Sam Nelson, VP of CX at Telarus, presents a comprehensive state of the union on customer experience and artificial intelligence for 2025. The presentation reveals how the CX market is evolving, with contact center as a service projected to reach $17 billion by 2030, while buyers are increasingly overwhelmed by point solutions and conflicting AI narratives. Nelson introduces the AI technology sandwich framework, emphasizing that successful AI implementation requires solid data foundation, smart AI tools with trust controls, and enterprise-wide deployment. The session addresses the AI hype cycle, showing how most organizations are stuck in the trough of disillusionment and need guidance to reach productive AI adoption. Key insights include positioning CX as the front door to larger technology transformations, with AI serving as a capability layer that can turn $30k deals into $300k comprehensive solutions. The presentation emphasizes outcome-based selling approaches and the importance of addressing AI across the entire technology stack rather than in silos. Team members Meagan Thai, Mikey B., and new hire Brent Wilford contribute insights on helping customers define clear AI objectives and measurable ROI to overcome adoption barriers.
Transcript is auto-generated.
So to give us a clear eyed view of where customer experience stands today and how AI is increasingly influencing outcomes across CX, cloud, cybersecurity, and advanced networking, I am excited to welcome Sam Nelson, vice president of CX, Meagan Thai, director of contact center and UC solutions, Mikey B., who’s also been in chat, he is our solution architect east of UC and CC, and Brent Wilford, solutions architect of CX. Thank you all for being here today. I am super excited to hear your presentation, so I’m going to go ahead and turn it over to you.
Amazing. Well, thank you, Cass. Really appreciate the handoff there. Everybody, great to see y’all. So you see Meagan, on the call.
We’ve got, Mikey b. He is virtual traveling as we all do. So, folks, chime in on the chat. You also saw mister Brent Wilford on there.
So wanted to, very quickly announce that Brent has joined us as a CX solution architect. He is based in Colorado, and he is shadowing the call currently, as this, I believe, is his second week on the roll. So, that said, we will roll right into this. Chandler, let’s make sure I am pinned so everybody could see the slides, actually, the light board that I have set up as per usual, and we will roll.
Now all of you know I love to keep this conversational. Right?
And, yes, welcome. Welcome. Welcome. I’m watching the chat, so blow it up, people.
You know how I do. Make sure that you are engaging in the chat. Meagan, Mikey b, even Brent, if he’s on, I will go ahead and throw some stuff in there as we go. Feel free to ask any questions as well.
Okay? But as Cass mentioned, this is a state of the union on CX and AI. But, very so cleverly thought of a different kind of engaging title here, which is the new adviser advantage, AI CX and bigger deals. Alright?
So we’re gonna roll right into this, but keep the questions, keep the comments rolling in the chat because we are let’s start with CX. Okay. CCaaS market. Real quick.
Alright. We all know that, like, what is it? Eighty, ninety percent of stats are made up? But anyhow, just to kinda get into, like, what the trajectory looks like.
Right? Folks, it’s not stopping. So that’s the good news. Alright? When we look at, like, contact center, as a service market or even, like, the UCaaS side of the house, obviously growing.
So, I know the numbers are a little small, so let me give you some. But as far as the CCaaS market or contact center as a service market, looking at seventeen billion dollars by the year twenty thirty. Yeah. We’re already hitting the thirties, in the two thousand.
Unreal. Ucaas, on the other hand, two hundred sixty two billion by twenty thirty. Alright? And something that we’re seeing now, yes, yes to the moon.
Right?
That’s what we’re seeing too is this maturity model. So this is really interesting. Right? And, this is kind of how people are approaching what a CX transformation, is, but essentially, you you tend to find clients kind of all across the board when it comes to this graph.
Right? You have clients who, what we’ve seen all last year, are ones who are like, yes. Stop the bleeding. Right?
Like, at this point, CX is a liability. Our NPS score is low. We gotta increase customer satisfaction. Right?
Then you have the next phase, which is like, okay. Your basic stuff. Right?
Maybe excuse me. Maybe NPS is just below the leaders. Right? They’re getting there. And then as we continue to move it forward, you now have a lot more customers who are not just optimizing channels, but now raising the bar.
