Kane Simms: And away we go. Matt Clare, welcome to the podcast my friend. How are you?
Matt Clare: Hey, I feel like this is a long time coming. I’m doing great and I finally get to take part in one of these.
Kane Simms: Likewise. So I’m going to be in the chat today. Yeah, yeah, it’s a long time coming. I remember, I think we spoke originally when you were at Google, we spoke when you were at Mitel, we just hadn’t managed to kind of make it happen, but I’m super glad that we can do this now that you’re here at UJET and still heavily involved in the AI space. So excited to chat to you.
Matt Clare: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wouldn’t it be a conversation about CX in 2026 without AI?
Kane Simms: I know, I know. I went to CCW Amsterdam in a few weeks weeks ago and it could have been an AI conference because every single company there was talking about AI. 90% of the talks were about AI. Don’t get me wrong, I was there before that. I’m not as interested in the general CX stuff. I’m pretty much interested exclusively in the role of AI. So for me, it was fine and good.
Matt Clare: But it’s funny though, right? Like if I think back to like 20 years ago when I was doing my first kind of like contact centre industry shows, then heavily communications, like very focused on like physical, you’d have the phone vendors and now 20 years later, you’ve seen this like transition from the like communication shows became contact centre shows becoming AI shows. And I went to like a general technology show a couple months ago and I can tell you like that show felt like it’s become a CX and AI show just because like the use case like AI customer experience, obviously something that everybody is like, yeah, it’s funny how how much it’s like disrupting the event space. Space.
Kane Simms: It’s mad. It’s mad.
Matt Clare: And all this time we’ve kind of couple weeks ago, you saw my mug and my MF Doom sticker on my mug and we went down this rabbit hole about like hip hop and so I’m going to shout out some friends in London, Ontario where I came up
Kane Simms: Yeah, and absolutely the same. It was funny because, you know, I spent a long time kind of, you know, when I was growing up doing the same thing and it’s funny because we were talking about you were saying that you got yourself an MPC in lockdown. I managed to come across the MPC sample fairly recently. So I’ve been diving into that. It’s just funny, isn’t it? It’s funny. So what we thought we would do for this episode, for those tuning in, if you are a hip hop head, like me and Matt, then you’ll enjoy this one very much because. As we go through the discussion today, at certain points, whenever it feels kind of relevant, we’re going to nominate some or a series of or one or however many we get to some hip hop tunes that we think match the moment. And at the end of this episode, we’re going to take them all and stick them on a Spotify playlist and we’ll put it in the show notes and you can go there and you can listen. We can’t really play any music at the minute because obviously YouTube and Spotify now not really enjoy that, but we’ll put it on the playlist afterwards and you can grab it there. Sound good?
Matt Clare: It sounds amazing. This will be the funnest podcast I do out here.
Kane Simms: Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. So maybe it’s very bit of context. It might be worth sharing with the listeners a little bit about yourself, about your role at UJET and a little bit about your experience, as I mentioned, ex Google, ex Mitel, a lot of experience in the contact centre, a lot of experience with AI. What is it that you do and share a little bit about your experience and what you’re doing at UJET?
Matt Clare: Yeah, so really quick, VP of product marketing at UJET today. I’m also responsible for our solution consultant sales engineer group. A 20 years in the space as of this year, came up with a little company called prairieFyre Software based out of Ottawa, Canada. At that time, they were an exclusive provider from Mitel contact centres. We helped them grow to about 300, probably 300 employees, but besides UJET today. And then we got acquired by Mitel and became Mitel’s contact centre platform of choice. Somewhere in there, in the 10 years I did with them, I moved from product marketing to product management and eventually was running contact centre product at Mitel with a considerable number of agents. I think, it was about 1.3 million contact centre seats around the world when I left to go work for Google. Mitel was a good partner with us as being a provider at Google Cloud Contact Center. That’s UJET. Just rebranded, reskinned, subtle tweak and how it deploys on the cloud for the next 10 years. So, yeah, I’m a product manager. UJET and really trying to change the conversation about the value of the AI and CX. And without giving away too, too much that really means like, we all hear automate, automate, automate, automate. You see the headlines. There was a great headline yesterday from IKEA that said, IKEA has moved 2,500 people, replaced 2,500 people with AI for customer service. The subtext was they kept those people. They put those people on higher value work. That’s what AI should be doing. But we keep hearing. And he’s like, yeah, well, I’m just going to replace everybody with robots. And I always joke. I’m like, well, what’s your, what’s your CSAT score look like after you made that change? Nobody wants to share that data. So our kind of approach at UJET is very much so like, AI should be doing the chores. Humans are the ones that deliver value, differentiation, revenue, customer lifetime value, et cetera. And yeah, it’s been a blast over here the last year and a half.
