2273 - Transforming Customer Experience Through the Power of Voice AI with Thinkrr.AI's Mohan Gulati

0:04Well, hey, Thoughtful Leader. Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. On this show, I interview purpose-driven founders, experts, and change makers who are making a real impact in the world. Want to be a guest? Simple. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click podcast. I'd love to promote your story to our audience of over 100 ,000 and across over 2 ,300 daily episodes and counting. Want to get booked on other great shows like this? Simple. Go to podverified.com and get your free guest authority score. Thousands of hosts are looking for high quality guests and Podverified connects you the right way. Now let's dive into today's episode.

0:58With us right now, it's Mohan Gulati. Mohan, you are the founder and CEO of Thinker AI. You're found on the web at thinker.ai. And that's, of course, in Silicon Valley style. It's spelled like an AI app should be spelled. It's got two R's and no vowels at the end there. We have the correct spelling. It's T-H-I-N-K-R-R.ai. That is in the show notes for our friends that are listening right now. So, Mohan, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. It's awesome to be here. Yeah, before we talk about what Thinker is, and we're going to talk about voice, which I'm a huge fan of. What have you been doing?

1:42Like, what do you do for fun when you're not at work? Well, I spent a lot of time, actually, I'm a big binge watcher. So I love watching movies and TV shows. And I just recently caught the Superman video that's out there right now that totally brings me back to my days when I was growing up, right? The Marvel heroes. And they did a great job with that. Yeah. I, you know, as much as I appreciate the Snyderverse, it's a little morose. It's a little dark. You know, and I think that that works really well, obviously, in the, you know, the Batman universe. In the Superman universe, I'm kind of with you on that.

2:21Like I generally, I, you know, resonated with the Christopher Reeves, um, super friends, you know, and Superman didn't kill humans. He didn't kill people like he, you know, and he, you know, they, they very intentionally showed him saving lives, like saving human lives and, and just being a nice goofy kind of friendly, accessible person. And, um, that was so enjoyable to watch. And then, of course, the message of just, you know, kindness being punk rock. Like it just I'll no lie. Sorry. I can tell you like this topic. But I'm like, oh, I want to talk about this movie so much. So I gave that movie a very rare nine out of ten.

3:08I would say normally I would probably give it a low eight point something out of ten. But I think it was the perfect movie for right now when we should look to our heroes to be kind, loving, compassionate, you know, look out for the rights of others, you know, look out for those who are, you know, otherwise marginalized. Like those are great American values or I mean, human values, you know? So I didn't mean to like, okay, Mo, let me, let me give you just a little bit on why you enjoyed the movie and then let's get into Thinker. Well, it's so funny to hear you say that because what I really found amazing about it was the depth of the characters in the movie, the way they get, you know, they started off assuming you knew the origin story.

3:55and then the spin on how the connection between you know how there are significant people whether you look at it from any perspective who have such an influence on your life and for him it was this whole myth about you know without giving away too much of the plot what his parents had kind of sent him there for what his mission was and what he had totally built his identity around and then he realized there was more to that and all of a sudden he was confounded with who am i yeah who was I supposed to be right and that kindness that humanness that you talk about that really came through to me it was like to me it was like how he had to really solidify who he was and he went through this kind of reflection and you know that's part of like anything you deal with in life is you've got to deal with who am I when you're in front of a situation that completely comes out of the left field right so to me that's not that's very you know very practical very human-like and I just connected with that so much.

4:51Yeah. You know, as founders, there is maybe, I'll just speak for myself. There's a lot of pressure that you can put on yourself because, you know, now not only are you judging yourself over what you expect your role or your identity to be or your results to be, but now, you know, it's like you start roping in all of these things that you may not have full control over. And those become indicators of your value. Oh, well, someone decided they didn't want to buy my product. So therefore I feel bad about myself or there's something wrong with me. And that is just so unfair. I can speak for myself.

5:35I, you know, Moan in years past, I have been so wildly unfair to myself. And I, and I think I saw what you saw as well in this movie, you know, about, you know, and boy, again, not spoiling the ending or anything, it brings it together in such a beautiful, you know, unexplained, you know, not overly explained way. Like it's just, it's just part very naturally of the story. Like that discovery, I think is subtle enough where it in no way feels forced on the audience. It's like, you can kind of lean into that if you're ready for that kind of a message. Josh, what I would say is like, and this is kind of segue into like, more of the conversation we're here to talk about, which is like, storytelling is a big part of every entrepreneur, every business person's kind of thing.

6:30And the way they told the story, left me having a compartment in my brain, right? It didn't leave. Some things you watch and stories you hear, they come in, they leave. This was a story that didn't answer everything explicitly, but left enough thought provoking questions that it stayed in my mind all the time. And as business people, when we are like in the world talking about solutions and talking about what we do, I think that's equally important to tell stories that, you know, you're not being explicit. You're allowing people the creativity to see how to take it and how it relates to what I do.

