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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#767: Krisp.ai CEO Arto Minasyan on voice AI and the customer experience
00:21:56
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The Agile Brand welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and martech platforms as we explore marketing, technology, AI, E commerce, and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to.
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Create an agile brand built for today.
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And tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom advising Fortune 1000 brands on MarTech, AI and marketing operations.
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To make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the.
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App you listen to podcasts on and.
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Leave us a rating so others can.
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Find us as well.
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Now onto the show.
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This episode is brought to you by Krisp AI, the all in one voice AI that makes every conversation sound professional. With industry leading noise cancellation, real time accent conversion, accurate transcription and smart call summaries, Krisp helps teams and individuals stay clear and productive, trusted worldwide and powering over 75 billion minutes of conversations each month. Krisp is the easiest way to elevate every call. Try it free at Crisp AI what's the biggest myth about building a world class AI company that leaders inside and outside of Silicon Valley still believe? Agility sometimes requires fundamentally rethinking the core business assumptions around how we fund growth, build teams and create value. Today we're going to talk about the strategic decisions that underpin the AI revolution. It's not just about the technology itself, but about the crucial choices that leaders make around how to finance innovation, how to structure teams for a global remote first world, and how to stay ahead of the curve on what's actually possible versus what's just hype. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Ardo Minazian, Founder and President@ Crisp AI. Ardo, welcome to the show.
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C
Thank you Greg. Thank you for hosting.
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A
Yeah, looking forward to having this conversation. Before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Crisp's AI?
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So I'm the co founder of the company, the president. We both basically call it the company met my co founder David so we started company in 2017 with the mission to bring the productivity to business meetings with voice AI and we partnered several technologies in the space. We were the first to introduce AI noise cancellation for the calls. We are like among first to bring a accent conversion which translates different accents to neutral American accent in real time which is very useful especially in call center side app. We also introduced AI meeting assistant which Helps to transcribe summarize calls with AI and get the company's meeting knowledge base in one place and so on. So pretty diverse set of voice AI technologies and products.
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Yeah, yeah, definitely. And so let's start by talking about the future of AI voice tech. Obviously there's what, 75 billion minutes of conversations each month being powered by crisp AI, but there's still, you know, there's still room to grow and innovate in AI voice tech. What breakthroughs still need to happen before AI can truly understand human speech across accents, noise and nuance?
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That's a great question. I think when we're talking to voice AI, there are like two separate, two different tracks. One is like human to human conversation and the other is human to computer. So when I'm talking to a human to human, it's still. There are a lot of unsolved issues there. So let's say we are having a podcast. I'm using like a very regular headphones. You're not using one. Like, imagine if there like a button which can sound your voice on my end at like studio level. Or maybe making my voice sound much more natural for you with just one click of the button. Right. So it would make our conversation much more productive. So tons of issues to solve there as well. But I think that the biggest challenge or the biggest opportunities in the space of human to computer interaction with the voice and obviously both like AI and robots and everywhere and all the automation which is coming needs to understand human voice. And I think human voice is already becoming de facto the most important medium for communicating to robots and to AI. It's still not there yet. There's a lot of tons of issues to solve, like starting even like, I know, removing the background noise for the, but making them sound more naturally, bringing more emotions to the conversations, understanding when to speak, when to stop, all that stuff is not solved. And I can proudly share that Krisp now is powering most of the voice bots in the industries of our technologies, different technologies to make their effectiveness, their work much, much better. But again, I think we are in a very early days of voice AI revolution. I think in next five years we will see much more natural voice AI, much more natural interaction between human and computers.
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Yeah, yeah. Well, and to your point, it is a lot more natural than, I mean, I think we take for granted that we type into keyboards or even swiping on a device or things like that. I know we're used to that, but it's not as natural as speaking to, to someone else. Or you know, in the future speaking to AI or even in the present speaking to AI. You know, I know you mentioned some big potential impact. Where do you see AI voice technology making the biggest impact maybe in the next few years?