Kane Simms: So nice. Yeah, I think it’s interesting. I thought I saw yesterday, I think it was yesterday that Microsoft apparently is laying off about 60,000 staff, which I think I can’t remember the stats. It might be something like a third of its workforce, focus on AI.
Matt Clare: I got hit by that restructuring. I had a job back at Google within two weeks, they just moved me into a job where I was working on AI instead. So I was kind kind of like, look, I’ll believe that Microsoft’s laying off that many people at the end of the year, when I see that the headcount hasn’t grown, but my gut feel is they’re just repositioning people onto higher value AI focused work and projects. And at the end of the year, that company is still going to have net growth. That would be my sneaky suspicion. I strongly doubt that this is a pure headcount reduction play. And I think that’s where a lot of people get infatuated with this idea of like, save the world and AI can do everything. And it’s like, no, you kind of still need. I think segues into kind of what we wanted to talk about today was this like personal agent. Right. And so now it’s like, I’ve been around, you’ve been around long enough that we heard like, digital channels are coming for voice. And it’s like voice traffic never went down. And we actually hired them back, or we just reposition those humans to do different work. And now it’s like, all right, this personal agent thing showing up now. I mean, arguably doing some automation of things that have always been been available, whether a company, you know, exposes those APIs and that self service capabilities, that if you happen to go to a website or you sign in it into a mobile app or a portal, functionalities just getting exposed in a different way. Am I convinced it’s going to take down the need to talk to a human? I don’t know, man. I don’t think I believe it yet. Like, I think it’s just a new conversation as a result. Yes, for sure. Will customers do more in self service? Sure. But is it going to like build a need for human agents on the other end? I don’t see it. I don’t see it.
Kane Simms: Do you think that’s a kind of, well, I don’t necessarily know whether it’s about the kind of human sort of capital reduction, so to speak, necessarily. It’s more about the consumer trend of these kind of personal AI agents. You think of like Muse, Instinct, Hark, dots from OpenAI, Grok Bot, OpenClaw, I think was one of the first ones to sort of like raise people’s attention. And then you’ve got like Claude and OpenAI, which are, it’s a chat, there’s co-work, so it can actually do stuff as the agent harness. But then there’s also the code platform, whereas Grok Bot kind of sits in the middle of, yes, it’s conversational and it may as well be something like an Instinct type of interaction. But with cursor behind it, it can do all the stuff that the other platforms can do, but it just makes it easier. It’s more user friendly. So it’s like for me, it’s more about the ease of adoption of these platforms and the ease of experimentation on these platforms has the potential for, as you said, the contact to rise. But I don’t know if it will necessarily rise because just because I start using Grok Bot to help me with certain things doesn’t necessarily mean I might have to do things that I wouldn’t have otherwise done, which creates more demand. But it also takes away demand because I’m not calling anymore. It’s the other thing that might be using the website. Instead of call instead of me calling it uses. The website type of thing, you know, so I don’t necessarily know there’s going to be a net. It could be a net massive increase, depending on how fast these take off. But yeah, I don’t know if it’s so much about reducing human capital and more about how do you deal with this new interaction paradigm?