7:07Right? And that's why stories work. Well, Moen, how does that relate to, listen, actually, you're welcome to touch on that and kind of the segue, what you were just referring to. I want to talk about this because I love the fact that you are in the AI voice space. And I am incredibly bullish on the sentiment that folks like Sam Altman, Johnny Ive, and many others are indicating that the future might not be as screen dependent. And that there is this ability to interact both in voice, you know, and using audio, because audio is a lot less bossy where, you know, and again, I'm a huge YouTube consumer.

8:01Obviously, we consume tons of screen time and video time and so forth. But it requires your full attention. Whereas, you know, I know for me, just on the side of input, like user input, like how am I communicating with AI right now? How am I communicating with other, you know, platforms? terms, I got to tell you, Moan, I'm probably about 80 % speaking text, spoke, you know, kind of speech to text. I don't do a lot of typing. If I have to type more than a couple of sentences, it's probably because I hadn't thought about it. It's only because I'm catching myself. Whoa, what am I doing? I'm typing more than two sentences.

8:45Now editing and that sort of thing, that's a little bit different right now. But certainly like if I need answers or I want to explore something or I have something that I need to convey to someone else. I'm almost always using my voice. Seldom am I typing, you know, that sort of thing. Like I'm engaging with AI. And I think this is so exciting about where the future is, which I think is a perfect, now that's a perfect segue into what you do. Because again, you're all about voice. I'm all about voice. And I mean, I'll just start off with a story. So there's a segue. It's really about how I kind of came across the vision for creating the company that I have today.

9:22And it was exactly what you said. I felt that the most natural way to interact with CX of the future is voice. Right. So this is a, this is really what happened. This is the origin story. I was downstairs having to fix something called a garburetor, which you put underneath your sink. Right. I am not a handyman. And I was trying to fix that. And I immediately started to like, just lose myself. Cause I was like, here's the YouTube video how do I like watch it how do I do this and just start imagining wouldn't it be awesome if I had a pair of glasses that could see what I'm trying to do but then interact with me through voice and say you know what Mohan this is not something you should be doing you're not skilled to do this let me analyze the problem oh you should you know what call somebody in perfect okay who do I call in well there are these three people that are around this person can be here in an hour this person can be here in you know a few hours and this person can be here tomorrow and this is approximately how much they cost so i did all of that while talking to me in my ear while i'm doing something and then imagine that it asked me do you which one do you want i tell which one i want it contacts books that person in and processes transaction fees at the same time my brain just went afire like that is the way in which i see the world evolving yes people in the most natural, you know, nothing that I'm trying to do differently in terms of like, this is something I need to do.

10:50I need to fix my carburetor. But being able to do that in a completely paradigm shift way, then what I have to do today, we just struggle for four hours, trying to get it to work, or even trying to find somebody that I can call, do the reviews on my own. All of this can be done in seconds. And I'm sitting down and enjoying my rest of my evening, because the guy's coming in an hour and I've got it paid for and I'm like, my wife's not going to get upset because the dishes won't stay unwashed, right? So this is like, this is the real human story of why I thought this is awesome. And I want to take that and apply that to business domains.

11:25And that's kind of where it started from. Well, and how often have we, you know, I think in our lives, Moen talked about how, oh gosh, just, yeah, you know, texting and it doesn't convey the whole message, miscommunication, like, you know, that happens in Slack, that happens. And, you know, and so, you know, I think we've all experienced that, you know, for those of us who work, you know, virtually, and maybe we do most of our communication through Slack, like there gets to a point like, no, no, no, let's just jump on Zoom. Like, this is way too inefficient back and forth. It's convenient, for asynchronous communication or whatever.

12:05But again, I think voice, especially if we can get to kind of closer to real-time communication in voice, is obviously, it makes things way more fluid. Do you mind sharing exactly what Thinker is and where it fits into this and how companies can offer voice services to clients? And again, you've got an agency model. We'll talk about that as well. Yeah. So, I mean, first and foremost, we built a platform. It's a SaaS platform, which allows you to rapidly deploy and build voice agents that allow you to be used on the phone or on your website, right? So both for inbound, this is like a receptionist where you can answer your calls.

12:51It can book your appointments. It can even do a live transfer to whoever you want to, right? So it's fully trained, easy to do, set up, and you get that deployed in under 10 minutes. That's how fast you can do that. Then you have systems, whether it's following up on sales leads, from an event that you just had, or it's a list of people that you should have followed up with or you want to just keep connected with, or clients that you need to do reviews with, or they need to call out to get more, fill out something in the form and they're missing in details. This is where we play in, and we've solved real practical business problems that voice AI can be utilized for and easily trained, and then build up those processes for efficiency, ROI, and give you the space in your business to have more time for what your money business wants, which is human connection.

