Shawn Cordner (00:13.038)

Hey everyone and welcome to the Amplitude of Tech Podcast. I’m Shawn Cordner, Chief Marketing Officer of Amplix. This is the Inside Amplix edition of the podcast. What does that mean? We’re going to bring you thought leadership from Amplix employees, actionable intel and insights that we’ve learned by doing thousands and thousands of technology transformation projects. Hope you enjoy the episode.

 

Shawn Cordner (00:38.83)

All right, Mike Dolloff, welcome to the Amplitude of Tech podcast. This is the Inside Amplix edition and you are one of the key people inside Amplix, so I’m happy to have you here. Maybe just tell people a little bit about who you are, what you do here.

 

Mike Dolloff (00:51.66)

Yeah, glad to be on. I’ve been waiting for this day for like feels like ten years. So honored to be on. Surprised it only took a hundred-dollar bribe to get here.

 

Shawn Cordner (01:01.166)

I didn’t get that yet, by the way. I’ll send you my Venmo afterwards.

 

Mike Dolloff (01:04.79)

No problem. I’m sure sure it’s on the way. Yeah. So Mike Dolloff. I’m E VP of Sales and Account Management. I’ve been with the company for over twelve years now and came as much of Implics did through strategic acquisition. And I’d worked to build out a CX focused technology advisory and services company. And so love the contact center and CX space, been in that in industry for a while, but now of a broader view, help our clients with not just that, but a lot of other areas and

 

But that’s about it on me.

 

Shawn Cordner (01:36.35)

All right. having been in this space for that long, you’ve seen quite a bit of change in the landscape of the industry and of course the technology of the industry. And so it’s been, you know, a few years since AI has become the buzzword and and it’s been practically available for enterprises to implement in a a way that actually can impact their business. And so I’m wondering, you know, from your perspective,

 

Where are we at in terms of adoption across enterprises that have contact centers?

 

Mike Dolloff (02:10.486)

Yeah, I think if you if you think of like the the innovation adoption curve where you’ve got kind of this this bell curve shape and where people are at, I I think we’re getting close to the top of that where you’ve got kind of the early majority is kind of reaching peak peak saturation and then we’re gonna start getting towards the late majority here in the next couple probably months to year. So we’re right in the thick of it right now.

 

And it what that practically means, I think, is there’s still a good probably close to fifty percent of the market that’s not doing much with AI in the contact center yet. Which might sound surprising because you see so much and this has been the news and you go to an event and you you search anything on this and it’s it’s everywhere. It’s the the amount of volume of this noise around this is so loud. But practically speaking, you will still see probably roughly fifty percent of the contact centers that aren’t doing anything yet. Now, when I say that

 

Researching, yes, evaluating things, thinking of strategy. Maybe they’re working on internal governance and guardrails. Yes, I’m sure more than 50% of that have that stuff going. But actually using AI in the contact center, I think it’s still around 50% or less. Now, some are like very fully there, and some are dabbling in in proof of concept or have one or two use cases built out. But that’s kind of where we’re at. I still think there’s a lot of

 

There’s a lot of runway. So if you’re if you’re like, man, I haven’t done anything yet, you’re not the last person. And I’ve been saying that for a couple of years. At some point though, I’ll be like, You are the last person. We’re not there yet. Yep.

 

Shawn Cordner (03:43.894)

It’s coming. So you said fully there. That that was the the words that you used about, you know, businesses that are really in engaged in the adoption of AI in the contact center. What does that look like?

 

Mike Dolloff (03:56.396)

Yeah, I think there’s there’s a there’s just a handful of folks there. But I think it’s like I I like to think of the contact center when it comes to AI in two two big buckets. Like you’ve got where is it directly interfacing and impacting the end customers and then where is it impacting the business internally? And you know, a customer that’s fully there is is leveraging as it makes sense to the business in both of those buckets pretty comprehensively.