Matt Clare: There’s always two sides to a coin, right? So like, I totally agree with you that the value is actually for the consumer. What will inevitably happen and always does, just like it happened with the agents, is technology, company, spin some ridiculous ROI of saving money and human replacement. Hey, throw everything. But like this will just be another round of we did it with deterministic. We did it with generative. We did it with agentic. Now we’re doing it with personal agents. You can the goal should be deflection and containment of conversations that your humans would otherwise be handling. And I think that, you know, that that in some cases, maybe there’s a potential for that. Like there will be things that as a result of me asking Grok Bot to go do for me, I don’t need to ask somebody to do values for me as a person. I think the this infatuation with like getting interaction volumes down, getting humans off phones like sea level leaders are still going to go, oh, yeah, that’s that’s the value of what we’re doing. And it’s like, no, the value of what you do is delivering a better customer experience. Like I’ve been saying for a long time, probably a decade now, the companies I like the most are the ones I talk to the least. This is a new way for me to ensure that I don’t have to talk to companies. Could those same tasks be performed manually by me in the past? Yes. Now I have like a little helper assistant doing it makes it even easier. Great. Makes it more widely adopted, for sure. I think the impact is on CSAT is going to be the real value. And that’s my first hip hop song. So the and the value of all of this is being able to tell an assistant to go do something, go do this there. And. And so my first hip hop track that I’m going to name is Lyrics Born. I don’t know if you know that name. Lyrics Born is one of two guys from a group early 90s hip hop group called Latyrx. L-A-T-Y-R-X. They like almost soulful hip hop banger called Do That There. And that’s the value of these AI agents is, hey, I need you to book me flight tickets or find me the cheapest flight tickets. Go do that. Here’s the sites I want you to go do it on. Go do it. So that’s my first my first track for the list today.
Kane Simms: Nice one, I like it. Lyrics Born, Do That There. That’s the first one on the playlist. That is class. So what I was thinking when we were thinking about this is which I which will arrive at my first song, which is the polar opposite of yours, which is that I don’t think that I don’t think consumers will stop using these personal agents. I think we’re at the very beginning of what could be a pretty significant rising adoption. Just three or four weeks spent with Grok Bot and trial in Dots and Inst historically hasn’t been set up from the beginning to be a doing partner. It’s been set up from the beginning to be a chat partner or information based partner. And that was great for OpenAI. And that’s what’s led to that initial adoption. But that’s not what’s going to continue. And I think that the way that these agents platforms now have positioned themselves out of the gate as we will do jobs for you. That’s that if you can make that easy, I think you’ll find that you you’ll get really great adoption and Grok Bot its onboarding journey is unbelievable. In the space of four days through this asynchronous chat before you before I before I I knew where I was. It had access to my email, had access to Slack, had access to my CRM, my calendar. And yet last night when I was experimenting with it, it signed in to Claude via its own browser and was interacting with Claude on my behalf via its own browser. That’s not something I’m going to maintain because it seems incredibly risky for me. But the reality is it can go in there and it can do it. So, you know, when you think about these things now as they’re emerging, sometimes you’re not going to have a choice about it, the business, because someone can just sign into their bank account using Grok Bot and Grok Bot can just get on with it. But the business is going to have to try and figure out what do we allow? What do we not allow? How far do we go? Where do we stop? For the purposes of preserving our own security, for example, in the between the rise of these personal agents, a facility in business with customers, businesses and users are going to have to regulate what they are going to do.
Matt Clare: I think that’s a good point. I’m going to drop another one right now. So I had written down The Roots, The Next Movement, which was like the third record, I think. And I’ve written that down as like the next movement in CX is like we for the last two years at UJET, since we launched our conversational analytics platform, we’ve been talking about like root cause analysis and the importance of using analytics, not just to like optimize a virtual, but like optimize to not have an interaction again. Right. Most of the ones I don’t talk to. And this is kind of an evolution of that, which is like it’s not just how do you optimize for not having an interaction, but like what are you what risk are what are you willing to expose? Cause like, again, I’ll come back to like some of it, chatting a lot of it just internally the folks, as we’ve been thinking about our own roadmap for personal agents and how we we’re going to support that at UJET, like the idea of exposing. functionality via self service is not new. Microsoft Nuance was doing this ages ago when like language models sucked and it sounded like talking to a robot, right? Like the tech’s been around for a long time for companies to expose self service over the phone or through a web portal or through a mobile app. And you still like get certain things like I called my bank last March, maybe this past year, I was in my mobile app trying to get a call. And I was like, why are you asking me in chat? I get a lot of human. And he goes, so are you going to have to call in? I can’t do that over chat. And I was like, well, you know who I am. Can’t you call me? And he’s like, No, I’m just a Just because I can ask my Grok assistant to go do this now is my bank and expose it. Of course not. So this is where I’m like having a bit of an existential crisis with all this personal agent stuff is like how far are companies willing to take it? Because they companies will take it as far as they can. We know that most consumers take a little bit of risk. Like you said, maybe you don’t want to punch it through and doing stuff in cloud for you. Longer term. But it can. Right. So it’s like the thing that kills me about this industry customer experience contact centre is technologies always further along than adoption. Yeah. Typically, right. Like you think of like you think back to like Omni channel and multi modal and you think through like agentic. And it’s like, I think most people would tell you they have agentic AI and it’s pretty vanilla generative FAQs. It’s not anything that we consider agentic as like folks in the industry. So what’s weird is I think the consumer desire to adopt personal agents to do the work because of the value that provides us as consumers. Consumers is super high. Will companies actually get there becomes a big?