13:40So it's actually using voice AI to build more time for human connection. So can you explain? So I think the best thing for our friends to do is go to thinker.ai. So obviously what I'm looking at right here is a widget. It's on my website and any user on my website can now start talking to our AI voice agent. Right. And so obviously I would imagine like any GPT, we can, you know, give it its identity, you know, load it up with knowledge files, make sure it's got the proper, like we've got a, we've got a chat agent on our website right now. So we just use like chat base or something like that. So, you know, now someone can click on, you know, a button and you're seeing more and more of these.

14:33Right. So someone can click on a button and say, hey, it's a, you know, and I call mine Josh GPT. Right. So it's like, if you want to talk with Josh, you can talk with Josh GPT on my site. And I think that that's a good first step here. And it's going to be really exciting to see just how interactive we can get with folks. And so can you go through some use cases of where this fits in? And again, if you want to talk about particular clients that you're working with and how they're using it, that would be awesome. Yeah. So specifically speaking, by taking voice AI and putting on your website, which is what you've just spoken about, it can answer all the questions about your business through building it, training it with all that documentation, but then also take action.

15:21right so it can qualify that person and it can do like divisions like if you're trying to talk to somebody in the sales department versus somebody in the operations department or somebody in the finance department because you want to call them about a bill it can first of all transfer you in but it can also book appointments accordingly so you can really do a lot of it's much more powerful than just taking the gpt and planting it onto your website it's about having the ability to easily branch it out to model what you wanted to do for your business, right? Now you can do that on the web, but you can also do that on the phone.

15:57People have still, a lot of people want to pick up a phone call. If you're talking about different age brackets, right, they're going to interact with your business differently. So we find that's how it's going. And good example that you can go to one of our clients right now. They're in Canada, which is where I'm located. And they run a home inspection business and they're using it on their website and they're literally using it for lead capture. All right. So it's a huge lead capture for them. You'll see the voice AI widget on their website, inspect.ca. And in there, you'll see that what they're doing is they're interacting, answering all the questions, but quickly getting them booked into how do I get somebody to come and do a quick home inspection?

16:37A lot of their ICPs are like real estate agents, right? That are like trying to close. So they'll do that. But there's also a lot of people who just want to know before I sell my home, what do I need to, you know, do I need to fix anything? So huge, huge opportunity for that client that we have. And they are the largest in Canada for home inspection. Wow. Yeah. So I think about like the friction that this removes. Can you, do you talk about from a, just from a behavioral standpoint, like when we are engaging with potential customers and, and, and not just customers, I would imagine, you know, again, support, um, yeah, um, to address the, the friction that this, Oh boy, no, we, we don't have time.

17:24I'm looking at the clock. Yeah. I was just going through it like pretty quick. So look at like home, like support's a really good use case because when you create support systems in your business, you want what I call multiple release levers, right? So you're going to want, like, You're going to have a form where they can submit something. You want a phone number that they can call. You want to be able to have a live chat bot that you can talk to. But now you can have a voice bot that's built and can answer questions and take action, right? So you can assist them in ways that they couldn't. And it's available 24 hours, 7 days a week, 365 days of the year.

17:56So it solves a huge release lever for a lot of businesses because you want to provide great CX. You want to provide great user experience, not just at the time of when you're trying to close them and sell them. but throughout the entire journey that they're your client. And this provides a very, very obvious solution, yet another release lever. And honestly, the cost of these things compared to hiring human labor is so much more worth the ROI that people are just like, it's a no-brainer. It really is a no-brainer to do this. Yeah. Moen, just kind of last question here. For someone that wants to check out Thinker, how does this work?

18:35Like obviously go to thinker.ai, but what would you recommend for someone like for them to go from here? They're obviously they're listening to this episode because they're interested in AI. They're interested in Thinker. So where do they go? What do they do? So just want to say like, go to thinker.ai. We service two different types of profiles. First, if you have a business stuff and you want to use voice AI, absolutely. But we've actually found that we're having a lot of people come to us who want to resell voice AI and we have a white labeled version. So when you come to our site, you can demo the Voice.ai right away.

19:09And if you want to learn more information and you want to speak to us, you can easily book an appointment with us and talk to us. Or we have tons of information available on our free community, which you can join. Click on the community link there and enter into our community. It's a community of over 6 ,000 people where you can get like-minded people who are looking how to deploy Voice.ai into their business or how to offer Voice AI part of their service and part of their business as well. I love it. Mohan Gulati, founder, CEO of Thinker AI, found on the web at thinker.ai. That's T-H-I-N-K-R-R.ai.

19:45Mohan, thank you so much for the conversation. Thank you. Lovely. Thank you, Josh.

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