How Thoughtly Is Turning AI Voice Into A Competitive Advantage

[00:00:00] Your agents aren't producing accurate answers because they don't have a complete semantic understanding of your data. And Denodo is solving this and solving it through semantic consistency. Through semantic consistency, your agents can start making accurate predictions in real time. So see what else Denodo can do by visiting denodo.com to learn more. But now let me introduce you to today's guest.

[00:00:29] Welcome back to the AI at Work podcast. Now there's a lot of discussion about AI agents right now. But let's be honest, much of it lives in demos, prototypes and predictions about the future. Well, today's guest spends his time somewhere much more interesting. And that is putting AI agents to work in live business environments where results really matter.

[00:00:59] And he's doing this with some pretty big names. So my guest joining me today is from a company called Thoughtly. And he works at the intersection of AI, business operations and customer engagement. And he's helping organizations deploy AI voice agents into revenue critical workflows. And that means everything from sales follow-up and customer service to scaling conversations that no human team could realistically handle.

[00:01:27] And he also has a front row as to how AI is changing work right now. So you can expect today to hear more about what happens when AI moves beyond experimentation and starts creating measurable business outcomes. While helping people, human teams, focus on the work that humans do best. And with that scene perfectly set, let me introduce you to my guest right now. So thank you for joining me on the podcast today.

[00:01:54] Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do? Yes, absolutely. So my name is Will Del Princeby. I am the founding go-to-market at Thoughtly, which is an AI software company. We specialize in inbound and outbound AI voice agents, particularly on the outbound side, to completely automate a business's workflow. Meaning the calls that they used to have to take that are repetitive, coming in, answering questions, booking appointments. Those are now all automated with conversational AI agents.

[00:02:24] And the calls that they have to make daily, like the speed to lead calls, the reengagement calls, the SDR type of calls, all of that's now automated with natural sounding AI voice agents. And I've been to a lot of tech conferences this year, and a lot of companies are still kind of experimenting with AI agents. But looking at what you're doing here, you're deploying them directly into live customer and revenue workflows at Thoughtly.

[00:02:50] So what is it that separates maybe a successful production deployment from just another shiny AI demo on stage that looks impressive, but never survives those real-world use cases? There's so much research that needs to go into a B2B AI software. If you're a legitimate business and you're looking into some sort of software, especially on the AI front, I think the only way that you could indicate what's real and kind of what's just shiny is going to be real utility.

[00:03:19] Like the use cases behind it. Like who's actually utilizing this and what's the results that you're getting? And I hate to toot my own horn when saying this, but I'm pretty good at tooting my own horn, so I'm going to go ahead and do it. But I think our software does kind of speak for itself. Our customers have seen ROI of upwards of nine times with deploying AI voice agents.

[00:03:47] They've seen workload reduced on their SDRs. They've been able to hire their SDRs to AEs. I believe one of our customers, I don't want to get this number wrong, but has booked 650 meetings in 90 days with an AI SDR. Something they never could have done before. Now, this is something I go to conferences as well. This is something that I go and explore as well.

[00:04:12] And I see all of these cool concepts and these cool ideas, but that social proof, I think, is what's a big distinction between shiny and truly useful in the market today. And you've said something that really stood out to me before I come on the podcast. I was doing a little research on you. You said that high consideration follow-up is actually one of the first real wins for AI voice agents.

[00:04:37] Why is that particular use case gaining traction and what impact does it have on the daily work of sales and customer service teams? Yeah. And before I answer that question, I'm going to speak directly to the pessimists that are listening to this right now. There's so many pessimists out there when it comes to AI voice agents that say, you know, I would never talk to an AI. If an AI called me, I would shoo it off and I wouldn't want to talk to it.

[00:05:04] But number one, a lot of the people who take our calls don't know they're talking to an AI, which is awesome. I mean, we're seeing somewhere around in 70 to 60% rate of people who have no idea. That number is slowly dropping because of how people are starting to catch up with the software and understand that AI is actually making calls now. And number two, it's going to be because of the high consideration aspect. I completely agree.