Kane Simms: Yeah. 100 percent. I mean. I mean, I think Amazon’s already blocked bots from using its Web app. But actually, apparently the whole economy is essentially built on banks keeping hold of as much money as is humanly possible. And the person I was talking to was saying that one of the biggest threats, actually, about these personal agents is that if everyone does it, if everyone uses them and all of a sudden banking becomes an interaction with personal agents, those personal agents don’t care about anything and all they care about really is doing the thing, which means that they potentially could be initiating transactions at a pace and at a rate that the banks can’t cope with. Therefore, the entirety of the banking industry and therefore the economy could feasibly collapse because they could be moving money around at a rapid rate, which just depletes the capital that they have stored.
Matt Clare: Crazy. But you can also so like. Comparable story. Last year, I visited a large retailer in North America and a good chunk of the calls I watched her staff handle in a couple of hours. I got to the kind of shadow in the contact centre was doing returns and refunds. When they got to a refund request, because like an order didn’t get delivered, there’s no checks or balances. And like it’s under 100 dollars, we’ll just give you your money back. It’ll cost us more money to look into this than it will for us to give you the money back. Well, you take that like internal corporate mandate and you expose the ability to just get overwhelmed and swarmed with personal agents asking for refunds. Like. Are you going to go bankrupt tomorrow? Today, the friction is a human has to do initiate that interaction, right. You’re going to get. So my next song is Sims, Future Shock. And so I think like when we think of the impact of this tack, everybody right now is thinking like, what do do we do? How do we get set up sooner than the later? So we’re going to differentiate in the space. But at the same time, it’s like. Your risk team, your compliance teams are there, they’re staring future shock in the face, because you’re getting these like crazy questions around. Does the way we’ve been operating not only, not only like, how should we operate in the future, but there’s a way that we’ve been operating as a corporate philosophy, does it even make sense in this new world? Or do we risk bankrupting ourselves as soon as somebody figures out that this has been our policy? And six thousand personal agents on us.
Kane Simms: I think I’ve got two there, actually. So one is related to the first part of the conversation, which is the whole kind of thing about how do businesses respond? Because businesses could block the adoption of these things, you know, and banks.
Matt Clare: Well, and they should. Yeah.
Kane Simms: Yeah. And so and the reason for that is they they they basically without
Matt Clare: There you go. Yeah. Now, now we’re talking. I absolutely love those guys. Yeah. I still have a pretty worn out tape from probably the late 90s. Yeah. I don’t know what it would have been right when it came out, but yeah. Yeah.
Kane Simms: All of my favorites. And related to what you were talking about in terms of future shock, I think it potentially even goes one further than that, which is related to my next tune I have, which is the some I couldn’t do this without putting some UK MCs. So I’ve gone for Lewis Parker and Yungun and their tune is called The Big Idea. And the big idea for me is that what whether it’s personal agents or not, what I think is is occurring is. I’d love to get your What I think is happening is that businesses for a long time have pretty much firstly differentiated on product. Go back to the 80s, 70s, whatever. It was all differentiation on product because we were innovating new technology or the oh, my God, that’s a brilliant invention. you were built based on the products they sold. And then as things start to mature, you start to to get in this kind of like pricing war. So then business start differentiating based on pricing. And then you’ve got premium brands and expensive brands and cheap brands and medium. So then you start to get into this sort sort of like differentiation based on pricing. And then as the Internet comes around, everything starts to become more abundant. everything starts to become more readily available. And then you start differentiating based on the brand. Well, I like Apple because I’m an Apple guy or I like the PC because I’m a PC guy. And you start to differentiate based on the brands that you subscribe to.
