AI & Human Relationships - !Unlikely Allies?!

As part of the CPaaSAA Smart Communications Summit, this panel served as a sort of Rosetta Stone, creating visibility for the telecom-exec audience of the CPaaSAA into how opportunities for AI texting are seen from the perspective of customers whom the telecom industry would classify as “end users”. 

The discussion centered around how, contrary to the oft-repeated fear that AI replaces what humans do, AI can be supportive of human time, talent, and relationships.

Steve Mesler, who gold medaled at the 2010 Winter Olympics with his 4-man bobsled team, now uses his celebrity to help children in his role as CEO of non-profit Classroom Champions. The organization forms months-long mentorship relationships between kids and Olympic athletes, teaching that grit is not an inborn trait but a learned skill. 

Steve described how the bulk of the year goes mostly without a hitch because all interactions between the students and the athlete are asynchronous. A bottleneck happens twice a year,  when trying to coordinate synchronous meetings on Zoom: athletes around the world are involved, and an athlete’s schedule is fundamentally unpredictable thanks to weather and other variables.

Then Steve’s wife interacted via Lumin.ai with another vendor, and suggested that Classroom Champions use it to coordinate at scale. The results: completion rate increased by 15%, meaning that thousands more children were able to benefit from their coaching opportunity. Staff members spent 40% less time, freeing them to support athletes and teachers.

Mike Steed serves as Chief Growth Officer at SYNERGY HomeCare, the fourth largest home care franchise in the nation. His team works with people who might want to own a SYNERGY location, helping them determine whether they’re a good fit. This is a deeply personal conversation, as the goal is not that they’ll buy a franchise, but that that they’ll make the right choice.

The most important activity is speaking with potential franchisees about this fit; but traditional approaches fill a team member’s day with the arduous task of reaching out to 180 prospects a month, as many as 6 times. Ironically, one of the most disruptive surprises is to actually have someone answer the phone and talk for half an hour!

Using Lumin.ai, SYNERGY’s lead-to-appointment conversion ratio rose from 14% to 30%. Mike says his team members feel their job quality has improved, now that they spend so much less time at the chase and double the time having meaningful conversations. Their conversations are more thoughtful and planned. With Lumin.ai’s help in 2022, they had record sales, and are on track to do that again this year.

Keith Gerson is one of the most widely recognized experts in the franchising industry. Through his leadership role with FranConnect as their President of Franchise Operations, he has visibility into performance statistics across FranConnect’s 1500+. As such, he’s in an unusually good position to articulate issues that cross the entire franchising industry.

He made several key points that validate the breadth of the opportunity for AI in franchising.

• Growth is a franchise’s lifeblood. Franchisees enter the brand in large part because the franchisor can support their success through shared resources. That matures as the franchise grows.
• With leads costing $110 on average, and a brand’s lead budget averaging $250k, every brand treats leads like gold.
• Most brands manage to talk to only 7% of their leads; but with Lumin.ai in place, that average is closer to 23%.

Kevin Nethercott, Managing Partner of CPaaSAA, capped off the discussion by connecting a few dots for the audience of telecommunications executives. 

First, as small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) are seen as a major growth opportunity for telecoms, franchising plays directly into the sweet spot, representing “Main Street”: businesses of 2 to 10 people.

Second, he and Keith both underscored that while many systems can take months to implement and require a substantial lift by IT, implementing an AI system like Lumin.ai can by as fast as a couple of weeks.

Finally, he came back full circle to the premise of today’s panel session: that AI can be provide value other than by undercutting the cost of human labor, and hence can be supportive of human talent and relationships.

That implication, while obviously of human interest, also highlights a contrast in commercial models. In the telecom industry, one is often happy when a text generates a nickel of value. For the applications we discussed in this session, a text can routinely generate tens to hundreds of dollars of ROI.

View the full recording here.