 

And we can dig deeper into that. But at a high level, that’s what it is, right? You’re doing something where you’re leveraging AI for your in in-facing customer interactions, right? Whether that’s a really intelligent chat or SMS experience, really intelligent kind of voice virtual agent experience, some combination thereof. And then on the internal side, meaning the business side, it’s you you’re leveraging AI to really make smarter, more informed, more more capable agents, right? Whether that’s

 

you know, better QA and and automation around that. So you’re measuring more, more comprehensively. You’re helping agents have knowledge at their fingertips and without having to search for it, you’re streamlining that process. So when they’re on an interaction, they’re focused on the the human component, understanding and empathy and solving a complex problem versus, where’s that document? And let me ping a colleague like having that surfaced up. Things like that. So being being mature and adopting across all these different areas, which

 

Which are all part of the contact center, but historically, right, like you’ve you’ve had, you know, a lot of contact centers have siloed this stuff, right? the the I VR stuff, that’s this team, that’s this person, the QA, that’s this team. So this kind of crosses a lot of the functional teams that are responsible for the the contact center operations in tech.

 

Shawn Cordner (05:40.302)

When I think about AI in the context center, now mind you, I’m not out there selling this, right? I’m not engaging with clients at that level. What is most visible to me is the front end stuff, right? So chat bots and and you know, voice AI bots and not do we call them bots anymore, agents, I guess I’m I’m using old terms.

 

Mike Dolloff (05:59.53)

No one’s standardized, but yeah, virtual agents, I guess, is more of the common term now. Yeah.

 

Shawn Cordner (06:04.47)

Yeah, I I’m increasingly becoming the cranky old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn and I not keeping up with the vernacular. But you know, so I so that’s what I think of, right, is is that front end facing, customer facing experience type of stuff. And when we had our prep call before this, you said that actually you think there might be more adoption on the back end stuff. So just just kind of talk to me about what is the entry point for most businesses? Is it the front end stuff and they quickly grow to the back?

 

Mike Dolloff (06:09.271)

You and me both.

 

Shawn Cordner (06:31.776)

Or is it back and then they start to grow to the front?

 

Mike Dolloff (06:34.786)

Yeah. I I think when you think about the horror stories you’ve heard about AI when it comes to the contact center, most of those have been like you you know, the the chap bought that gave s gave away a car at a dealership for five dollars or somebody had to do a ticket exchange with one of the airline carriers because of a a death and the you know, it was just a very un inhumane sort of treatment of how it was dealt with. those those are the ones that pop into people’s heads because the

 

press. So I think there’s created a little bit more fear broadly in the market because of that on the on the customer side. Somewhat. Now there’s still lots of people are like full steam ahead. But I think that created a little bit initially of like concern and fear around that. I think we’ve largely gotten past that. And people people aren’t we’re not seeing that, I mean, done what well, like that’s not a problem at all. But but there is a little bit of kind of reticence of well, I don’t want to I don’t want to screw up a customer interaction. I get it, right? Like that’s

 

That’s that’s how that’s your brand. That’s the front door to your business in a lot of cases. And people are really concerned. That being said, there is a lot of adoption there. But yeah, I think on the back end side of it, you’ve got AI being used. It’s not as immediately visible to us as a consumer, but on the contact center, it’s, you know, yeah, there’s agent assist that’s happening. There’s knowledge, you know, AI driven knowledge that’s happening. There’s interaction summarization and QA that’s happening.

 

And I think a lot of that is because A, it’s not facing the public. And so people felt like this is a little more contained. This is an internal workflow versus if this isn’t set up or just done right, I’m gonna impact customers directly. And I I think that’s one thing. The other thing is these are existing processes that you’re able to leverage AI to augment very quickly. You think you think outside of like the contact center, just broadly, we’ve done we’re doing things as individuals or in the business where we’re using

 

tools like Copilot and Claude and others to now augment a process that we’ve been doing manually. It’s the same concept here in the contact center with these. So I think people gravitate versus like, hey, I’m going to build an entire customer interaction and journey and use generative AI or agentic AI to do that on the front end. That feels more daunting. It is, frankly, than like, hey, I’m going to leverage gener, you know, generative AI to summarize my interaction I just had as an agent.

 

Mike Dolloff (08:58.08)

So my notes are really concise and I can say yes or no, this is right. So I think there’s a level of effort, there’s a level of perceived risk difference between them. Also think too, some of it is there’s this big debate going on out there of like, is AI enabled CX the future where humans aren’t needed? Or is this to augment and improve humans? And I think this is a broader societal discussion. But, you know, my feeling is people feel very comfortable of how do I leverage to make these agents more

 

more effective in and that quells some of the noise too of like, am I are my contact center agents gonna go away? Like, hey, I’m gonna help you get better and smarter. I’m gonna help you get more of the interactions and handle those more efficiently or take off some of the interactions that are maybe frustrating or repetitive. So you can focus on these important ones. I think that that’s where I think a lot of companies are trying to get to too and like let’s enable the team to have a more, I hate to say, but like enjoyable job to some extent because it’s tough being in the contact center.