Right? So CX actually becomes a core component of the overall company brand. They fully incorporate things like omnichannel. They’re now looking at customer journey orchestration.
For example, what do I mean by that? Right? Is, let’s say you put something in your cart, you’re online, and then it continues to bug you until you revisit the cart. Right?
Oh, hey, Brent Wilford. We could see you on video. Feel free to turn off if you want to. No big deal.
You can totally stay on. But, yeah, really short innovation cycles.
They’re wanting to move things forward pretty quickly. Right? And just continuing to improve projects all around. So lots and lots of companies now raising the bar as they’ve taken this journey on CX.
So let’s talk about what’s changed. Okay? So when you think about CX, it’s now tied to things like revenue retention. Right?
The cost to serve, brand trust, and lots of boards are asking the questions, like, is the ROI? Right? What’s actually automated, or what can we automate, or what’s still kind of broken? So the bottom line here is that CX is no longer experimental.
It’s actually becoming much more operational. And and right now, buyers are super overwhelmed. Folks, I remember, I think last year around this time, I did a high intensity tech training call on point solutions. Well, guess what?
Buyers are totally overwhelmed by them. Right? And I knew it was coming. We all knew it was coming.
So they’re overwhelmed by the point solutions. There’s a lot of vendor hype out there, and then there’s a lot of just really conflicting AI narratives. Really good question in the chat. The time frame for moving to the lower left to the upper right in that maturity model, Totally depends.
Totally depends, but we can make that go a little faster with the resources that you have here at Solaris, which I’ll talk about a little later. Alright? So underlining this conflicting AI narratives component. I hate to say it folks, but, like, whether or not you wanna go into the world of artificial intelligence, at this point, you really don’t have a way to avoid it.
Alright? So that brings me to sort of my next point is right now, where is AI being really misunderstood? Now, I oversee for those of you who don’t know, I now oversee the CX and the artificial intelligence practice areas here at Telarus. And what we’ve found over this last year across all of the technology swim lanes, whether that’s cloud, cybersecurity, advanced networking, is that AI is dramatically misunderstood.
Right? It’s it’s really positioned in the market as, oh, look at this really cool AI feature, or look at this bot, or look at this SKU, or, hey. You can go buy a box of AI at your nearby big box store. Right?
No. Absolutely not. In fact, AI is a capability layer because when it comes to artificial intelligence, customers need things like clarity, they need orchestration, and most importantly, they need to be able to define the outcomes that they are looking to achieve by implementing artificial intelligence and taking advantage of that capability layer. So, folks, this is your opening right here.
Okay? So let’s take a look at sort of a different way to approach AI this year. Now hang with me. Okay?
And, yeah, we’ll be sending this out, so don’t worry. You’ll have access to this stuff.
But this is what I like to call, thanks to Gartner, the AI technology sandwich. Alright. So I know it looks a little bit like a burger, but just hang with me here. Imagine it’s a sandwich.
Okay? Or what do you do you, boo. Alright. So the bottom bread where it says data centralized here.
This is where you’ve got your organized data. Okay? It’s clean. It’s centralized. Because at the end of the day, if your data is super messy or it’s scattered, AI is not going to work well.
Right? Like, this is the foundation piece of the bread. Alright? Now the middle, this whole middle part, the blues, the the this magenta, this orange, all this good stuff, this is where all the thinking happens.
This is you could think of this as, like, AI plus the guardrails. Okay? So there are really, like, two kind of big parts here. I’m just gonna, is that there’s AI tools.
Right? So some AI can be built by IT. It could be built into applications. It can be brought in by employees.
Right? Like, we all know, ShadowAI is a thing. And then there’s this whole, like, trust component right here, which is really referring to, like, the trust and control piece of security, the risk, the governance.
But even more importantly, humans still overseeing decisions. Right? And so this, like, big layer right here in the middle, is what actually makes sure that AI is useful and it is safe. Now the top bread.
Okay. This little component up here. The top bread, it’s the data everywhere. Right? So this is, like, the AI that’s being used across the entire business, whether that’s, like, sales, support, back office, front office, like, you name it.
And this is where, like, the data kinda flows freely so that AI can actually help people do their jobs. So at the end of the day, when you look at this, like, as it says here, a conceptual framework for executing artificial intelligence, good AI is really solid data.