[00:05:31] If I got a cold call from some AI voice agent and it's telling me that to get solar on my roof, I would hang up the call. That's not high consideration. However, if I'm looking at purchasing a house and I put my name in because I'm interested in learning more information about this property. And three seconds later, I get a phone call from a natural sounding voice agent.

[00:05:58] You better believe that I'm going to be asking some questions because I'm already interested in this property. I just showed interest. So I'm going to ask my questions. I'm going to push back on some objections and then eventually the AI voice agent will do what it does best and it will get me booked in to speak to the next person or get to the next stage of the pipeline. That's what we mean by high consideration B2C.

[00:06:23] And there is a common assumption out there at the moment that customers dislike interacting with AI, like you said a few moments ago, or they want to know if they're talking to AI or not. But you've argued that transparency actually builds trust. What have you learned about how people respond when a business is honest and that they're speaking with an AI agent and can actually help? We've heard the doom and gloom. We've seen it on our news feeds. Tell me the other side of the tale here and what you're seeing.

[00:06:49] We're not there to agentic AI to where it's like it sounds more human than humans do. So if you were to call in, there are people who understand that they're speaking to an AI. What I recommend is always come at it with a level of transparency.

[00:07:06] If I'm calling you and for example, let's say that you just saw a billboard for a lawyer and you call into this number, I'd recommend by just introducing yourself saying, Hey, this is Tessa. I'm an AI receptionist trained to help you with exactly what you need today. Can I first start by getting your name? From there, run through a list of questions.

[00:07:35] The person has the interest. So when you have that high intent portion of it, there's nothing wrong with transparency. Matter of fact, we've seen it work out in our favor. Um, and as, as time goes on and we progress as people, it's going to become more and more normal to start speaking to AI. Yeah, I completely agree with you. And I think one of the most overlooked parts of conversational AI is latency.

[00:07:59] And if we look at the old Siri or Alexa versus the speed of open AI, most people don't think about the milliseconds in a human conversation. But when you actually listen to that old voice, digital voice assistance versus the new, there is a huge clear difference there. But you've, you've also suggested that response timing can make or break trust instantly. So why is that sub-second responsiveness so important for a natural interaction?

[00:08:26] Do you think are you referring to the latency or are you referring to, um, the speed to lead aspect of it? Oh, I was going with the latency, but maybe both. I think speed is, is how all AI companies operate. You have to move as quick as possible when you're having a conversation. It's very important that the latency is reduced as low as we can. Um, and people don't quite understand how hard that actually is.

[00:08:54] People think just like, why is there a pause here? Well, if you look at the backend, there's so much that's happening. Um, to give you a rundown of these past five years, what this looks like is an AI is taking what you say. It's putting it into a transcript. It's sent, it's sending it to an LLM to formulate a response. That response then sent to a telephony system. That telephony system gets the conversation back to you.

[00:09:22] So there's a huge interaction that's going on in the midst of a conversation. And that's not even to consider the weird little speech patterns that we do. For example, I just paused there. Did I just add my sentiment? Should you know that I have ended my sentiment there? Should you be speaking there? There, there's so much training into these models, um, to, to match a complex conversation that we don't even know is complex.

[00:09:49] Uh, at thoughtly, you also, you sit right at the intersection of AI systems, governance, and business operations. So you're right in the eye of the storm here. And I'm, I'm curious from everything you see in here, what, what mistakes are organizations still making when they rush AI agents into production without thinking through oversight, escalation paths or, or customer trust? I mean, I named a few there, but there's so many more as well. What mistakes are organizations still making? The mistakes is, uh, not, uh, lacking exploration.

[00:10:20] Yeah. So I think there's a lot of enterprise customers in particular, you'll see a couple of, of, of spectrums here. So the SMBs and mid markets, they're typically eager to get started with AI. Um, and it's actually really good to be immersed and eager and kind of have your eyes open to it. But then you have these enterprises who are tad bit stuck in their way still, um, who have a whole lot of consideration before they're even think of something like this.

