“Everybody wants AI, nobody wants BS” with Fertitta Entertainment
Summary
Brian Jeppesen, who serves as Director, Contact Center Operations at Fertitta Entertainment, joined your host Nikola Mrkšić to discuss his vision for the AI-powered contact center.
Listen to hear Nikola and Brian cover:
- How to overcome the challenges of staffing call centers during high-demand periods, including with virtual agents
- Their reaction to the Keep Call Centers in America Act of 2025, and what it means for brands and BPOs
- Myths around the implementation of AI in contact centers
- The risks BPOs (Business Process Outsourcers) face if they do not proactively offer AI solutions to their clients
- The transition to generative AI-powered virtual assistants, including what’s working today and what’s still yet to come.
PolyAI is proud to bring insights from our customers to the pod! Learn more about our work together here: https://poly.ai/case-studies/golden-nugget/
Key Takeaways
- AI as revenue protector: Fertitta faced massive call abandonment during COVID, risking up to 50% of revenue. By partnering with PolyAI, they quickly deployed voice AI that captured lost revenue and cut abandonment to 10%.
- Local voice, brand identity: Fertitta and PolyAI co-designed voices that matched the brand — even down to a Texan accent — proving that automation can feel authentic and customer-friendly.
- Scaling with trust: What started with simple FAQs and reservations grew into a system handling 30% of volume, cutting attrition in half and improving agent satisfaction — showing how AI and people can work hand-in-hand.
- Future of hospitality AI: Fertitta and PolyAI are now pioneering agentic AI in hospitality, making it possible for virtual agents to do everything a human agent can, while keeping the experience fast, efficient, and on-brand.
Transcript
Nikola Mrkšić
01:24 – 01:37
hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of PolyAI’s podcast. Today, I have the great pleasure of welcoming Brian Jeppesen, who was our first client in The US many, many years ago.
So, Brian, welcome to the podcast.
Brian Jeppesen
01:37 – 01:41
Thank you. Thank you.
Great to be here. Great to see you.
again, Nikola.
Nikola Mrkšić
01:41 – 02:36
Absolutely. Always.
And I look forward to seeing you in person in a few days, here in London. But, I have a few sentences, kind of, like, about you and kind of, like, your history.
I think, you know, you’ve been working at Entertainment, which listeners may know for Golden Nugget casinos and all of the restaurants under the Landry’s dining umbrella. But you’re also one of the directors on the board of the contact center of the AI association.
And you’ve previously been an executive, at Alorica, one of the largest BPOs on the planet. So I think, I really look forward to picking your brain on a lot of these topics, but, I’d love maybe just to kind of kick off with our story and how we started working together.
So, I’ll pass it over to you. I have a call recording ready at hand as well, but, yeah.
Brian Jeppesen
02:36 – 02:57
Yeah. Great, great intro.
So, yes, I’ve, you know, I’ve been in the business for thirty five plus years. I think I stopped counting.
And I tell people, I realized that just because you’ve been doing something for a long time doesn’t mean you’re good at it. So, but I’ve been playing golf for longer than that, and I’m still not good at golf.
So,.
Nikola Mrkšić
02:57 – 02:57
Okay.
Brian Jeppesen
02:57 – 03:02
but, it just means you’re old when you’ve been doing something.
Nikola Mrkšić
03:02 – 03:06
I haven’t yet started playing golf, so I look forward to being bad at it. day.
But,.
Brian Jeppesen
03:06 – 03:06
Okay.
Nikola Mrkšić
03:06 – 03:07
yeah, it’s.
Brian Jeppesen
03:07 – 04:46
That’s, I can teach you how to be bad at golf. So, yeah, I you know, my story, you know, when we were four and a half years ago, almost five years ago now when we were kinda connected and looking at solutions because we couldn’t handle calls coming out of COVID.
I couldn’t staff, couldn’t hire people, had high abandon. And, so, you know, we’re just looking for solutions and told my CFO this is the amount of revenue we’re potentially losing because we can’t answer.
We’re banning 40 to 50% of our revenue calls. You know, what can we do? And he said, what do you wanna do? I said, let’s explore AI stuff.
So I looked at a lot of different solutions. I was out there.
Most everybody four and a four and a half years ago, the voice quality wasn’t like it is today. And I wanted something that was a good experience for my customers.
I didn’t want a robot. I didn’t want it to sound, you know, like everybody else had had bad experiences with AI.
And, you know, there’s, it’s funny now because I say everybody wants AI, but nobody wants BS. Right? And there’s still a lot of it out there.
So, I would look for some great solutions, a great voice, somebody that people wanted to connect with. And you gave me a sample of, you know, the first one you did, I’ll let you play the one that really hooked me.
But, the first one you did, it was a very nice British female voice who did, you know, reservations for my restaurants, for Sawgrass Steakhouse. And I’m like, that’s really nice, but can you do something more Texan? And so I don’t.
know if you wanna share, you wanna share what you came back the next day with.
Nikola Mrkšić
04:46 – 05:37
absolutely. And, you know, I mean, you guys are our headquarters in Houston.
My father-in-law lives there, so I’m, like, well familiar. And I think that we’ve maybe what’s probably the most important demo we’ve ever had for anyone.