Matt Clare: Is it brand or is it user experience associated with the brand?
Kane Simms: Well, that, I think, is the fourth leap. It moves from brand to experience. And for the last decade or two, we’ve been brands have been differentiating based on experience because the products and pricing has started to basically homogenize. So it doesn’t really matter where you get your insurance from.
Matt Clare: Talk about AI making things worse. It’s easier to build SaaS products than ever right now now. So how long are you going to be different for two weeks? Exactly. I bet when you see it with like the frontier models, it’s like somebody will put in, like the AI leaders are an AI leader for 10 days max until one of the other AI vendors launches their new frontier model and takes over and is doing stuff that you’re not doing.
Kane Simms: So basically where we’ve been is that brands have started differentiating with product, then started differentiating on pricing, then started differentiating on. Then started differentiating on experience because as long as my car gets me to school and back, it’s still a car. As long as my insurance company ensures me, it’s still insurance. As long as my bank holds my money, it’s still a bank. So the actual thing that you do is less important than the experience you provide. However, as you start to get into there, what AI starts to do is it starts to make the experience less important because an AI agent doesn’t care less about your experience because it’ll just figure it out. It doesn’t mind waiting on hold for 35 minutes before it speaks to someone because it doesn’t care about time. It doesn’t mind a rubbish website because it’ll figure it out. So what it potentially does, and I spoke to Mathias Fanschek about this from Raiffeisen Bank fairly recently, and I didn’t really appreciate what he was saying until recently, which was he was talking about the headless bank. And I think that’s kind of where we’re getting to is almost a headless organisation where the product doesn’t really matter as long as it meets my needs. The pricing isn’t as important as it was because everything costs pretty much the same. I don’t really care about the brand because I’m never going to see you, quite frankly. And I don’t care about the experience because I’m not the one that’s engaged in the experience. So when you do that and they’re going back to that song, The Big Idea by Lewis Parker, when you’re going. When you do that, the big idea basically is customers get what they want when they want for a price they’re happy to pay and they don’t care less about about who provides it. And what that does to businesses, I think causes massive problems because everything that you’ve been relying on so far to build your business disappears as differentiation.
Matt Clare: Yeah. Which which then puts the ball firmly back in the court of. If you’re not enabling personal agents to engage with your business. What are you leaving on the table? Yeah. Right. Which is you’re essentially leaving almost all your differentiation on the table because that that effectively is like the next generation of experience.
Kane Simms: Crazy. It’s mad. But at the same time, the question is, you know, how much do you divulge and offer and open up? Because, you know, let’s say you’re a bank and you offer mortgages and savings and stuff like that. And you want to be really innovative and you want to be getting out there and you want to make sure that you’re available in all these personal agent platforms. You take a really innovative stance and you think all we care about is getting to the customer where you end up basically is in a position where you volunteer yourself to be intermediated by an aggregator to ultimately which which is this personal agent who doesn’t care less about you or your brand and only only cares about getting the best deal for the customer. So you lose the contact with the customer. You lose the customer relationship. And what you’re left with purely is product price, you know, and
Matt Clare: Probably still going to need a human in the loop like as a business. Right. Like obviously whoever the consumer is using the personal agent they’re going. And ideally it won’t be doing anything that you’re not aligned to doing. But you think like that price matching use case and price matching use case that existed for a while. Like I can program a generative bot to let my users come on my website and chat with an e-commerce bot and negotiate the price. Yeah. The question is how far do you want to take that with somebody being in the loop making those changes. Right. So it becomes like, all right, I think back to my refund use case. My groceries never showed up. All right. Well, I have a picture of them sitting on your front porch from the shipping company. So how are you going to prove to me otherwise? Right. And do you really want as an organization, your AI just to refund that consumer AI based on what