[00:10:49] And, um, the idea alone isn't something on their radar. I think that it's never a bad idea to pilot a new software. If you have, if your team has the bandwidth to do it and you've scoped it out efficiently, piloting a piloting a new technology could lead to a completely new way in how you operate as a business. And I think personally, that would be the biggest mistake that most people make is, uh, lacking

[00:11:15] exploration because as you know, in the tech space, things are moving so fast, like scary fast. Yeah. And just like every single thing in the, in the past, if you really don't adapt to these changes, your competitors will. We saw this with internet. We saw this with e-commerce, um, when we're seeing it right now with, with AI. And you guys are moving quick as well.

[00:11:43] I mean, I go to so many tech conferences this year. This is all everyone's talking about. And when I'm looking at this stuff, I also say, I think it was a recent press release from you guys, you raised, you've now raised 8 million plus to build omni channel agent for revenue teams. Tell me more about that. It feels like quite a big deal. It is a, it's a very big deal. And the reason why it's a big deal is because it's a, uh, it's a brand new vision that we're taking on. Um, although we are the, we're the AI voice agent guys, we specialize in AI voice agents.

[00:12:13] Um, we want to give our agents a persona. We want to give them a life. We want them to almost become an extension and an employee of a, uh, of your company. And what does this mean? This means that they have relationships with the customers that they're pursuing. At the end of the day, we like to generate revenue. Um, what does a good SDR do? It follows up on text messages. It calls it emails. It maybe WhatsApps.

[00:12:42] If you're not in the States, um, it's, it's constantly working a deal. It's maybe following them on LinkedIn, DMing them on LinkedIn. Um, and all of this traces through its memory. So at this stage, it's going to, it's going to track a conversation from start to finish. Meaning if I text you and you say, Hey, listen, I'm at my daughter's recital. Can you call me back in 10 minutes?

[00:13:08] If I call you in 10 minutes, I'm going to say, Hey, are you done with your daughter's recital? This is the same intelligence that we want to be bringing into these AI SDRs. Um, a completely autonomous agent that works on every single channel and touches every single one of your leads in a personalized way. And as we said at the beginning, well, I think we both stand against just another shiny tech demo. And I think we're both attracted to bringing these stories to life with very real world results.

[00:13:37] And I was reading another, um, press release from you guys. I think it was with Nomad and with one month of going live thought the agents were handling volume that no human team could have absorbed. I think the numbers were something like 20,000 tenant folk calls handled every day, 13,000 outbound sales calls per month, huge numbers that a human team couldn't handle. Tell me more about that. As any other use cases or stories that you can share that we'll just bring it to live

[00:14:05] to people thinking, Hey, is this just another AI tech story or AI agent story? Because it really isn't. There's so many big companies involved here, isn't it? Yeah, we have a, we have a lot of big logos and, uh, we like to consider ourselves to be a little bit more of the enterprise grade software. Nomad in particular. We absolutely love Nomad. Um, they've been with us for a very long time. They're a, they're, they have a great service and a great solution.

[00:14:30] And because of that, they, uh, they don't have the human workload to get to every single one of their leads. They're bringing in thousands upon thousands of leads a day that are just vaguely showing interest because once again, it's a very high consideration purchase. What they do, they do property management, um, for rental properties. And with that, in our recent case study, um, once again, we've been together for almost two years in our recent case study.

[00:14:59] Um, he's attributed his success raising, uh, his series B now directly to the work that thoughtly is done inside of their, inside of their calling because they were able to take their SDRs, which they had like three boost them up to eight ease and have thoughtly completely handle all of the outbound efforts. Um, and because of that they were able to raise their, their series B and now they're doing, they're doing very well and continuing to do very well as business.

[00:15:28] Um, same goes for, for companies like, uh, pad notes, uh, Siemens to you. Um, all of these companies are, are seeing massive success due to the outbound efforts that, uh, that our AI voice agents are making. And one of the things that stood out to me about the nomad story was that how you help the ability to scale without adding additional staff that they couldn't afford at the time. And it was much more about that than removing humans.

