Bluehost CEO Sachin Puri on Building an AI-Ready Web for the Next Generation of Founders

[00:00:01] Welcome back to the Business Technology Perspectives podcast. Now, in today's episode, I'm joined by the CEO of Bluehost. I'm sure you know Bluehost is a well-known name in the world of web hosting and digital infrastructure, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses.

[00:00:21] But my guest today, he spent more than two decades working across SaaS, e-commerce and online platforms, and he's helping companies adapt as technology continues to change how businesses operate.

[00:00:37] So, in our conversation today, we'll talk about how AI is changing customer expectations, and most importantly for entrepreneurs and business leaders alike out there, what they need to be thinking about when building and running websites in an increasingly competitive digital environment.

[00:00:56] But before I get my guest on today, I want to give a quick thank you to my friends at Denodo, who are playing a big part in supporting this show, because one of the questions I hear more and more from listeners on this podcast is, why does AI succeed or why does it fail? Because let's be honest, AI is moving fast, but success is often still elusive. Now, most projects fail not because of the AI, but because the data foundation.

[00:01:26] This is why organizations are increasingly turning to Denodo delivers trustworthy and AI-ready data without the need to copy it everywhere. Essentially, you can optimize your lake house, accelerate agentic AI, and build data products that finally make self-service real and achievable. And with a powerful partner ecosystem, teams get to value even faster.

[00:01:55] So, if you're ready to understand why your AI projects fail and how to succeed with AI, simply visit denodo.com and take control of your data world. So much to get through today. So, let me introduce you to my guest right now. So, a massive warm welcome to the show. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do?

[00:02:22] Daniel, thank you for having me. I'm CEO of Bluehost Group, and I lead a portfolio of digital brands that focus on one mission. And our mission is to help entrepreneurs and small businesses turn their ideas into online success. I mean, right from our beginning, which is in 2003, our journey has been always focusing and catering to small and medium businesses.

[00:02:51] And when our journey started, it started with WordPress, and it has never left since then. As you may know, Bluehost is one of the longest recommended hosts by WordPress.org by 2025. So, in terms of what we offer to our customers, we offer enterprise-grade performance, reliability, speed, and human support as what we call SMB affordability.

[00:03:21] And one of the things that we are very excited about is that we have intentionally built our systems and our software that can be easily used by small businesses to be successful online. I love that. And I think many people listening will know all about you. I can remember Bluehost as long as I look back.

[00:03:41] And the phrase that you use there, helping people turn ideas into online success, I think is more important and more relevant than ever before. Because, I don't know, let's go back three, four years, and how creative you were depended on how much access you had to, I don't know, an Adobe Creative Suite, whether you could afford it, whether you had a thousand hours to master in using it all, and all the other different tools and subscriptions that were out there.

[00:04:09] But, of course, now AI has dramatically lowered the barrier. And I think it's never been easier for anyone that's got an idea in their head to bring it to life. I was also talking to someone about a Telegram group recently. And that Telegram group was just full of people who had ideas and were starting right very bottom with AI and then just building their business out step by step. And they were sharing their success. Yes, but I'm curious, from everything that you're seeing and hearing here, because you do have a unique vantage point,

[00:04:38] how are AI native platforms fundamentally changing the entrepreneurial landscape? And what new opportunities do you see emerging for small business owners? Because I think this is the magical time of year, isn't it? We're all thinking about what we're going to be doing in 2026 and mixing things up and doing things differently. So what are you seeing here?

[00:04:59] Now, as you rightly put, AI platforms are definitely removing some of the historical friction that existed for small businesses to start an idea and scale their businesses. So that barrier that, hey, I don't know how to build something is kind of out of the window or slowly going out of the window.

[00:05:22] And where the cost of entry and experimentation is extremely, extremely low. But the ceiling for growth is immense. And it's the faster move advantage that small businesses can take advantage of and indeed are taking advantage of. Particularly talking about AI native platforms, what it enables today is the work that in the past required tons and tons of teams of designers,

[00:05:53] developers, developers, and analysts to mine the data to build the right tool can all be done by one person today. Through AI assist mode. In fact, what we are seeing is there is a new kind of what we call it as solo scale entrepreneurs that are emerging. But one person can actually achieve a lot more than what required a bigger team in the past. Things like they can launch a brand. They can launch a storefront.

