation.
Telarus Studio (28:25)
Yeah. I love it. Let’s talk about some obstacles, I guess, in this journey, right? I think we’re painting a picture on how it should go, the best ways to engage. And I think most often that gets you into deep conversations of problems people didn’t know you could solve or they didn’t even know that they had in their own different departments. maybe walk us through, let’s think about some AI misconceptions. What do you hear from customers regarding that?
Billy Houghton (28:26)
Yeah.
Telarus Studio (28:54)
How do you help them kind of see past this whole hype cycle?
Billy Houghton (28:59)
That’s a good question. Do you ever follow George Westerman? ⁓ I don’t know if you know, I’ve had this conversation in past. He’s a senior lecturer, Sloan School of Innovation at MIT. And he coined the first law of digital transformation. ⁓ Maybe some years from now, we’ll call it George’s law of digital transformation. But the law is simple. Technology evolves quickly.
organizations change more slowly. And as simple as that statement is, that mentality comes into this AI space ⁓ tenfold. So technology evolves quickly, organizations much more slowly. So what you have to do is you have to realize that executive teams are looking at this tech stack, AI, and they’re going, it is evolving at the speed of light, right?
⁓ One minute you’re going, what is the art of possible? And the next minute you’re looking at generative AI, spit out stuff and going, whoa, that was fast. Organizations are trying to catch up to that. And I think that George Westerman’s ⁓ law or his observation there is spot on. And what we have to do as advisors is we have to look ⁓ at an organization on its journey on digital transformation.
and help identify from a business impact perspective, you have to really run a BIA on what these guys, what is going to make the most sense from an outcome perspective and you have to help them focus there. ⁓ You can, ⁓ there’s an order I was just mentioning a minute ago, you could throw an AI tool into this mix and you could affect this much outcome. But if you see from a business impact perspective,
that they are spending 200 hours a week on repetition. Let’s start running an ROI on that. And so from there you say, hey, what if we knock out the 200 hours a week? And then in the middle of that, we’re teaming you up for the AI. And so as soon as we knock this out from a process optimization perspective, we can then pump AI into it. So I think that’s the misconception that I currently battle from an advisor role is orgs thinking that this is just a, push the button.
and our org is going to change overnight. And I don’t think that’s the case.
Telarus Studio (31:30)
You know, ⁓
If you’ve ever gone through any of the biases training, like recency bias, ⁓ confirmation bias, right? think those are all things to constantly keep, ⁓ in the back of your mind as you go through these. Another one of the biases that you just maybe think of that maybe this is a little bit of the key to unlocking that obstacle is the sunken cost fallacy. So if you’re out there, I think that applies so well, probably with a lot of these bigger orgs of like.
Billy Houghton (31:56)
Mm-hmm.
Telarus Studio (32:02)
Well, I’ve already got 18 people that are part of this equation that are doing this. I’m already paying them. They’re great people. They’re doing really good work. But ⁓ you’re going,
But if you could redesign it today, how would you design it? Oh, well, I’d do it like this and this. Then let’s first principles this thing and let’s do it. Do you want to modernize at the rate that your competitors are modernizing? Or do you want to get left behind? And so I don’t think people think of it like that, to your point. They just think that, kind of got to do this because that’s just how we’ve been doing it. I don’t want to.
These guys are doing good work over here. I don’t want to mess that up, right? But meanwhile, the world passes you by. Great. It’s a good obstacle.
Billy Houghton (32:47)
Right? Yeah, in
if you take that Josh with if you took that into your, you know, your financial planner and said, Hey, should we stay in this, you know, we should we stay in this position, this stock because we’ve we bought it? Or should we assess current state? It’s all day long, assess current state. Just because you’ve owned the stock for this long does not mean that ⁓ it means you should long term stay here. And that’s what you need to do. You need to assess current state.
is the current mixture of people, process, and tech. Is it delivering the business value that is driving not only your org from a competition perspective, but to your point, that’s driving your competitors. And in my experience, those periodic assessments, ⁓ they have to happen ongoing. That’s to your point. Don’t ever ⁓ stop learning. ⁓ Don’t ever stop assessing these areas.