 

Just getting counted with issues all day long.

 

Shawn Cordner (09:59.628)

Yeah. I think everyone that I’ve spoken to on this podcast, at our events, doing stakeholder interviews for projects, when I’m I’m dealing with a technology leader and I ask them about AI, whether it’s in the contact center or not, they all have the view that this is an enabler and it might be something that reduces future costs of staffing up so that they don’t have to scale human resources linearly with increased you know.

 

volume or whatever growth they’re seeing in their contact center or their business. But nobody is saying I’m hoping to get rid of everybody. And y you do see some of these horror stories like Klarna, I think, was someone that overnight fired like what, seven hundred agents and then had to hire them all back, right? That’s a kind of an ill conceived move, I think. but that’s that’s the outlier. But

 

You do see a healthy dose of skepticism in society right now towards AI and and skepticism might be a nice way of putting it. I mean, people are are really concerned about what AS AI is going to do to jobs. They’re really concerned about data centers and and, you know, the impact to their communities and to natural resources. And so I do wonder if that’s something that is ultimately going to I I don’t think it’s going to limit growth. Maybe you’ll feel differently, but do you think it would slow adoption where

 

businesses that may have introduced AI into the front end a little bit might be sitting on the sideline a little bit longer because consumers might not be too into the AI thing right now.

 

Mike Dolloff (11:31.714)

Yeah, it’s an interesting it’s an interesting thing. I would yeah, skepticism, I would say cynicism right now, right? Like that we’re in this w deep wave of it right now. I don’t I honestly don’t think so, because if you look at the reasons why AI and the contact why AI especially landed earlier, I think, broadly in the contact center than other spots, is because you have this storm that’s been brewing for a while, which is customers are demanding better service and companies need to maintain costs.

 

Right. Like it’s a competitive market, there’s macro headwinds, just whatever, right? Like there’s there’s been staffing difficulties in here. Right. Like this labor challenges have persisted. And so I think there’s this there’s already this challenge that peop that companies and organizations have to solve for. And I think it you know, I fundamentally believe this, that at the end of the day, if I’m a consumer or anybody that’s engaging in the contact center, I’m trying to get a problem solved.

 

In the most effective way possible. And sometimes that might be getting me quickly to some a human that can solve that problem because it’s just a weird thing and that there’s not it’s just a one-off kind of situation. But also if I’m so I think people want choice or people want efficiency in getting a problem solved and they want choice, right? So as long as you build those into your strategy, then I think you’re okay. This is this was where it comes into like escalation by design and the thoughtfulness of this, where if you’re jamming people into

 

This is where people are frustrated with IVR still. You’re jamming them into this path that’s going to waste a bunch of time for them because they ultimately need to talk to somebody. If it’s doing that with AI, you’re just it’s going to probably cost you more as a business and you’re going to frustrate your end customer. It’s just the same as an IVR in that way. So I I don’t think I don’t think it slows it down. I just think it it will force the issue if companies are doing this in incorrectly or un not thoughtfully, then people will use.

 

I hate that they’re doing this at the AI. What they’re mean really mean is it’s not solving for my need for efficiency in solving a problem I have or the way I want to do it.

 

Shawn Cordner (13:36.546)

Yeah. You just kinda hinted at something. Are you finding that when people are adding AI into the customer experience journey that they’re being thoughtful about the underlying processes that they’re adding AI to? Or are you finding that people are adding good AI to bad processes, which makes bad processes terrible processes?

 

Mike Dolloff (14:00.096)

And more expensive ones. Yeah. It’s a little bit of both, right? There’s a mix here. And this is where when you talk about ones that don’t go well, or, you know, the board’s mad because this AI project’s failed, what happened, what went wrong, it is often this, right? It people want it to be this easy button to solve everything. But you’re right. Like it we built in the context center a lot of these processes based on limitations of technology and

 

Or it’s just this is a way we’ve done it for 10 years or 20 years. And I’ve we worked with contact centers that literally they’ve they’ve been around for a hundred years, the business and the model. You might not have called it a contact center the whole time, right? But they’re they’ve been operating with this customer service or support element in it. And the process hasn’t evolved since they were doing this stuff with like pen and paper. And so yeah, this is a needed time to re to really look at it’s it’s really the unsexy, unheralded part of this, but it’s really important because.