[00:06:22] They can run full marketing funnel in days, not months. They can use AI to analyze market data, shape their offer, as well as very quickly test ideas. See how they are showing up on search results, AI results, and LLM. And based on that, run automated campaigns to acquire customers or retain and upsell and build customer lifecycle.

[00:06:50] Now, this is one lifetime opportunity where AI native platforms are enabling entrepreneurs to be able to do that and test their idea at a very rapid pace. And when we're talking about things like diversity of thought and lowering the barrier of entry to creating almost anything, we've got vibe coding as well, for example. I think we are creating equal opportunities for everyone.

[00:07:16] And anyone that's got that idea in their head can easily bring it to life, or at least much easier than they could have five years ago. So are there any examples that you could share of how AI is unlocking creativity for entrepreneurs, especially those that don't have technical backgrounds or come from a family that has any technical background? Yeah, no, for sure. AI is an equalizer, for sure. And I think you said it very well about that.

[00:07:43] Some of the examples that really jumps up is, you know, a boutique owner with no design background can generate multiple visual identities, brand identities like brand logo, color, typography, design their packages, the product design in minutes. A restaurant owner, now food is very close to my heart. I'm a foodie by love.

[00:08:10] And a restaurant owner can use AI to create menus, full-fledged social posts, imagery, website, product description, all the things that they want to talk about and express what they're putting into their food, without a single dish is photographed. A non-technical founder can turn their rough ideas into a full-fledged wireframes,

[00:08:38] a landing page, a site, a customer journey, all of that without writing a single piece of code. And I think, Neil, you already talked about wipe coding. So these are some of the use cases that are allowing what we call as non-technical people, people who don't have the background of writing codes or dealing with technical tools or software,

[00:09:03] can now can really take the advantage of AI and build these applications, bring their ideas to life with a much more rapid pace and an extreme degree of simplicity. Like, for example, we launched a website builder and what we are seeing, customers who are using our website builders are able to launch their website 2x or more faster than they would have used the traditional way of building their website.

[00:09:33] That's phenomenal. And this is we just getting started and we can see it on a real-time basis, how AI is incredibly improving the productivity and creativity of customers who in the past did not have as much technical skills. And I think in 2025, we saw a lot of businesses struggling to find ROI from their AI projects.

[00:09:58] Very often that's because they went AI for AI's sake rather than focusing on the problem or what it was that they were trying to achieve. And there's an old mantra in IT that you can only improve what you measure. So from what you've seen here, what are the most significant measurable efficiency gains that you've observed for SMBs that are using an AI-powered website tool and all the services that you offer there? Yeah, I think we touched upon that as well.

[00:10:27] But the way we think about it is in the paradigm of five pillars here. First is the powering the website itself. Being able to get access to incredible level of power and capacity that SMBs can today use at an affordable price is immense. So the speed, performance, reliability is absolutely fantastic.

[00:10:54] The four key layers are the layers that are very, very important for anybody to run their business online. And that's where the efficiency starts to come in. The first one is how quickly you can build and change your website. What you need earlier used to take months, possibly a week, if you are extremely high, highly qualified in terms of building websites, could now be done within minutes.

[00:11:21] Customers are able to shave off a ton of cost by just being able to build their website, modernize their website, and change their website. Whether it is drafting the pages, building sections of full-fledged content, and then iterating of those. So that's one, just something what we call as create. Being able to create something, build something. A site, a store, what have you.

[00:11:49] The second pillar is how do you take what you have built and monetize it? Sell something commerce. Now, commerce doesn't need to be all somebody comes to your site, click a button and buy. Yes, there is a single-click checkout capability, product description, auto-generation of product imagery, auto-generation of product description,

[00:12:14] and inventory details around that can very quickly be automated and a huge level of efficiencies to be able to send online. But also, selling your product is also about sometimes being able to manage walk-ins, schedule appointments, and that is all really a huge level of efficiency gains through the AI tools that are available to schedule appointments, but also AI-powered chats,

[00:12:42] engines that can talk and interact with customers through voice, as well as text to allow for those appointments as well as conversion. And the fourth pillar is a large around how do you get discovered? And discovery is driven by both LLMs, emails, as well as search engines.