It is smart, and it is something that has really strong trust controls. And if any layer of this is missing, the sandwich I’m not gonna say it falls apart because technically, it’s still there, but it’s a bad sandwich. Right? Like, you’re missing all the components that make the sandwich really, really good.
So if I were to put this in front of a customer, for example, I would say something like, look. AI does not fail because the model is bad. Okay? It fails because the data is broken or there’s just this no trust kind of framework that you have because the reality is that AI touches every single layer.
So, folks, you hear it from me and hear it now, this is how a thirty k deal becomes a three hundred k transformation. Right? You’ve gotta sell it all. Now you’re probably thinking, okay, Sam, in twenty twenty five, like, this looks great moving forward.
But what happened again? The twenty twenty five State of the Union, how did people feel, right, about AI over time? So really interesting to uncover this stuff last year. Here’s this hype cycle, and you can look this up.
You can Google the graph. I thought this was really interesting. But let me kinda walk you through the different phases so that you understand, where your customers are thinking. And you’ll probably put them into some of these buckets, and then, we can kind of help you talk them through to the next bucket because, like, you want them here.
Right? You want them in that last phase of productivity, but this is, like, the emotional roller coaster they go through. Okay? So this first section here is what we call, the innovation trigger.
Alright? This, is where someone sees something and they say, OMG, this is going to change everything. Right? This is where, like, new AI shows up, the media goes wild, executives start panic buying, and, expectations are just, like, super unrealistic.
Right? Super unrealistic. We’ve all heard it. Right? This is where the phrase AI is gonna replace all the jobs by next year.
That’s where this lives right here in this area. Okay? Now as we get to this kind of peak, right, this peak of, expansions or expectations, I should say, right, is this is where people start saying, wait. This is a little harder than we thought.
And they get into this what we call or what they call the trough of delusionment. Disillusionment. Not delusionment. Disillusionment.
And this is typically where a lot of the projects really stall. Right? Because they realize after this, like, really yay feeling when you come down, you’re like, oh, right, is the data’s not ready. Right?
The costs start showing up. They’re like, cool. I’ve implemented all this cool stuff, and then they get hit with, like, all these fees. And they’re like, wait.
Where did this come from? And why is it not broken down and all this stuff?
And they realize that AI just does not magically fix a broken process. And this is where a lot of companies just quit. Right? And to make it super easy, I put that blue arrow there, people quit right here.
Okay? And so some people make it. Right? Some people figure it out with the help of people like you and me.
Right? Tech advisers, this is your time. Everyone there’s a ton of people right here. Remember I talked about majority of AI projects failing because they’re not tied to specific KPIs or not producing ROI?
Folks, everyone the majority of folks are right here in this trough of disillusionment. And if you help them get out of that, then they reach this slope of enlightenment. Right? It’s a, oh, okay.
Now we know what use cases we’re actually addressing with artificial intelligence.
There’s fewer pilots. They’ve scaled back. Right? They’re experiencing more production. Ai is tied to real workflows that are measurable and which outcomes have been defined, and ROI actually starts to show up here.
So, essentially, what you could think of is AI, stops being kind of a science project in this slope of enlightenment. And after that, it’s all rainbows and unicorns. Right? So in this final phase, if you can get people here, it’s where they kinda say, this just works now.
This is great. AI is boring, and that folks, that’s a good thing. Right? It’s embedded into applications, operations.
There’s this sense of sort of normalcy where AI starts just delivering really consistent business outcomes. Right? Nobody brags about it anymore. It’s just the new norm.
And so that’s this journey that people are taking, and a lot of them are stuck right here. So this is your year, folks. You see it on every meme, every quote after New Year’s. Right?
Like, this is but this is truly your year, right, to get people out of this trough of disillusionment and into this plateau of productivity. Alright? So you’re thinking, okay. Where do you start?
Oh, the dreaded question. Right? So first, just gonna put it out there. This is from our tech trends report.
Now if you have not downloaded it, please go download it. You can actually, send it off to customers. It’s got a lot of really great client facing information there.