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Yeah, few fields first like call centers where like tens of millions call center agents talking to customers each day about insurance, health care, banking and so on. So I think AI both can elevate the human agent. So human agent becomes much more effective, much more productive and can serve the customer more easily with more effectiveness. And also I think voice bots will come to call center. So I assume that most of us are experiencing the pain of not just getting to the call center agent. Right. And in many cases a lot of things could be solved at a level. So I think we'll have much better customer experience and customer support with voice AI next five years. The second space I think is professional setup, especially in multinational companies, multinational trade, let's say, let's say I'm having a call with my Chinese partners and usually we are not very good at English and let's say real time voice translation will be very, very useful. Or like another example, again like talking to multinational teams, if I can convert accents of different people to sound for me more natural, it will be again like a very high uplift in effectiveness. So call centers, business meetings and lastly robots. Robots are coming to the mass production next two, three years like an optimus from Tesla and others. And we'll have robots everywhere. So a human to robot interaction would be very essential before we get mass deployment of robots in the industry and in the society.
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So how should business leaders look at, you know, measuring the impact of making investments in something like voice AI? What should they be looking for?
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It's all boils down to return on investment roi. So usually have many areas to invest as a business leader and you should carefully where most of the ROI comes and depending again like on the industry and the use case, you can get very high ROI by deploying voice AI agents. Like an example that I'm now discussing inside my company, what if we deploy AI product interviewer and then it just calls to our users customers and ask several questions about the product quality, what we can improve and so on. It will be like a huge uplift for the company because we can understand more insights, more customer feedback very cheaply. The alternative is having a human doing the job right. So ROI there is very clear and I think each business leader should very carefully judge on roi.
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Yeah, well and to that example, you know, traditionally you know, unless all of the interviews that you were doing were in the same language, maybe same geography even, it would be difficult. You'd have to hire people that spoke, you know, either natively or you know, spoke those languages well and well enough to understand and converse. Now this really expands not only for the large multinational companies that maybe are from a cost savings perspective can can leverage this but also from the mid and Large companies that may not have the resources to expand and have multilingual staff and customer service. Right. So I mean it really in a way it could start leveling the playing field. Right?
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Exactly. Yeah. I really believe that AI will enable more innovation and more business enablement and eventually the economy will grow rather than doing a cost cutting and just replacing humans. I'm truly believer in more opportunities than threats with AI.
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Yeah, I believe it. So I want to talk about a couple other things about Krisp and about your journey and kind of balancing the. Certainly there's a lot of VC money floating around for AI investments, but a lot of companies are also deciding to bootstrap. And what factors did you weigh when deciding whether to raise capital versus bootstrapping? And how do you know you've chosen the right path?
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That's a great question. I think when you are building world class technology, you need to do a lot of investment upfront, at least couple of millions depending on the product and the technology. So there is no other choice than go and raise the money from VCs either. You should have the money. Right. And then at our stage we already we are multi product, multi technology company. So it's time to scale the business and we need money for go to market. We need more sales people, more advertising budget, more events and so on. So again VS comes very handy and getting the capital and fueling the business growth is super important. But I can imagine many companies being super effective these days even without VC money. Let's say if you are building a SaaS application and you are yourself or your co founder are engineers, you can leverage all this AI thing and basically get to tens of millions of dollars of annual revenue even without a dollar of physical capital. So I really believe that in the next five years we will have a unicorn companies which are bootstrapped. And I have a team of 10 or 20 people just. And a lot of AI agents.
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Yeah, yeah. In your journey, what lessons have you learned about financing strategies that you think could help early stage founders?
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I think the one thing which we really learned is it's much better to start selling early on. And when you get the customer money, even if you don't have the product, that's the best validation of your idea of your product and so on. And it also helps a lot with the VC fundraising because if you have the customer money then VCs are happy to put extra in order to fill your growth. Right. A good example would be like recently my other company, we basically started promoting a product which don't Exist. It was just an idea. We just did like a sketch in Figma and started promoting to customers and sold like more than $100,000 or more $100,000 to like 30 customers. So it was a very good validation that there's a product market fit. Now we need to go and build it and then I present this to VCs. Everyone gets excited, right?
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Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, another key part in addition to funding is building the right teams to build and continue building and scaling. What do founders often underestimate about hiring and scaling teams outside of Silicon Valley?