[00:15:56] That is not the case here as well, because that's another story that gets blown up again and again. So tell me more about how AI agents are supporting human teams in instead of replacing them, especially in revenue critical roles, for example. Yeah. Yeah. So you're in a revenue role right now. Let's say you're an SDR and you're watching this podcast and you have this will guy talking about how we're going to have AI SDRs that are calling and doing the same job you're doing. You're probably thinking, well, screw this guy. I don't, I don't like this guy. He's trying to take my job.

[00:16:27] Well, that is not the case. Matter of fact, SDRs, if you are listening to this, I want to get you promoted. That's my job is to get you promoted. I need you to be doing the, uh, the high, the, the, the human task, the, the big work. Um, we need you to be on sales calls. We need you selling deals, um, instead of booking appointments. So what we've come to realize is we don't replace jobs.

[00:16:54] Now, although we could supplement it out. So we're, we're fulfilling a role. The SDRs that are currently working there oftentimes get boosted to AEs, which means they're selling deals now instead of setting deals. Um, so it's actually, we've promoted more people than we've fired at, uh, at thoughtly. And to enable people listening to see that bigger picture and that grand vision that you're creating

[00:17:20] here, if we were to look ahead into the next few years, how do you see AI agents reshaping the day-to-day employee experience over the next few years? Well, will they become invisible digital teammates operating quietly in the background or are we heading toward a more obvious human and AI collaboration model? How do you see all this evolving? I could speak to this, uh, for hours. I, um, I'm a tad bit crazy in my opinions. Um, and they kind of get scattered across every direction.

[00:17:50] The only thing that I could say for certain, and I'll get into my, uh, to my, to what I think the future is going. The only thing I could say for certain is if you don't learn this technology or if you find this boring and you don't even want to like go poke around, I, I think there's, it could be rough, especially if you're a young person today. Um, it's, it's going to be very hard to, uh, to, to be a part of, of society.

[00:18:17] I think in 20 years, if you have no interest in collaborating with AI, that's number one. Number two, I think that we're going to have to, we're going to have completely new sentient beings. I, because as of right now, inside of thoughtly, we already have AI agents and I'm not talking about AI voice agents. I'm talking about actual employees that do day-to-day work. Um, we have, uh, executive assistants that manage complete workflows.

[00:18:45] We have content creators that go and create content every single day. Um, an IT person. And when I say people, I'm talking, these are fully autonomous AI agents. We message them. They have personalities. They message us. They could FaceTime us. Uh, they call us, they know all of our little quirks. So like, um, like I'll say something inside of a Slack channel and then our AI agent will go DM somebody and be like, this is totally something Will would say, LOL.

[00:19:14] Like they have a persona and they do, they do their own thing. Um, so I'm seeing it right now of how everything's shifting. And I really think it's going to, that's only going to get enhanced as years go on. Um, so I think that, uh, the future does look bright, but you definitely need to, uh, you need to embrace it because I don't think there's any slowing it down. And if we have, I don't know, a school leave or someone entering the workplace for the first

[00:19:43] time, or maybe even a business leader that's just concerned of how they don't get left behind. What advice would you say to anybody listening of any age that, uh, what they should be preparing for, what they should be doing, maybe what they should be playing with. What advice would you offer to those people listening? Step one. And I think this is where everyone starts is prompt engineering. Yeah. Um, you can look at YouTube videos and see what these LLMs are capable of.

[00:20:10] But if you, you got to start speaking to LLMs and start, uh, start seeing exactly what they're best for, ask them questions, even talk to them now. Um, this is going to give your, you're kind of going to get loose to the fact. Now, uh, the next thing I'd recommend is joining somewhat of a community. There's so many like free school communities now where you could just join and it gives you like a newsletter of what's going on or like, what's the latest tech or what's the latest softwares that are out.

[00:20:37] And then simply poke around with these softwares. It's pretty easy to start learning how to, to, to prompt engineer and, and build different softwares out, uh, poke around. It does depend where you're at in your life. If you're a young person, I'd recommend going all in on AI. Particularly. I started my own AI software when I was 20. Um, and I had a, had an exit when I was 23.