So I’m just gonna reference this, but again, we’ll send it as a follow-up. But here’s where organizations are first testing artificial intelligence and actually where ROI is showing up really quickly. It’s in the customer experience. It’s in the Sietz portfolio.
Now you could see a whole slew of items here. The blue represents mid market companies, and the yellow, is showing, enterprise companies. Now what you’re seeing is mid market folks are catching up very quickly. The enterprise folks were the ones who kinda took the first step.
Right? They’re like, hey. We’ve got resources and money, and let’s throw it at it, and let’s go, like, invest in stuff. And so they’re kind of now in this next iteration.
But folks, market, SMB, like, these guys say, oh, wow. These big companies are now doing it. Great. It’s time to go do it.
Let’s go do it. Right? And so everyone’s looking for how AI can help from a, data analytics standpoint, AI driven quality management, quality assurance, real time agent assist. For example, if I am a customer service rep helping someone on the phone, and the customer starts talking about something.
Right? Something pops up automatically. That little bot starts feeding me information on how to best help that customer. So I do not have to say, hey.
I’ll be right back. Right? No. No. No. It’s all there in real time. It’s helping that agent.
Yes. It is real. Both it’s been around for some time now, but now it’s at the forefront of all these conversations. Right?
And so this is this is where you can start very, very quickly and very, very easily. Deployments are really, really quick.
But okay, but doing the responsible thing here as head of AI now, right, is you had to realize one thing. That CX is the front door, but it’s not the whole house.
Alright? It’s not the whole house.
Buyers are connecting. Okay? And they’re connecting these things. So think, like, CX Insights. They’re like, oh, okay.
Well, that’s a great conversation into, like, cloud optimization. Right? The data. Great. Well, let’s talk about the security piece.
Right? I’m sure the majority of you are like, cool. Let me just scan this QR code, and it’s all good. But do actually know what happens when you scan the QR code?
Totally guilty here. Right? So they’re thinking from a security standpoint, it’s a really easy shift to have in that conversation. And most importantly, network performance.
Folks, do not forget. Y’all saw Graham Scott, on the hit call the other day. Right? Is network performance directly impacts customer satisfaction.
Guess what? Right? Poor call quality folks and all the CX stuff is not actually a CX problem. Right?
We just expect that everything else is going to work so swimmingly together, and we don’t think about what’s inside the house. Right? And so when you think of poor call quality, you have to look at things like network design. You have to look at from a security standpoint, is it all actually secure?
Right? And when we look at things like cloud routing, right, there are so many different things that affect this potential issue. Alright? So I want you to think more holistically.
I know totally overused phrase, but think holistically. Okay? Sietz is just the front door, but you have to look at the whole house. Okay?
So with that said, when you look at the whole environment and not just one silo, that opens up a multitude of opportunities. Right? A multitude. So let me head actually into this next one because some of you have seen it, maybe not, but if you haven’t, this is the AI practice here at Telarus. Yes.
It is formally built out so many different things to address across the world of artificial intelligence. You will notice, first thing, is that it is not segmented by technology type. It’s actually segmented by what’s achievable, k, keyword achievable at the AI layer. Alright?
And so when we look at kind of what’s the most prominent agentic conversational AI in the CX world, Absolutely. Right? Virtual agents, real time agent assist, like I mentioned. Then there’s this predictive analytics, right, decision intelligence.
We start working across the stack, but you’ll notice that it’s segmented very differently. It’s segmented more like use case, right, from a security and risk component. Like, robot dogs is a real thing, folks. Right?
We’re talking about dogs earlier. You don’t have to dress these up in cold weather. Alright? And then there’s this kind of random, like, industry and domain specific stuff.
So another thing you’ll notice is that you’ll come across all of these different AI little kind of AI players coming out of the woodworks who are addressing very specific use cases in, like, very specific industries. And that’s all that they do, but they do it extremely well. Right? So point solutions making this kind of, like, not it’s not even a comeback.
It’s just like a, hey. Appearance. Here I am ready to save the day. And, all these different AI players are starting to address all of these different pieces all separately.
And, yeah, not all of them play in the channel. But guess what? If you have contacts, if you’re starting to run into, suppliers out there who you’re like, Sam, we gotta get them under Polaris. Please come to me directly.