 

What are we trying to actually accomplish? Why are we doing it this way? Now, that starts pulling these threads that maybe widen the scope of what needs to be addressed and maybe slow down. But you need to slow down to kind of really get the full benefit. Cause you’re right, otherwise you’ll end up with failure or we’re we’re spending a lot more money than we thought we were. Because, and this is a challenge that I think as this matures with AI broadly in the enterprise, like you’re starting to see people pull back because, like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

 

I mean, even internally, right? Like we’re using AI tools and have to look like thoughtfully before we roll this out. Like what how are we using this? And what are the what are the workflows and have some standardization? Otherwise, you just unleash this and all of a sudden the CFO is knocking on everyone’s door, like, what are you doing? Well, why where’d this cost come from? Same thing in the contact center. So yeah, it’s a needed thing. It’s it’s something I think people will speed past. And we’ve had engagements recently with clients where they’re getting pressure from, you know, senior leadership, like, you got to do this project. And we’re coming in as the advisor saying,

 

We agree it’s a it’s a great project, but here’s the order of operations. Like you have to fix these things first. Otherwise, and they’re like, No, no, no, we just want the software, we want it working. And we’re like, I hate to be the the naysayer here, but you’re just you’re not gonna get what you need if you skip this stuff. And it’s it’s frustrating. It’s frustrating for companies to realize that sometimes when they want the easy button, but there is no easy button here. You’re gonna have to do it. But that being said, I think

 

Mike Dolloff (16:20.662)

I think this is one of the best things that can happen for companies is to be really introspective on processes. It’s it’s one of these things that gets neglected way too often and use this AI moment, this AI tailwind to really drive some of that change because you’ll find probably a ton of your processes outdated, unnecessary, complex, unfriendly to customers, unfriendly to internal people. And while you look at this AI strategy, you unpack that, you’re you’re gonna have a very good, sustainable.

 

AI adoption strategy then.

 

Shawn Cordner (16:52.098)

Probably an interesting message to the 50% that haven’t, you know, stepped into this AI movement yet. And that is take this time while you’re sitting on the sideline, don’t sit on your hands. Start addressing some of the underlying processes in the business so that you are ready. But yeah, I I think this probably becomes more acute of an issue when you introduce a gentic AI into the picture. And my again, my impression has been that Contact Center was.

 

One of the first areas the enterprise saw value with AI and I think it was also because it became productized here and you were able to buy versus build a lot sooner than some of the other use cases for AI. So, you know, I wonder you how do you view the buy versus build conversation now and and how does AgenTic potentially change that?

 

Mike Dolloff (17:40.866)

Yeah. I think your point on agentic first too of just the the process. That’s a great point because you’re again, think of cost, right, with agentic and I’m I’m now doing these steps, right? And I’m building these things out. If if you’ve if that’s clunky. If it’s clunky in the past, as businesses, for whatever reason, we’ve we’ve gotten used to the idea that we’re gonna just waste money on having people do inefficient processes. That’s just sort of like the course of like if people businesses are okay with that. Like that happens everywhere.

 

But people are less okay with that, with AI doing that for you. Why is this why are we spending money on these AI which are expensive, right? To do these inefficient processes. So you’re gonna have to solve that for a gen tick, right? For sure. The build versus buy. So I think there’s a couple things. I think in the contact center, you’re right, it’s been very productized. We we have seen, and this is broader with I would say kind of broad contact center technology, it’s mostly been a buy marketplace, with some excep exceptions on the enterprise fringe, I would say.

 

But the majority of contact centers, the majority of where agents live and where contact centers live is not in, they’re not, they’re not building most of this stuff. that’s that’s still edge. I just think that’s definitely the case still with these AI enabled CX products. I think there’s a lot of why build that application when that’s a tool being used for that’s not the core purpose of the business, right? In most cases. And and I think there’s been a lot more, I think, awareness and understanding too of people want to.

 

typically want to build when there’s a control element or they just have a lot of resources and that’s sort of like the DNA of the company. There, I think the control element of like data and LLMs and all that, people have, I think the general enterprise levels awareness of what that all means and being educated on that has risen up. And then the tools, right, the built products have a lot more kind of capabilities for customers to understand and get comfortable that hey, if I’m buying this, this is what that means for my controls for my data.