[00:13:06] So now AI is allowing on a fingertips customers to get insights how they are showing up or not showing up on search results as well as AI results, and then build campaigns around that. And the last piece is really engaging with the customer, which is communication, SMS, email, to automated AI-generated campaigns right off the bat, based on the content that is already generated from your website.

[00:13:36] So if you look at this full loop, it creates a very, very fast, highly efficient flywheel for SMBs to really go from starting an idea to growing their businesses online. And we see this time and time again. Our customers are leveraging this power of AI as to run their business online. There's a saying that we use a lot on this podcast

[00:14:05] that the last best experience that we have anywhere becomes the standard expectation that we expect to see everywhere. And this year alone, during the holiday season, I've noticed changes in my own habits. I'm not going to spend a long time on a traditional search engine looking for something when I can get much closer to what I'm looking for, or even personalized gift ideas, for example, through chatting to an AI agent. And I know there's more and more people doing this. And there's a lot of older businesses

[00:14:33] that have invested a lot of money in SEO, but their customers are looking elsewhere. So I'm curious, from what you're seeing, how have customer expectations evolved in this age of AI? And from your viewpoint here, what should SMBs be prioritizing to meet these new demands? Yeah, so customer expectations, as Neil, you and I have been in this industry for decades now, and we have seen the digital revolution has already changed

[00:15:02] the way customer expectations has evolved. But with the very fast advent of AI, what we are seeing is an acceleration of customers today expect instant, relevant, and seamless experiences. They reward personalization. They reward seamless experience. They reward spontaneity, instant speed. But they also penalize the lack thereof.

[00:15:31] So what that means is that the pages that load immediately. Messages don't feel cookie cutter and tailored. They feel very, very specific and personalized to the customer. Check out experience that have zero friction. That is always the goal. But check out experience that are not clumsy, easy, simple, in and out.

[00:15:59] And support when they need it. It's available when they need it. And when you think of all of this together, it's a high bar that SMBs have to work on. And what they really need to start focusing on is performance, which is all about a reliable website, reliable hosting, reliable media delivery, personalization.

[00:16:25] Now, the good news is that AI today allows to bring the troves of data to provide recommendation and dynamic content to the customers. That it feels tailored. It feels personalized. It feels relevant. Responsiveness. As I was saying, support and engagement when customers need it. This is where chats, smart help, clear communication and content delivery

[00:16:54] starts to play in. And the last is consistency. Your experience has to look, feel very consistent whether the customer is coming through a desktop or a mobile or engaging on social. So when you think of all of this, AI has really raised the bar. And SMBs that match those expectations of instant, relevant, and seamless experience

[00:17:24] will continue to enjoy the customer loyalty and the growth. Something else that I think many businesses fail to realize or I have seen happen over the course of time is they can have a website with, I don't know, a thousand visitors. Just everything's ticking along nicely. But then it could be ChatGPT pointing people to their site. It could be a viral social post

[00:17:51] that almost overnight turns their traffic to 100,000 visitors. And I'm curious, from what you're seeing, what are the most common pitfalls that you've seen SMBs face when their company suddenly goes viral when they least expected it? How can they proactively prepare? Because these moments come when you least expect it, aren't they? See, virality is a gift. Yeah. Momentum is priceless.

[00:18:18] But it's lost instantly when a website crashes. Many times I talk to people in so many startups and we talk about, oh, virality, we got to go and achieve virality. Virality isn't just a marketing problem. It's truly and truly an infrastructure and readiness opportunity. So from my vantage point, the three key failure points or risk point

[00:18:48] that SMBs can prepare for is one, an infrastructure. End of the day, sites run on infrastructure. And you have to build your site on an infrastructure that is prepared for traffic spike. Because in the moment of time, you can go from a very, very low traffic to extremely high in that virality moment. And you don't want to lose that moment and lose that momentum.