it was saying? or do you want to go. Guess what? Like this is what kills me in all of this is like human to human conversations are still going to need to happen. It’s just the conversations again. Like this is like a new level of like friction and like emotional charge, if you will. Right. So it’s like, all right, me, not the consumer. I tried to go place a refund for this delivery that never showed up. I tell my Grok to go do it. It tries to do it and can’t. Now I’m frustrated. Now I need to talk to a human. And so this is where I’m like, like you think of the humans in the contact centre or customer service, perhaps whatever you want to call them. like they’re just going to be getting the new level of heated escalations because it’s like, all right, so we expose the ability for you to do something. It couldn’t do it. The task failed. It was blocked and seemed too risky, too sensitive. Or we just didn’t expose what you were doing. Now you’re going. You’re going to have even more pissed off customers, part of the language. Potentially contacting the businesses. And so I think that’s through all of this is what matters most to me is like, yeah, totally agree for the companies that nail it and get it right. And I think it could definitely like distance yourself from the process. But if something goes wrong, that customer is coming in hotter than they’ve ever come in. When they pick up that phone. Right. And so like I’ve been saying for a while now, like again, the companies that I like the most are the ones I never talked to you. Why? That doesn’t mean that I’m not engaging with them in other ways. I tried. I tried to do it for me and come in. Then I had to take it upon myself to go do the research and try to figure it out myself and still come in. Now I’m picking up the phone. We’ve wasted a ton of times. We’ve wasted AI tokens. It’s just like we’re just like adding layers to this problem. And so I see like I see an opportunity for personal agents to bring down conversation volume into a business. 100% routine, mundane, repeatable conversations, transactional stuff for sure. But I also see the other side of the coin, which is, hey, if this doesn’t go well and you’re not exposing something that I as a consumer think you should be like, am I going to go shop somewhere else where they’ll expose me to this functionality? Quite possibly. Right. So yeah, it’s a brave new frontier.
Kane Simms: I’m kind of like I always think in extremes, I suppose, which is like I think tremendous amount of value and slowing down the process and therefore slowing down the service to the customer and all that kind of stuff. So it’s that first wave of digital transformation. And what happened in that sort of phase was that at the same time as businesses were trying to move from like on-prem into the cloud and moving from paper to digital and moving from Excel spreadsheets to systems. While all that was happening, in the background you had eBay, Uber, Airbnb, Booking.com and all these companies that emerged that were built on that from the ground up anyway, Monzo, Revolut, and those kind of like leapfrog a bunch of companies because they didn’t have the baggage that other companies had. And so I always kind of think about that and I think, well, on the one hand, some companies did have to do a lot of work to change the way that they were operating because if they didn’t, they’d end up like Blockbuster, prime example. Blockbuster stayed where it was. Netflix emerges, built on digital and all of a sudden everything’s over. So on the one hand, I always think that this might be another one of those times where we’ve already seen OpenAI and Anthropic, come out of nowhere, and now they’re two of the most valuable companies on the planet. Google has managed to transform itself and get itself into a place where it’s also one of those, you know, leaders in AI. So it’s like on the one hand, I feel as though companies are in a position that they’ve been in before to bring back a tune that I think is a classic as well, not a classic, but it’s a good tune from Nas, Destroy and Rebuild, from Stillmatic. And how much do we expose, how much do we not expose? We’re going to have to orient ourselves to be able to handle potentially increasing demand. And we’re not going to be able to do that with people alone. We’re going to have to put AI agents in place. Now all of of a sudden we’ve got a knowledge management problem, a system integration problem, an infrastructure problem, a data problem, and all of this stuff. The first wave of digital transformation didn’t solve emerges again. On the other hand, on the other flip side, I think sometimes have I just got my, like, again, another tune, another classic, classic group, Gang Starr featuring Inspectah Deck above the clouds. Great. Do we just have our head in the clouds because we’re all in this industry and we love AI and we think that that’s just inevitable because it’s where we are.