 

This is what my data is doing for myself or for others. And I and people understand that. So they’re comfortable. So I I don’t see that changing, honestly. what I do see changing, and this kind of ties into agentic, is I think there’s just how do all these things play together well, right? Because you are gonna have environments where you even in the contact center might have several different products running different things that talk to each other, integrate with each other, maybe use different LLMs in some cases or share LLMs.

 

Mike Dolloff (20:09.558)

in some cases then tie into stuff that maybe does workflow automation across the whole enterprise that doesn’t necessarily sit in contact center because it touches other parts of the business. I think there’s a lot more of that that as this matures that will happen. and I think that won’t open up necessarily build, but it’ll open up the contact center becoming more integrated, communicating from an API and technical standpoint more with the rest of the enterprise real time.

 

Whereas historically it’s mostly been in its own little piece. And this is now like opening up like where does some of this data flow? Like ’cause you and this sort of ties in, I think, maybe with like some of the CRM and this other broader conversation, like the customer journey and customer data. but I think you I think these doors start opening up and Connect Center moves from being a silo to much more of an integrated part of the business.

 

Shawn Cordner (20:59.512)

So interesting. your rationalization for buy versus build makes total sense, right? Why recreate something? Why spend the time and resources, have the risk of potentially failing or not doing it? Well, when you could buy something off the shelf that’s already enterprise grade and people are using it and probably quicker to deploy. I think that’s sound logic, and I’m not saying that it’s not, but I do think something is changing in that.

 

I I read three articles just yesterday on avoiding vendor lock in in AI. Right. And a lot of that has to do more with the the inference models that are kind of sitting on the back end of of AI workflows that people are building. But there is a real concern about the underlying cost structure of AI and and token use and token use optimization being something that is a super critical conversation to have internally now.

 

Because if you do get locked in with a vendor and they do change the underlying price structure, then the economics of your solution could get turned completely upside down and then it’s no longer a viable solution, right? So I do wonder if we’re going to come to an inflection point where people have to think a little bit more seriously about the build instead of the buy to avoid being stuck with a vendor for a period of time and having that kind of that that model flip on them.

 

Mike Dolloff (22:21.3)

No, I think that’s a huge that is risk and I think that’s a concern. I don’t know exactly what that looks like, honestly, but I think you’re right that there’s starting to pop up some of these stories where someone that you know, a large technology provider that people have invested a lot into suddenly is like, hey, our and and some of it maybe is it’s just greed, margin expansion. Some of it is potentially underlying costs are expanding rapidly for them as well, right? And this new new world of

 

of, you know, all the costs associated down to the, you know, we’re starting to get visibility in the broader public of like the costs of data centers and and and the environmental costs and the social costs and the hard costs, electricity. And people have been wondering for the last 10 years why their utility rates are going up. I think they’re starting to realize why. Like those are no longer hidden, you know? So you’re starting to see this. I think that’s a real concern for sure of hey, I’ve put a lot of eggs into this particular basket. It’s become really important to have this part of the tech stack

 

We’ve re-engineered our workflows and all the stuff around it and all of us and we built this all with an assumption of cost at X. And now cost is X plus 30%. Like how do we justify that? So I think there’s this I don’t think that’s necessarily new, but it it’s new in the AI world that we’re starting to see this. and I think that’s the risk that businesses were gonna have to kind of ma manage of like this off-the-shelf ease, enterprise grade security controls.

 

But there’s risk of having too much in too few of providers where I’m now at the mercy of cost increases. So yeah, I think there’s a balance. And then are there certain elements of this that we should bring in house or we can build or middleware or connectors that we can easily then swap this piece, this provider, with someone else similar if we need to, because we’ve we’ve engineered our enterprise to be able to kind of move pieces and parts out. I do think there’s I think there’s some level of framework that

 

enterprises will be seeing and figuring out over the next couple of years to to mitigate that risk for sure.