Telarus Studio (33:46)
Yeah.
I don’t think it will ever hurt you to keep learning cool stuff. They’re the, I’m telling you, like, I’m not going to get all like, ⁓ you know, the universe, whatever on you, but there is just something to be said about the universe rewards those who continue to learn, continue to apply themselves. Let’s just call it Darwinism. don’t know. Like whatever, but you just find a way to use these things that you constantly challenge yourself to learn, ⁓ be comfortable being
Billy Houghton (33:47)
Good stuff.
Agreed.
Telarus Studio (34:17)
comfortable, continue learning, continue putting yourself out there, and then instantly you’re in the top 1%. That’s the recipe. That’s the secret unlock. Just saved everybody thousands of dollars from the infomercial. Look, these guys are great. The Tony Robbins are great. They’re exciting. Don’t get me wrong. I love their stuff. I think sometimes people are just looking for the cheat code. And the cheat code is it’s the basics.
Billy Houghton (34:18)
Mm-hmm.
Telarus Studio (34:44)
I mean, it’s just the basics every time. If you get those right, all of the rest will follow.
Billy Houghton (34:51)
That tension is going to be here though, I think long term, right? I don’t think that tension is ever going to disappear. You’re to have folks that want to learn and want to advance, and you’re going have folks that are kind of okay with the status quo. And I think learning how you can enable them to think more positively, how you can enable them to be more open-minded to technologies. ⁓ I try, when vendors reach out to us, I try to not say no to any of them. I try to say, tell me what you’re doing that’s different.
Tell me what you’re doing that’s unique. Show me what you’re doing to out innovate the market. And I think if the market at large took that mindset, think about how much more quickly we would be evolving within digital transformation. So speaking of, am curious. as you see conversational AI, as you see customer experience, as you see agentic AI, ⁓ where do you see this going Josh, three, five years from now?
What do you see the future holds in three to five years?
Telarus Studio (35:57)
Ooh. All right. I’ll tell you my future, and then I want to hear your future.
I think, you know, if you, if you follow these kind of the way technology works from a Moore’s law perspective, you follow the rule of compounding, you follow these, ⁓ advances in technology. And then you also, I don’t remember what it’s called, but there’s that one chart that shows the rate of adoption of a new technology, right over here. You’ve got your bleeding edge. You’ve got your.
I ⁓ think that’s the general principle that I would apply over everything for the next one, two, three, past five years. It’s hard. ⁓ but I also like to pay a lot of attention to the GPU race. Let’s call it like the cert, the circular GPU economy, like whatever it is that’s, that’s making GDP growth happen right now. And for tech,
⁓ I think if you look at all of those things, these guys are all the big boys are all investing in areas that will enable us to use technologies that makes it smarter and smarter and smarter. I don’t think that I’m not focused on AGI, like this alternate general, you know, human level of intelligence where it can think and feel and be empathetic. I’m not.
I’m not focused nor do I care about that’s anything that we chase because I’m a huge believer in this human in the loop forever mentality, regardless, like people want the human touch. There’s a lot of stuff that we can automate. There’s a lot of things that we can improve on. think you’ve alluded to that. There’s a massive, massive, ⁓ non-saturation in the market of those. mean, pots lines just, pots lines are still getting replaced guys. That, that started 15 years ago, 10 years ago, maybe.
So the, you got to put in perspective, the rate at what it takes for businesses to your, to your earlier point, businesses to adopt. So do I think there will be more GPUs in cycles faster, more effective GPUs, TPUs, everybody’s coming out with a different means of, you know, could we have small nuclear reactors, SMRs that are safe and, and, know, ⁓ manageable to power the data center needs that we need. think you’re going to see advances in power. think you’re going to see advances in GPUs and TPUs and then
Billy Houghton (37:56)
Mm-hmm.
Telarus Studio (38:18)
money I think is really around the wrappers around the automation. You’ve got foundational LLMs, but the wrappers around that, what are the business applications and processes and technologies? And then those who integrated in win. people, look, businesses have product, everybody’s got a unique model. Businesses have product that they need to sell. Those are foundational things that will continue to feed in and make it bigger, better, faster. And, you know, I never thought in the, in,
Billy Houghton (38:26)
Mm-hmm.