Come to the team directly. We want to know because you are out there having all these majority of customer conversations. Okay?
So that said, everyone’s like, cool, Sam. So what can I expect in the next six to twelve months after this sort of state of the union?
Lots of really cool things. And here’s what they are prioritizing. So number one, cost reduction through automation. By far, by far, the quickest way to sell artificial intelligence.
Right? The next thing is productivity and retention. If anybody uses a gen a GPT, right, whether that’s a ChatGPT or a Claude by the way, they have Claude Cowork now. Really interesting.
Perplexity, Copilot, you name it. Right? That’s also another great segue into having an AI conversation right here.
Better customer intelligence.
They want to know about customers before they get to them. I know that sounds wild, you’re like, is that even a thing? It is. Trust me.
Right? If you’ve got a digital footprint, which, by the way, you’re all on this webinar, you all do at this point, so it is what it is. But if you’ve got a digital footprint, companies are looking to uncover that footprint, figure out what works well to sell you, and then replicate that formula across similar profiles as you. Right?
So customer intelligence, absolutely a thing. Don’t forget security. I would get in trouble if I didn’t mention this, but let’s be realistic. Okay?
The security absolutely has to be a part of the conversation because you do not want AI doing stuff that it should not be doing. Right? There needs to be a way to audit. Right?
There needs to be a way to track everything. Pull up any news article on AI, and it’s probably around the security discussion. Right? There are literally there’s I think there’s a website.
I forgot the name of it, but it’s quite literally where you can look up which states have incorporated laws around the use of artificial intelligence, right, within their confines. So this is absolutely a critical piece of the puzzle is talk about the security component. How are people monitoring, auditing all of the AI usage? By the way, yes, suppliers are in the portfolio for these.
And the last thing, don’t forget, integrations are still absolutely a thing. And that’s why I say don’t sell in a silo, folks. Again, your front door can look amazing, but once you open it and go inside, right, it’s like that white picket fence effect. It all looks great, but then when you look under the hood, you’re like, ugh.
Right? And so, always a great idea to make sure that everything is working swimmingly on the back end, so that that front door can look all nice, shiny, new, and inviting for people to walk through. Alright? So you, as a tech adviser, you are going to have to change.
And whether or not you want to change, this is how your role now expects to be looked at by customers today if you want to continue to grow your business. Alright? So your role before, quite possibly. And if you’ve moved on to the new advantage, awesome.
Right? But previously, I think this on this side, we’ve been known kind of as the quote gatherer.
We like to match products to scenarios right away, right, almost too quickly.
And we’re we’re kind of like another skew on the page. Right? Now I highly encourage you to change that mindset and incorporate this perspective. You being now an outcome architect. Help people figure out what outcomes they actually desired, how to get technology to help them reach those desired outcomes in the new year. By the way, that approach works with any persona. Alright?
A stack translator. This is big. Let me look at everything you’ve got under the hood. In other words, even behind that front door.
Right? And let’s talk about what this all means to your overall technology strategy in the coming months. Number two, yep, risk mitigator. Okay.
That’s really never gonna go away. Right? But consider from a security standpoint. Yeah. Absolutely. With things like artificial intelligence and what it can do now as we move quickly into, yes, AGI.
Right? Expect all the documentaries to start coming out this year, folks. Right? Can’t wait. This is gonna totally gonna, like, fill up my Netflix queue.
But risk mitigation, a hundred percent. And then last but certainly not least, revenue enabler. If people start using AI in the right way, this is why so many people in the revenue role are now so interested. It’s how do I make my people more effective?
How do I increase overall productivity? How is that going to translate into more qualified leads, more, let’s say, lead conversions, right, and decrease things like churn. Right? Because we all know that losing a customer is more expensive than gaining a new one.
Right? So with that said, here is your call to action. Alright? Number one, lead with the outcomes.
Okay? We do a whole training on outcome based selling. We even now, this year, sneak peek, are incorporating the MEDDPIC methodology, and it’s really important to start incorporating those different types. So I highly encourage you to start signing up for our sales mastery stuff.
We’ve got a lot coming down the pike as far as going in and having the the conversations around outcome based selling, all that good stuff.