 

Shawn Cordner (24:21.986)

Yeah. I this reminds me just a little bit of of how telecom has evolved over the years. I mean, if you go back to deregulation and and you the telecommunications act of nineteen ninety-six, you saw that people had to get access to infrastructure, like like third parties, competitors needed access to infrastructure because the cost of building the infrastructure was huge. And there was regulation that limited

 

the underlying R box, the the carriers from how much they were able to charge on those platforms. And so you you got a world where you had competitive pricing and it drove prices down over time. And now you’re seeing in in that same space with POTS lines that the FCC has let up on some of those pricing regulations on that infrastructure. Costs are skyrocketing overnight. And so y you didn’t it takes regulation potentially to keep prices down and in check.

 

And when you lose that regulation, you see that the prices, you know, start to go up. So we’re in an unregulated, wild, wild west kind of environment with AI right now. And there’s no question that these companies are losing boatloads of money, like boatloads of money. So it it is it’s gonna be a real challenge for people to to navigate this uncertainty in in terms of costs going forward. I’ll step off my soapbox now and ask the the last question. But I I was curious, what are your thoughts on

 

You know, the the CM the CRM market is is really starting to embrace AI, obviously, and it has been leaning into the CX space for some time. In fact, I’m surprised that you don’t see more competition, you know, from the CRM stepping into CX technology. But CRM is is critical for the contact centered tech stack. And I I’m just curious if you’re seeing or think that you’re going to see

 

the CRM market start to shape the AI in CX space at all.

 

Mike Dolloff (26:19.192)

Think we’re starting to see it already. it’s it’s always been this cooperation frenemy kind of, you know, for the last couple I shouldn’t say always, it has been the last couple of years, right? Because you have Salesforce in ServiceNow and Zendesk and others. And they’re they’re I’d say in varying degrees of where they’re at too. I think Zendesk is more aggressively, as an example, pursuing this ServiceNow is a little less aggressively pursuing it. Salesforce is

 

pretty aggressive, but not quite as aggressive as NDS, you know, as a simple example of three of the bigger ones in this space. So there’s they continue to evolve their relationships where they’re kind of play nicely together and improve integrations and do these kinds of things. But I think it’s pretty s the signal’s pretty strong that I think the CRM and ITSM space is trying to own more and more of the customer interaction side of things versus just the customer, customer record, customer data side of things. And that

 

Kind of goes back to your point earlier, right? Which is for some customers, they’re like, great, that’s great. We have a lot of invested here. Let’s invest more. And I think the the risk there, right? There’s a couple of risks. One of them is the the the fundamental economic risk of of being all in on certain things. You’re now putting all your eggs in a basket of a tech company that if they change pricing, you’re what’s your leverage? You don’t have much. You have zero leverage if you’re all in on that.

 

That’s one thing. I think the other thing is fundamentally, contact center’s been a complex there’s been a lot of people who’ve tried to pivot into it and not done well or it’s not gone as quickly. I’d I would I’m not in on the s Salesforce side of things, but I would think if you were able to get the truth for some of their executives running it, it’s probably not been as easy of a pivot into trying to drive as much of that as they thought it would be. It’s really tough. Telephony is tough. voice is tough and interaction.

 

in all the things that need to happen in a contact center tough. We see this every time somebody enters the market and they’re like the new the newest thing, a new CCAS provider, for example, it takes them it takes them a while to get some of the stuff that people consider table stakes. You know? It just cause there’s just a lot of depth in these products and the the use cases and scenarios that that have to be so I think these worlds continue to converge. I th I still think you have a lot of enterprises who are very comfortable and want to keep them as

 

Mike Dolloff (28:42.292)

separate but very tightly integrated solutions. And I think what you see down market is more people saying, hey, I’m I’m I would like to simplify the tech stack and consolidate where I can. And here’s an area to do that. I think you’ll see more of that. But it’s early, I’d say it’s early innings of that. Like there’s a long way to go. And then if you take the other side of the coin, there’s people who are like, look, with generative and agentic AI, the the state of like CRM is

 

what what do we need CRM for? You know, like this is just about data and workflows around making it streamlined. So there’s another another world or another kind of argument that’s like contact centers needed customer interaction stuff is becoming more complex and more sophisticated. But CRM is becoming more of an easy commoditized thing with some of the AI enhancements. So I don’t know where it goes, but I would say they’re world they’re converging very strongly. But there’s some really

 

interesting inflection points ahead of us still that we don’t know where it’ll go. But those are my thoughts on it.