[00:21:03] So I'd recommend if you're younger, go all in on how to monetize AI. If you're more established and you have your business, you have your career, I'd recommend just utilizing the tools to their absolute fullest for towards your day-to-day operations. Now, um, either way, I think that there's, there's once again, no escaping it and we have to, we have to embrace it and we have to, uh, learn how to use these tools exactly how they were meant to be used, which is to make us more productive.

[00:21:32] And as I said earlier, there's a lot of doom and gloom on our news feeds, and I'd love to get the balance back in the universe and have a more optimistic closure today. So for anybody listening, what excites you about the future and the opportunities that it will create not just for yourselves, but for people listening to what excites you about where we're heading? What excites me the most is, well, I guess it's from my own personal projects is what excites me the most.

[00:21:57] And this might sound kind of funny, but, um, I'm currently working on an agentic agent right now that, uh, that knows me completely and knows exactly what I want before I want it. And what excites me the most is I want to be Iron Man. So like, I want, I want my own Jarvis. I want, uh, you know, I want an autonomous house. Um, I think that stuff is cool to me. A lot of people get frightened by that, but I think it's, I think it's so fascinating.

[00:22:24] I, I really do think it's such an awesome time that we're in right now. Um, and to be at the peak of like a technology era, isn't something that should be seen as grim. It should be seen as exciting. Like we're witnessing this right now. Um, and although I can't necessarily say where it's going to go, I can say that it could be definitely fun for you along the way to utilize this.

[00:22:53] Like, like I am, I, I, I, I'm building out my Jarvis now it's on like stage two. Um, and I'd recommend everyone to do the same and go build something that's, that's fun for them. You don't have to be a coder or developer or have a software engineering degree, go start building and you'll actually realize that it's not too dangerous and it's actually kind of fun. Yeah. I think that lowering the barrier of entry is something that everyone should be making the most of right now.

[00:23:19] And for anyone listening wants to dig a little bit deeper on thoughtly connect with you or your team, talk about your metamorphosis into Tony Stark or anything at all. Where would you like to like me to point everyone? Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, what I'd recommend if you're a, if you're a business that's looking for an AI voice agent solution, I'd recommend going to thoughtly.com in the top right corner. You can book a demo with our team and we could walk you through the platform, what it is that we do best. Um, if you're just interested in a little bit more information and want to just keep up

[00:23:49] with some of the AI stuff that we've been doing, we do have a YouTube channel as well that gives you a little bit more insight as to, you know, what's coming and, and, uh, how we're operating as a business. But, uh, that can be found at thoughtly, uh, thought.ly on YouTube. So, uh, with that, you want to book a demo thoughtly.com you want to catch up with us. It's going to be us. Uh, you're going to find us on YouTube. Awesome. And what I've loved about chatting with you today is you bring this practical operator

[00:24:15] level perspective on how AI actually shows up in employees day to day work and so much food for thought and things to take away. So I will add links to everything that you mentioned there for people listening. I heard you to go check that out and watch some of the videos. I'll add one of the videos from your YouTube onto the blog post associated with this as well, but more than anything, just thank you for your time tonight. Appreciate you. Of course. You as well. Thank you very much. I loved how optimistic this conversation was today.

[00:24:42] And my guest will have offered a refreshing perspective on AI agents, not as replacements for people, but as tools, tools that help teams spend less time on those repetitive tasks and more time on the conversations, building relationships and making decisions that really create value. And we talked about transparency, trust, customer expectations, and why some of the biggest wins in AI are happening in areas that people always overlook.

[00:25:10] And that is the ability to follow up instantly, engage customers at scale and support teams in ways that simply weren't possible before. So whether you are an AI optimist or you're skeptical of it, or maybe somewhere in between, I think today's episode was just a timely reminder that the future of work is being shaped by the organizations that have learned how to combine human strengths with AI capabilities in thoughtful and practical ways.

[00:25:37] And if Will is right, perhaps we are all a little closer to having our own version of Jarvis than we realize. That's kind of cool, isn't it? But as always, techtalksnetwork.com. Eight podcasts, 4,000 interviews, lots of information over there. You can also work with me, send me a DM, send me an audio message, or come and meet me at an event. Speak with you soon. Bye for now.