Also, MapAI across the stack. Really get to know which suppliers are allowing customers to leverage AI within the technology stack, and you can do that through any Telarus resource. Right? You’ve got the amazing three on here.
You’ve got Meagan, Brent, Mikey b, right, on this call alone in just the CX world, But that does not expand across the stack. Right? So make sure you’re getting to know who the cloud suppliers are, in cybersecurity, advanced networking. Get to know the different AI use cases across all those.
Because that way, you can get past the front door conversation and start talking about what customers are doing behind the front door. Alright?
The next thing, explore your resources. So kinda going back to leading with outcome based selling and med pick methodologies, we are rolling out so many exciting things right now regarding workshops, regarding events. Events look dramatically different this year, folks. All of my events have workshops in them, so you will be expected to actually, like, do work when you come.
You won’t have time to send emails. Right? You won’t have time to take calls between the presentations and the workshops. So come to those.
And then I’ve also spun up an AI resource page. Thank you, marketing team, where you can access things like the AI pitch deck that we’ve created for you that is fully brandable, as well as an AI readiness assessment that you can use as a guide when having discovery calls or conversations with your customers to see if, well, they’re actually ready. Right? And based on where they fall, what’s the next step to take with them?
Do they require more education? Do we actually bring in a firm to do a formal readiness assessment across multiple departments? Right? Or, like, are they ready for a pilot?
Great. Let’s talk about what the pilot looks like and how you scale that across the organization effectively. Right? So by all means, engage the team.
Don’t worry. We will pop all the links into a follow-up for you, as far as the pitch deck goes. If you want, by the way, if you want to view the recording of the pitch deck, I actually did it on the last hit call, which was last month when we released it.
So I quite literally go through every single slide as if I were talking to a customer. So feel free to review that, and we go from there. But the team is here to help. Alright, folks. So hopefully, this kinda gave you an idea of what things look like all across last year, what our findings were, what the opportunity looks like for this year, and we all get you selling more across the stack and linking it together with that horizontal sale, in other words, artificial intelligence. So I’m really, really excited for what’s to come this year. CAST, that is all I had.
And you have so much, Sam.
You really know how to pack in a lot of information into a very short amount of time. I’m sitting here with whiplash.
I love it. That’s impressive. Yep.
I mean, not only did you crush it, but thank you again. And for some of the questions I did see in the chat, I can also speak to this too.
Sam has created a plethora of materials for you to succeed in AI. I’ve probably dropped the link now twice. But what I’m dropping, if you haven’t been there yet, again, it is the Telarus university dot com, but it’s all of our marketing resources, all dedicated to AI. That’s registering for Sam’s upcoming webinars.
That is the AI essentials course in Telarus University, which if you have not taken and you’re new, very important that you go in and look at the materials that we have available to you. Also, conversational AI, the why AI now pitch deck, all of it is in that one specific link. So if you haven’t bookmarked it yet, please do so. I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but yes.
And even drop it again in case because the chat blew up really fast. Just one more time in case you missed it the first time, it’ll be there. But thank you so much. This is really really the time where we transition into q and a.
What I mean, what you guys did was fantastic. The entire team was really on top of it. If you do have any questions right now, please drop them in the chat for Sam and for the rest of the team. Hopefully, Sam, you get to answer them before Mikey b does because he was on top of it.
We do have a lot here. And in case you guys haven’t seen it, definitely make sure that you go to the forums tab in Salares University. You can see all of our past Tuesday calls. Very important that you have it in here.
I do have one thing for you, Sam. I’ll ask this question personally just because I did see we have some new folks in there. You said that they can just reach out to your team at any time. Is there anyone else that they should also be reaching out to as well to get any answers to these questions?
Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, we all, have different contacts, you know, between partners and between advisers and and Solaris folks. Right?
So whether that is, your partner development manager in your region, whether that is your regional SE on the SE team, folks, like, we’re all here ready to have the conversation. There’s always someone at the ready, right, to take that on. So whether or not they can answer it or I can answer it, right, we’ll just make sure that you get all the answers you need with regard to AI because it is, kind of a daunting topic. So while I, of course, encourage you to reach out directly to us, like Meagan, Brent, Mike B, by all means, engage any and all your resources, we’ll put you in the right direction.