Matt Clare: Well, what’s really crazy is when you think of that, like digital transformation and the companies that you mentioned that came out, like they embraced it day zero. This is the thing that it’s a fact, like that’s like a Pandora’s box, right? Like, uh, uh, about probably two or three years ago, I met with a bank out of. Australia and they were like, we don’t do brick and mortar. We don’t have ATM machines. We’re entirely a digital online bank, everything’s self serviceable. Like there’s, you can literally nothing that you would ever talk to a human about the company. And it was like, Oh, like, yeah, you showed up post LLMs. You showed up post generative and you built your financial institution from zero based on the tech that was available today. Like what bank, what retailer is going to show up tomorrow? That’s designed for this next era, uh, of. personal agents. Right. And this is like, it’s like, it’s like, how do I go invest in those? It will be a lot easier for a company that’s not like you think of banks like, you think of banks like, also using like as for terminals like, you’re ,’s still common in the major financial institutions like you get a point where at that green screen tech from 30 years ago, uh, mainframe and you’re building with personal agents online is probably a lot easier.
Kane Simms: There might even be companies that, you know, I think the big winners obviously thus far is OpenAI, Anthropic, Google. I think Grok Bot is quite good. And I think that, you know, they’ve always got a massive investment from SpaceX and all that kind of stuff. But like that could potentially be a pretty successful consumer product if it continues. But then at the same time you potentially also got the emergence of those companies that
Matt Clare: You’d be starting to see this with like some Saa with like some SaaS companies websites now you go to it and it looks like Gemini or ChatGPT. Yeah, exactly. It’s like you don’t have to worry about the merchandising aspect and. You don’t have to worry about laying everything out. Like you literally just have a search bar and an ask me anything agent on the website. And that’s that will do the work like find the page for me. Why are you making me click to a page and go through your navigation and scroll past the fold like all these things that like marketing has been trying to optimize for the last 30 years. You got to go like no like hey, I go figure this out and tell me tell me what I’m looking like give me the answers to what I’m looking for.
Kane Simms: Yeah. And where do you think all of this kind of where do you think that this leaves the contact centre in terms of because not all of a lot. Not all of what we’ve spoken about thus far is necessarily being contact centre related from a point of you all.
Matt Clare: Almost do it all with them. You can almost do it all with that which is the fascinating thing in all of this right. like if a company exposes functionality that an AI agent can talk to or that an agent can interact with you actually remove the need for a conversation. So like I keep hearing like oh like an AI agent is going to sit on hold and talk to a live human like that sounds like a boring waste of time and money for everybody involved like expose the API’s and a portal that my agent is going to be a AI agent can log into and do it without ever having a conversation. Why are we wasting our money on conversation? But it does change like the way we think about CCaaS It’s the like enabling technology behind customer experience and customer service. I think it broadens the scope of what we think customer experience is. It’s the business that serves us right like like me be searching for a product that I want to buy is customer customer customer experience. What happens beyond support post sale could be cross sell up sales problems all that stuff is customer experience. And when you talk to both contacts on our platform providers, they’re focused on channels and the conversations themselves. So I think it begs this really interesting question, which is like what happens to CCaaS. So CCaaS has become effectively an AI platform where every vendor will tell you that virtual agents and agent assist tools. And then they’ll tell you they have the plumbing underneath voice channels, digital channels, reporting, writing, all that jazz. Now that’s going anywhere, right? Like I said at the top of the call, like the most of the larger enterprise ones aren’t standardized in on one. The same retailer I mentioned earlier I bumped into this year at a show today. What are you guys looking at? And they say, just see what’s new. I said, can you guys just make like a multi-year, multimillion dollar commitment to a vendor? And they said, yeah, but nobody’s going to be number one for more than 12 months is our assumption. So we’re doing bake-offs constantly and POCs constantly and different lines of businesses are trying different AI engines and platforms, computing platforms. And they were like, we won’t even sign a contract for more than a year. Like this industry that I came up in, that we came up in, like has lived and thrived on multi-year contracts for the last 20, 30 years. And now you’ve got leading enterprises going, I won’t sign a contract for more than a year because I don’t trust your leadership position will still be intact next year. So it’s, I think it puts the onus on CCaaS vendors to be like an enabling orchestrator. Like, like you sit in a metal and you got all these sprockets, you’re the mastermind, if you will. There’s my next song, Deltron 3030, Mastermind, great record, huge Del fan, huge Hieroglyphics fan. And yeah, and yeah, I think CCaaS, the CCaaS vendors that win will be the CCaaS vendors that can mastermind the the intent experience across everything. And when I say everything, I mean like e-commerce and shopping and like, you know, the purchasing experience to the transactional experiences, to the customer conversations and what we think of traditional contact centre solutions, kind of capabilities all the way through to cross sells, upsells, promos, things that generate customer lifetime value. Those will be the mastermind platforms that win.