Telarus Studio (38:47)
The next 10 years, we would have cars that would be able to drive themselves, right? You get into Tesla and it takes a corner at 60 and hits through construction and it’s perfect. Almost perfect. Like I didn’t, you didn’t think that was here now, right? But is that for everybody? No. Is that for everybody yet? Maybe not quite. Like people.
just might not want that or they might not want it yet or they might not be open to that idea. I don’t think businesses are any different. And so I think as the technology gets better and better and better and better, you’re going to get better adoption. But it’s also, it’s got to apply to the business problems that people have. All that stuff is cool. But if it doesn’t apply to the business problem and people don’t figure out a way to solve a business problem. So I’m just excited for more. I don’t like solutions looking for a problem. I like problems that we can solve with solutions.
Billy Houghton (39:39)
Perfect, I love that statement. Problems we can solve with solutions. That’s it right there. I should have stolen that from the beginning. I you’d just told me that, because that’s exactly what we do. You’ve got to start there. Problems we can solve with solutions. Yeah, think my 10-year-old said we were talking about your topic on Tesla and self-driver vehicles and autonomous vehicles. And she’s like, you know, the reason they call it Waymo.
is because it’s going to Waymo easier and Waymo faster. And I was like, my gosh, I’ve known the brand, but I’ve never even thought about that. you’re totally right. And she nailed it right on. ⁓ We are going to advance Waymo faster. And that’s just the reality of digital transformation. And it’s starting to intersect the OT side of our lives. And I think as it pushes into the OT side, good for companies like Waymo or Tesla. Good for all these orgs are starting to integrate that.
⁓ I think in our channels, I personally, from a company perspective, I focus in orgs that are 500 users to 5,000 users. Most of those orgs, Josh, I see harnessing the power of outside of the OT side when it just pertains to data, data analytics, and AI within your data. ⁓ I do see groups
out competing and out innovating from a customer service perspective. think those first contact, those first call resolution rates, first contact resolution rates, those are where the orgs are going to start improving customer service out to the customer and where the customer is going to walk away and go, that was the easiest return or the easiest order or the easiest change or modification or what, insert what the actual workflow is.
That was the easiest experience. ⁓ I was looking at some reports that we did on a recent job. And I want to say ⁓ within like three months, I want to say like 70 % of survey results were five stars. People saying like, unbelievably easy, quick, frictionless. Like that’s what AI is doing. And I think that is where these organizations have a huge opportunity to improve their customer.
service, their customer experience, and I would say gain a competitive advantage. You’re going to return to organizations and groups that make your life easy. And I think that’s what this technology holds, at least in the next two to three years.
Telarus Studio (42:18)
I love it. ⁓ that’s the end goal. Get them to five star reviews, get them to be fanatical customers. We’re helping the customers. we’re helping our customers, ⁓ get the tech stack and all the pieces and the business processes to that, that their end customers are raving fans, then we’re magnetic for life. I love it. ⁓ it’s great way to end it. Really good stuff, man. Good, good stuff.
Billy Houghton (42:41)
All day long.
Josh, it’s been great, man. yeah,
it’s a pleasure to be with you and talk through this. always enjoy conversations with you, and it’s great to sit in the booth with you and enjoy this topic together.
Telarus Studio (42:58)
Awesome.
Awesome, awesome. All right, well, that wraps us up, man. I appreciate you coming on. And as always, everybody, when you’re listening to these things, whether you’re coming to us from Apple, you’re coming to us from Spotify, these are dropping out there on Wednesdays. So make sure that you’re liking, you’re subscribing, all that good stuff so that you get these notifications right when they come in. And you can great tips from folks like Billy and figure out how to advance the business. So Billy, thanks so much, ⁓
Billy Houghton (43:28)
It’s a pleasure Josh, as always.
Telarus Studio (43:30)
All right, that wraps us for today. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering at Telarus. Billy Houghton, GlobalNet Connect. This has been Beyond the Bot, how we’re shaping the future of customer experience with AI. Until next time.