We will also obviously make sure that we put you in touch with the right suppliers based on, who’s appropriate for the conversation with clients.
Wonderful. There are based on a few questions in chat, as for who do we contact from the UK. I’m gonna take your name, Lauren, just to make sure that we can reach out to you personally to see who your personal contact is.
Of course, I’m not there, so I don’t know personally, but we can definitely find out to make sure that you’re being taken care of for sure. I see that we had someone else again has already answered another question, so fantastic. Thank you, guys.
Is there anything else the rest of the team would like to add to the conversation before we end the day?
Yeah. Let me do this. Hey, Chandler. Can you unfin me? I’m I’m just, like, tarry seeing my face.
No. I’m kidding. And then maybe Meagan, Brent, yeah, come on camera. Because what I’d love to do is for this group to hear directly from you as far as maybe what to expect this year, and what does success look like for, you know, tech advisers in the new year?
What would make them successful in selling more CX as well as selling more maybe AI? Meagan, I will go ahead and start with you.
Yeah. I I love what you’re saying, Sam, about the outcomes. Right? Don’t be afraid to ask your prospects and your existing customers.
What are you trying to to do? What are you looking for? Because we get asked all the time, hey. We need AI for this company.
Well, what does that mean?
Right? It’s such a a broad question. And so we just have to dig deeper. So just have those conversations with your your customers to figure out what exactly they’re trying to accomplish and bring it to us, and we’ll help you solve that.
You know, like Crystal mentioned, great great point, Mike. You have Crystal talk to you because it we don’t know. There’s so many players in the space. We don’t have the vendors that are just specific to one vertical market.
We might have a couple that specialize in just health care, but what is it that your customer is looking to do? Right? Because we can bring in so many different options.
And, again, to your point, a lot of the AI that we’re we’re seeing in demand, of course, is the auto QA, auto summarization, everything’s automated.
The voice AI agent is still a hot topic. So, just let us help you figure out what it is your customers looking to accomplish. And the trickier thing is going to be AI behind the scenes. I always say it’s the intangibles.
Right? It’s a workflow automate automation that’s a little bit more complex to have a conversation about. But, we’re seeing a lot of demands for that. We can help you with that conversation.
Awesome. Thank you, Meagan. How about you, Brent?
Well, good morning. I figured out how to get on stage instead of stay backstage. So sorry about that.
You reached the front door. Congratulations.
Fine. I’m an old man. It took me a while to find it. No. Fantastic presentation.
I think the the main the main hurdle to companies adopting AI is the ROI conversation. AI is the most advanced technology that the channel and trusted advisers have ever had access to, but it is no different than every other leap that that technology takes every ten to twenty years. Right? Personal computers, the Internet, cell phones, these are all amazing things, but they didn’t jump off the page and people didn’t buy them in mass because they didn’t know what they meant to them.
And AI is no different. Everyone wants it. We know it can apply to various levels of the contact center and across, you know, the spectrum between security and other areas. But until customers understand what goals AI have what what are the goals for AI?
What are we trying to solve for? Is your data ready? Right? That that bottom bread of the sandwich is super important.
We have to have understandable definable goals. How do we measure the impact of those goals if we put AI in there? And what is the tangible ROI that we can present up to a nontechnical decision maker? CFOs are not gonna go spend thirty, forty thousand dollars a month in AI just because it sounds cool. They have to know what that means to the business as far as productivity and cost savings and customer enhancement.
Yeah. No. Really good call there, Brent. And I think that then there’s so much more noise than ever before.
Something new for folks who, are still on with us is OpenAI has officially opened up their marketplace. Right? And so very similar to, like, the iPhone, right, where they open up the marketplace and now people can come in and actually create applications. Hey, guys.
It’s just gonna get way more messy. And so, yeah, you heard it directly from Meagan and Brent is, like, let’s get in front of the customers. Let’s work through the noise and actually figure out kind of tangible ROI. And guess what?
Suppliers are also coming across the same situations. So many of them do have the resources to put in front of customers saying, hey. Here’s exactly how the solution will impact, right, your bottom line. So great insights, guys.
And, yeah, think that pretty much sums it up, Casper. This has been a a great session. Thank you for hosting.