 

Shawn Cordner (29:45.356)

Yeah. I mean that that’s exactly why because it’s it can be commoditized, that’s exactly why I feel like they’re going to see value in leaning into AI and and you know, I I can see Salesforce doing agent assist. Why wouldn’t they? Right. Or I could see them, you know, doing sentiment analysis. Why why wouldn’t they? And and I could even see them doing data services, like helping businesses get their data prepared for AI and that doesn’t have to just be CRM records, right? But

 

At at some point SaaS companies are going to have to look at their model a little bit more closely, I think, because what you are going to eventually have is high interfaces that people talk to to get their data and not necessarily, you know, portals and dashboards that come with your software applications. Create your own portals, create your own dashboards, you know, use natural language to ask the questions on the data that you’re you’re looking to glean, the insights. So anyway,

 

Mike, practical takeaways before we go. Like someone listening to this, maybe they’re in the the lagging fifty percent, maybe they’re in the leading fifty percent. I don’t know. what do what do you tell them?

 

Mike Dolloff (30:53.014)

I I still think there’s very few businesses that have exhausted all of the call it low hanging fruit opportunities of AI in the contact center. So there are some. For companies that haven’t started anywhere, there’s there’s it there’s stuff on the front end, the the client side of AI, the in the client side of you know, there’s so many repetitive things that happen in the contact center, right? Checking, shipping status, appointment status, authenticating, right? It it

 

it’s not even the whole journey, right? There could just be pieces of this journey that could be automated and leverage AI for. If it’s internal, it’s it’s what are you doing for agent assist stuff? What are we doing for auto summarization of interactions, for auto dispositioning of of what what this interaction was for QA is a process that people even even like internally, right? I’ll pull point us on this. Like we have we have contact centers and it’s like we’re we’re still like I’m pushing our team, like let’s do more of this

 

auto QA stuff and do more interaction analytics because there’s so much rich data there. So I think there there’s there is low hanging fruit, I would say, in like ninety per of the market right now with AI. It’s it’s where is that? And so it’s hard to say start here always or start there because it just depends on it really depends on the type of business and where where what the workflow’s like. There’s a lot of customers that are like like they don’t have automation on the client side because it’s it’s it’s a very unique

 

kind of model and what they’re helping clients with is is very different and or it’s B2B or something, that’s fine. But in but what are we doing internally then? And or vice versa. So it really depends. But I think if you there’s areas to prioritize. I think that’s the big word I’d say is prioritize. Don’t try to do all of this at once. What are the areas that based on our business, based on what’s going on, we have whether that’s internal facing or external facing to to find. And then start small.

 

Right. Like identify that thing and prove that out and then go from like show a win. Show a win for internal people, right? Executives, internal folks for for agents for your customers, like find a win and show a win and then build from there. And I think that’s the big other thing practically is unlike other big transformations where it’s like, we’re gonna go from like prem to cloud in our contact center, or we’re gonna go from like single channel voice to like multi channel or omnichannel.

 

Mike Dolloff (33:18.668)

This journey of AI adoption is there’s no real destination at the end of it. It is truly a journey that no one can see where the end is right now. So you have to adopt this mindset and sort of stamina to be in this for the long haul. So just don’t assume like you’re gonna check this box and be like, we’re done and we never have to touch this again. There’s a lot of evolving just on a particular use case, let alone that’s one use case of dozens of dozens of other things we can do in the business.

 

This is a long journey. So just have that kind of marathon mentality of how you’re gonna approach it with leadership, with expectations, with everyone.

 

Shawn Cordner (33:55.598)

All right, so if someone is ready to start their marathon, they’re ready to start small but they don’t know which project to start with. And if they’re looking to get a quick win and they wanna get some support from Amplix, how do they get a hold of you?

 

Mike Dolloff (34:07.778)

Yeah, reach out to reach out to me, reach out to someone in the sales organ. I mean, this is where we add a lot of value because we know we can quickly come in and assess and say, let’s start here versus there. Here’s why. And and save because you might get a win, but that win might take you a year versus we could get a win in three months. And that makes a big difference in getting budget approval and and getting excitement and momentum and in realizing ROI. So yeah, get in touch with me, Dolloff at Amplix.com.

 

And and I’ll I’ll route you to the right person on our team who can help.

 

Shawn Cordner (34:40.416)

Awesome. Thanks, Mike. Appreciate your time and expertise.

 

Mike Dolloff (34:42.626)

Yeah, thanks, Shawn.