As AI adoption accelerates across industries, understanding how the technology can enhance business operations has become a key challenge. Asking for A Trend is joined by Craig Walker, founder and CEO of Dialpad, who discusses how the company is looking to help businesses harness the power of AI to drive greater efficiencies.
Walker noted that Dialpad's efforts are focused on “collecting all business communications and analyzing them in real time.” This real-time analysis can help identify customer trends and ultimately enable companies to optimize productivity and efficiency within their organizations. He emphasized that the goal is to “create the most modern communications platform” and leverage AI to provide companies with insights into “business conversations.”
“Last year was the year that AI was all the hype. This year is the year that AI becomes reality. And next year and beyond is the year that the winners really start to monetize AI,” Walker told Yahoo Finance.
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This post was written by Angel Smith
Video Transcript
The AI hype is alive and well, and we were just discussing today how both Oracle and Apple hit all-time highs.
Artificial intelligence has given us the ability to work with open AI.
And now I'm joined by Craig Walker.
He is the founder and CEO of Dial Pad.
Craig.
Craig, great to have you on the show. For our viewers who aren't familiar with you, can you briefly explain a bit about your company, your mission, and the problem that you're trying to solve with your technology?
Well, Josh, it's good to have you here.
Thank you for inviting me.
Yeah.
Dialpad introduces an AI-powered customer intelligence platform that analyzes every business communication in real time.
That means how to improve your contact center calls, how to support one of your sales reps in making a sales call, how to close the deal more effectively with real-time coaching, how to analyze trends in customer satisfaction on certain things, which sales activities are more effective than others, and how to leverage your entire communications stack to make your company smarter and do your job more efficiently.
Craig, we are in the age of AI now, and I think you heard us talk about Apple and Oracle earlier.
So, Craig, can you elaborate on how your company is using that technology?
Yeah.
If you think about it, I used to run voice products at Google, and I founded this company about 14 years ago with the goal of building the most modern communications platform.
Then six years ago, we acquired a real-time AI company and built the capabilities to understand what's actually happening in a conversation into the core of our service.
Fast forward to today, generative AI and large-scale language models have become commonplace, and we have leveraged 6 billion minutes of training data to build our own large-scale language model that can understand business conversations and provide advice in real time.
So the real trick is to understand what's going on in the conversation.
How do you use that understanding to delight your customers, generate more leads, increase purchases, improve your recruiting team's hiring capabilities, and basically make everyone in your company more productive?
So, AI is really finding application in the areas of contact center sales and recruiting.
And, Craig, when we talk about AI, of course, you guys obviously have a ton of data.
Immediate questions arise all the time about data, security and privacy.
How do we get past that?
Craig.
Yeah.
So one of the most important things is to have the largest proprietary language model that is industry specific or specific to our company.
Business communications are owned by us, so they are stored on our servers, within our infrastructure, and are not sent to third parties for analysis.
So by building this in-house and running it at the core of everything we do, it's much more secure, it's not handed over to a third party, it's actually trained on your own data.
In short, owning your own is more accurate, faster and safer.
Craig, this is also a broader question about this moment that we're in right now because, listen, Craig, some would say that what you're witnessing here is a paradigm shift.
I mean, it's the internet, it's mobile, and now it's AI, and do you believe that, Craig?
absolutely.
I mean, there have been various transitions in the past, like moving from on-premise to cloud, but there was a cycle of early adopters making the move quickly and then other CIOs waiting to see how it played out, even after 10+ years.
And when it comes to all the AI brains, that won't be the case.
All large organizations are being mandated internally and by their executives to use and adopt AI to make their teams more efficient and their companies more competitive.
And today's CIOs can't afford to sit back and watch the results just because their competitors are doing it.
You're under pressure to do it, but even in terms of budgets, you see budgets being spent on AI-enabled solutions and not on the parts that require legwork.
So, you could say last year was a year of hype around AI.
This is the year AI becomes a reality.
And next year, and beyond this year, the winners will start to seriously monetize AI.
Only then can you distinguish the winners from the marketing claims, Craig.
I wish we had more time.
It was a great conversation.
We are very grateful for your participation.
Thanks for the invite, Josh.
appreciate.
I got it.