[00:19:15] You want to be able to have an infrastructure that's scalable. You have monitoring capability and you can plan for that search capacity, if you will. Second is once your infrastructure is able to manage that search, you want to be able to fulfill your business as well as the product that you're selling. So how do you plan for the demand in your operations with clear inventory rules so that you can fulfill the products?

[00:19:46] Don't complicate your product catalog. Keep the SKUs and inventory very clear so that it is realistic of how quickly you can fulfill and ship with a very defined timeline for the customers. And good news, if you have back orders, that means you're selling a lot, have a system ready to manage the back orders. And the last one, which I believe always in a human-driven environment

[00:20:14] is the best, is communication. If customers don't know what's happening, it leads to frustrations, confusion, and cancellations. Cancellations are expensive, not just financially, but also emotionally, it is demoralizing as well. So you want to be able to keep that communication going with the customer. Hey, congratulations, we have got your order. We are working on your inventory. Whether it is through email, through SMS, or chat,

[00:20:43] some kind of order tracking mechanism so that customers can see through what is the status of their product. And I think the key around virality is to prepare for that success before it really shows up on your door so that when the breakthrough moment hits, it becomes your growth engine and not a crisis moment. Fantastic advice. And I always think of web hosting as almost the unsung hero of the web,

[00:21:13] something that a lot of people take for granted until they realize that their website's gone down and everything that they do, every action, every social post, points to that website that's currently down. So what role do you see web hosting playing in the success of a business? See, web hosting is no longer, hey, it's a place where I just keep my website. Oh, my website lives over there. It's no more of that. As we see small businesses

[00:21:43] and very successful middle-sized businesses are leveraging is that they are using it as a performance layer for their business. Because truly, when you think about hosting, what it determines is about the speed, the uptime, security, and your ability to scale. Now, tools like AI, commerce, data processing, and tools around customer experience

[00:22:11] really accelerates that whole power. But eventually, it all gets fueled by the underlying hosting capability. Just imagine you have built this really beautiful, amazing site. You put all your heart and soul into it. But if that site is unstable, it is effectively broken. Yeah. And as customers and businesses adopt more and more AI and automation,

[00:22:40] what we are seeing is high-performance hosting becomes more of a strategic advantage versus a commodity. And I would highly urge all SMBs to see it such. Today, for example, for Bluehost, we have built our platform in such a way that we are offering the enterprise-grade performance, reliability, security, and support at a much, much more affordable and predictable pricing. What that allows is

[00:23:09] you're making a strategic investment into that moment where hosting is fueling your business across site, commerce, discovery, content, and engagement versus, hey, I'm just hosting a site. And for anybody listening anywhere in the world, what advice would you give to an entrepreneur of any age looking to maybe future-proof their website

[00:23:37] for both growth and resilience in this increasingly digital world? They also want to ensure it's picked up by AI as well. There's so many different things going on. But any advice that you'd offer to that person listening wanting to start 2026 on a positive note? 100%. And having run e-commerce and websites at scale all my life, I think there are four key elements that has really stood with me. I think the first one is

[00:24:08] build your websites on scalable modern infrastructure. These things that are hidden and unseen really fuel your website, really fuel your digital presence. So choose the hosting that grows with your website, goes with your traffic, goes with your content, and use it so that you're not moving around your website because that's expensive. Second, focus and focus on performance and security.

[00:24:36] A fast load time, SSL, backups, strong securities are table stakes. Not just trust for your customer. A secured website imparts a tremendous level of trust to the customer. But also it is very, very good for your search engine visibility, LLM visibility. So a performant, secured website is always good

[00:25:05] and it is table stakes from trust and SEO. Third, adopt AI early. Use AI to build your content, accelerate your design, build your support mechanism, optimize your site. Sites are living organism, as I always say to my team as well. You have to work with it, you have to keep it fresh, keep it relevant, keep it new, so that when customers come, they're always interested in finding it relevant that we have established early. So adopt AI early.