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I believe when we're talking about the company, it's best the team. Right. Those are the people who are building the product, who are building the marketing and sales and so on. So like having the world class talent, that's how you can stand out from the competition in each direction of the business, from R and D to sales. In Silicon Valley we have, I know the best people on this planet, but I'm sure that you can find people at the same level outside of the valley if you look very carefully. The challenge would be how, let's say you find a talented engineer, I mean in Bulgari or in Armenia or Romania, like you can do that, but you need to be like very careful. But at the beginning of the company, I think it's more important to bring the people than do in like cost effective way. But then companies start scaling, the costs on engineering, on R and D become more important. So maybe finding the proper talent outside of Valley with less cost also could be very beneficial for the business and for the scale.
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Yeah. And how do you instill a world class standard of product quality in distributed teams? And you know what, what advice would you give to founders who want to tap into global talent?
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That's a great question. I know that there's many successful companies who are building the same product across different distributed team, but we never succeeded to do so. So in our case, when we're building a product, it's usually one location, one team. If you like multiple products, you can have multiple locations, multiple teams. So my advice still would be if you're building a new product, it's much better to gather all the people in one place so you get the energy, the efficiency and like this daily communication between team members and the physical communication between team members so you can build the best product. Then like product is ready and you are just doing iterations with less fit. Then I think bringing people outside of that physical location is realistic. But again, for bigger companies, I believe having Multiple products, built in multiple teams. It's also like a very realistic path.
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Yeah, yeah. And so what do you do to build with your team? What do you do to make sure that you're getting the best ideas from everyone and really building that cohesive team that you've been able to build?
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Yeah, it's a matter of meritocracy and it boils down to the violence of the companies in our company. All the best arguments always win. It doesn't depend who is in the room. Like Junior who just joined the company or the founder of the company. If she or he has the best idea, that should be prioritized and basically become the priority for the team and for the company. And usually in the tech, people who are working directly with technology engineers, product managers, designers, these guys have the best ideas and who are also interacting with the customers. So as a founder, as a leader of the company, you should be very open and communicative with the team to make sure that these companies come to the board and you can decide which one should be protest and so on.
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Yeah, yeah. So a couple things as we wrap up here. First, thinking a little bit ahead here, you know, if we were to have this interview a year from now, what do you predict will be different?
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Yeah, I think we'll have more voice bots in customer contact centers. We will have more AI technologies, empowering human agents, doing like agent assist, doing live translation, ISO translation, all those things bringing more insights from the CRMs and so on. So basically more AI in the call center, better customer service. But I don't feel like one year is short term. So I don't think there was like a dramatic change there. But if you look at 10 years of Horizon, I think we'll get there that we have 10 times better customer success that we have today.
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Yeah, yeah, got it. Well, Ardo, thanks so much for joining today and for sharing your insights. One last question for you. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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It's all about learning. So there are a couple of shows that I watch and books that I read and also I always try to stick my system of values of an entrepreneur and also learn constantly and being very, very open minded to new ideas and changes.
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Great, great. Well, again, I'd like to thank Ardo Manassian, co founder and president at Crisp AI for joining the show. You can learn more about Ardo and Crisp AI by following the links in the show notes. This episode is brought to you by Krisp AI, the all in one voice AI that makes every conversation sound professional. With industry leading noise cancellation, real time accent conversion, accurate transcription and smart call summaries, Krisp helps teams and individuals stay clear and productive, trusted worldwide and powering over 75 billion minutes of conversations each month, Krisp is the easiest way to elevate every call. Try it free at Crisp AI.
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Thanks.
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Again for listening to the Agile Brand. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagile brand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact.
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Me if you're interested in consulting or.
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Advisory services or are looking for a.
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Speaker for your next event, go to.
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Www.Gregkilstrom.Com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay and stay agile.
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Before we continue, I wanted to share a key strategic resource that a majority of the Fortune 500 are already aware of. Finding the best technology, business and talent solutions is not easy. With business demands and competitive pressures mounting, you need to be able to design deployments and optimize your technology to provide leading customer experiences while driving business growth. Those of you that have been listening to this show for a while know that this podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, a global provider of technology, business and talent solutions. For more than 80% of the Fortune 500, Tech Systems accelerates business transformation for their customers. Whether you're looking to maximize your technology roi, drive business growth, or elevate customer experiences, Tech Systems enables enterprises to capitalize on change. Learn more at techsystems.
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That's teksystems.
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Now let's get back to the show.