Kane Simms: Nice. Love that. That is a quality tune as well. It makes me think you know, as we sort of, there there’s a lot of moving paths, there’s a lot of things going on, but at the same time, I think it is a brilliant time to be in this industry. As you mentioned, you know, from the, I mean, I don’t work at a technology company, so it’s a bit different for me. I imagine that if I was only getting 12 month deals and I was used to getting three year deals, I’d be, you know, I’d probably be a bit worried. And also the nature of the commercials are changing as well, which is some people are going consumption based, some are going outcome based, some are going still licensed based based on whatever. So it’s a turbulent time in terms of the usage or you’ve got a lot of companies that are just trying to build their own stuff, do their own thing type of thing. So, you know, where’s the opportunity? But I think that what is the case? I do genuinely believe this. I know we spoke a lot about personal agents, but I think that businesses are fundamentally just people, processes and systems, aren’t they? That’s all it is. So, you know, you’re always going to have people. I think that yes, I know Y Combinator is raving about this one person billion dollar company, which everyone’s trying to find, but most businesses are not going to be that most businesses are going to require people, whether it’s strategy a strategy delivery, delivery, contact centre, definitely in a midterm. And a lot of businesses are built on archaic processes and archaic systems. And I think that the opportunity there is to leverage AI to change that to get yourself in a better position where you’ve got better processes. So you can deliver better services. And in order to do that, you’re going to need better technology. So the chewing I was going to end on was was Our Time by Klashnekoff, from his The Sagas Of Klashnekoff album, which is a a classic one because I do think it’s our time and this is a moment to be alive.
Matt Clare: I actually don’t know that one.
Kane Simms: Finally, you know, I, I’ve accomplished something today. So so that is the that’s the thing. I think it’s our time and it’s a great time to be in this industry. But when I was just thinking there about people, processes and systems, that’s the classic that doesn’t change. that kind of triangle is that is the beginning and end of everything and every business knows always has and always will be. So I’ve just thought of another one which will be apt to put onto that, which is Jehst featuring Chester P. And I believe Kyza and the tune is. Called the trilogy from the High Plains Drifter album. So there you go. There’s a one there’s another one I’ll throw into that mix.
Matt Clare: Talk to you. You’re doing something right. Yeah. And that doesn’t mean you’re perfect, but it means that you’ve enabled me to help myself when I need help. I think that’s still the measuring stick. Like, and this this whole personal agent thing is just the next generation of, you know, how, how do you provide the same products and services and costs competition is awesome. You want to compete on because it’s a race to the bottom really quickly. So prices are pretty stable across providers. And then you go like, all right, well, is it brand disease or experience? What is it? It’s how do you get to that? Like one of a kind. And that’ll be my last tune. Blackalicious. Innovating for innovation sake and I made that way easier than it’s ever been. Right. Like you can iterate crazy fast and like one engineer can code at the speed of like 10 or 20 engineers now using agents to help them code. Like ask your customers what they want. Ask your customers what makes sense for self-service. Ask them what they want to do. Give give your customers what they want.
Kane Simms: Love that. Great place to end. Matt, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. We’ll get these tunes put onto a Spotify playlist. We’ll put them in the show notes on the website and all that kind of stuff. And, uh, yeah, I’m excited to give it a listen.
Matt Clare: Yeah, likewise. It’ll be a fun dog walk later today.
Kane Simms: Absolutely. Absolutely. Nice one, Matt. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much. We’ll put your details in there as well and UJET, and your LinkedIn and all that. To chat either business or hip hop. I’m sure you don’t mind.
Matt Clare: I’ll take either.
Kane Simms: Nice. Nice one. Thanks very much. And thank you all for tuning in. We’ll see you again on the next one.