[00:25:34] And the last one is build and design around flexibility. Choose a stack, choose a platform that should grow with how your business needs expand, your channel needs expand, and your customer engagement expands. Because that allows you to build on what you have already built versus keep changing things as I was talking about earlier. Listen,

[00:26:04] as long as we all have been in digital world, we all know internet will keep changing. And a strong, flexible foundation lets your business adapt and thrive in this changing need. And 2026, we will see exactly that and in fact, accelerated. So I will go back to those four principles. Scalable model infrastructure, focus on performance and security, adopt AI early,

[00:26:32] and design for flexibility and expansion. Exciting times ahead. And speaking of which, are there any big trends that you're keeping an eye on in the web hosting space as we end at 2026? Anything excite you? Anything you're monitoring closely? See, there are so many. I'll probably highlight a few of them. I think the first one, what we are seeing is SMBs are moving towards reclaiming their own web real estate. You know,

[00:27:02] years and years of chasing social algorithms. Businesses now want to bring the audiences back to their own sites. Because when a customer is on your site, it is your true hub and it's your true opportunity to build content, commerce with them, and build a community around that. So that's one trend that we are seeing emerging and we are very excited going into 2026. Second, we already touched upon that quite a bit. Intelligent sites,

[00:27:32] that sites is no more a static browser and more and more customers are building this living system that evolves with them. We talked about AI as a silent partner. We are very, very excited about the adoption of AI by our customers to build our website as I was talking about earlier. There is one trend which is really at the precipitous of very fast acceleration next year is the GEO,

[00:28:01] which is generative engine optimization as generative search and LLM start to surface more and more answers. Websites will be optimized not just for traditional search engines but AI engines as well. So one of the things that we launched in anticipation of that to enable SMBs is brand insights tool. So today our customers can go and use Yoast brand insight tools that are also available

[00:28:31] on Bluehost is it tells you how your site is viewed from LLM's point of view. How is your brand showing up? How are your competitors showing up? How are your customers looking for those answers so that you can optimize your site? And the last one is there is a race for AI from everybody. I think we see this every single day. But my fundamental belief is that the winning experience

[00:28:59] will be a combination of human and AI together. I suspect that in 2026 we will see that there will be a value and a premium that will come to the human judgment. When something is human verified human certified or human premium customers would be more willing to pay higher premium or luxury

[00:29:28] AI won't replace entrepreneurs for sure. It will actually unleash the ones who were always capable but never had the tools. And for the first time in the history small businesses have the same power as the giants before. And the only difference now is how fast they choose to move and operate. Wow. I think that is a powerful moment to end on. And for

[00:29:58] anybody listening that wants to be keeping up to speed with the work that you're doing and will be doing next year and also some of the tools that you'll be rolling out and how you might be able to help and some of the trends that you're seeing, where would you like to point everyone listening? Anywhere they should be going? Please. You can find us at bluehost.com or our work on social media at bluehost. And if you're ready

[00:30:28] to experiment with AI powered sites, hosting, and growth tools, visit bluehost.com today. Thank you very much. It's great to be here, Neil. I really appreciated the opportunity. Awesome. Well, I'll have links to everything that you mentioned there. I'll also link back to your LinkedIn as well so people can follow you there. But more than anything, just thank you for shining a light on this. And I hope that it will inspire people from a variety of backgrounds to turn their

[00:30:57] ideas into business success. And on that full circle moment, just thank you for joining me today. Thank you, Neil. Thank you for having me. A big thank you to my guest for sharing his perspective on how technology is shaping the future of online business for SMBs. And today I think we covered how AI is influencing digital platforms, what customers can expect today, and why preparation matters so much when traffic can suddenly spike.

[00:31:27] As he said there, going viral is a real gift. But obviously you need the infrastructure to back it up when it strikes. And I will also include links to Bluehost so you can find out more about the company and its work and everything that they're doing there. But more than anything, thank you for listening to this episode of the Business Technology Perspectives podcast. I hope you'll join me here again in the future. But remember, pop by techtalksnetwork.com

[00:31:57] There are approaching 4,000 interviews across nine podcasts there, all hosted by yours truly. So hopefully that will keep you quiet over the holidays. But that is it for me today. Thanks for listening, everyone. Bye for now.