I think I can remember a big howdy on you, so we all laughed about well, I’ll let people hear this thing, but it it was, it was something. Howdy.
Thanks for calling Saltgrass Steakhouse Amarillo. How can I help you today? Hey there.
Can I reserve a table for tomorrow night? Sure thing. What time would you like to come in? And I remember that.
Kinda like initially, you guys went to build something with a partner in The US, and then in the end, I think you told me that, Rick, the CFO, and you were kind of like, hey. If you can get it up and running quickly, like, you’d go with us and, you know, we, I think, got it up and running in, what, about two weeks, something like that.
Brian Jeppesen
05:37 – 06:01
Yeah. It was, at that point, that’s what convinced me.
I said, okay. You can give me the voice I want.
That was a little extreme, but, you know, I said, here’s 10 calls. Here’s 10 calls with my best agent.
Can you make it sound like my best agent? And you gave me a voice to sound just like my best agent. And, and I said, how soon can we do this? I think it was four weeks from the time we said, let’s do this.
I had 40,000 calls that were very simple PBX calls.
Nikola Mrkšić
06:01 – 06:01
Yeah.
Brian Jeppesen
06:01 – 06:19
FAQs, transfers that I needed help with. And, we went to live with that.
Like I said, I think it was about four weeks. And, day one, I handled 87% of those calls, and it dropped me.
abundance to 10%. And it was just a huge, huge success.
Nikola Mrkšić
06:19 – 06:58
Yeah. Yeah.
No. And, you know, I think that from that point on, Vegas has been a great part of our journey.
So, that was something that we’re always really, really thankful for. And we had just had so much fun working with you, building out the use case much more deeply into kind of a full reservation.
And I think, you know, especially when you look back at that time, I think you were a real pioneer in wanting to use AI for it. Because I think there was a moment around the ChatGPT moment when the situation flipped.
And it was like, why are you not doing AI? Right? But I know how hard you had to work to bring everyone on board, and I think that that’s a real testament to kinda like both you and the organization back, back at that time.
Brian Jeppesen
06:58 – 07:04
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, it was new stuff four and a half years ago. Now everybody’s wanting it.
Right? But,.
Nikola Mrkšić
07:04 – 07:05
Yep.
Brian Jeppesen
07:05 – 07:39
back then, it was, I feel like, you know, yeah, we pioneered that. We’ve explored.
Like I said, we’ve got a lot more detailed, a lot more complex, full reservations, books over a 100 reservations a day, making all kinds of extra revenue for us without the need to speak to an agent. And, ultimately, what it does is it gives my customers an opportunity to get their issue taken care of immediately, quickly without the need to wait for a live agent.
So we also give them an option if they wanna speak to a live agent. Right? So it’s you.
know, just give people options and choices to take care of their situation or their issues as quickly as they can.
Nikola Mrkšić
07:39 – 09:19
Absolutely. And I think, you know, like, for back at that time, even today, like, I think that, leaders like you have always just had, like, really two levers.
And I think one is offshoring. The second one is automation.
I think that there’s a lot more faith in automation now. But, I think kind of like, we try to start these episodes usually with just some news commentary, and I think the one we have for today is the keep call centers in America act.
I think it’s a bipartisan one with Greg and Jim Justice. And, this is like this thing is older than the contact center.
It’s existed perennially both in The US, in The UK where, like, there’s this, like, wave of offshoring, onshoring, offshoring, and onshoring. And I remember talking to you about, you know, like, well, your visits to these locations.
And I think that, you know, automation today is, in some places, improving, in some places, actually, making it harder to get to those humans. But, one thing that I found really interesting in talking to most leaders is that one of the main benefits, if you can do automation well, is in reducing the number of BPO partners you have to manage to get that extra staffing level.
But I think, you know, in these podcasts, we try to talk more about technology for CX, but also we have a wide kind of startup audience and, you know, like people who are, like, just getting into building this stuff. I think it’d be really interesting for them to hear about your experience with managing that kind of human portfolio, its growth, like, reductions, needs in special situations, and how that, like, shaped your life before and after AI was there to kinda, like, help deal with some of the demand.
Brian Jeppesen
09:19 – 10:52
Sure. You know, I think, you know, I think these congressmen that are wanting to move everything back to the US don’t really understand how many people there are.
Right? And, unfortunately, there aren’t that many workers available in The US to be able to handle the total volume that they would need to be able to bring it back here. I struggle now to find staff . I think most call centers struggle to find staffing.
You know, in thirty five years, staffing has always been one of the one of the. The hardest part.
And I and I know, you know, what’s interesting for us is, you know, now it handles 3030% roughly of my volume, which means and and I didn’t I didn’t cut 30% of my staff. It’s just 30% fewer people I have to hire.
And what’s interesting is especially in the BPO space when I was running contact centers, I had a 700 seat site. It was telecommunications, our attrition was easily 100% plus annualized.
And what are you? find it’s not you’re not turning the whole staff over 100%, right? It’s that bottom 25% that you churn three and four. times.
And so, and we were experiencing similar things here, not quite as high of attrition. But what I found is when the virtual assistant now handles 25, 30% of my volume, and I and I’ve been able to not have to hire that bottom 30%, my attrition dropped in half.
And so,.
Nikola Mrkšić
10:52 – 10:53
Yep.
Brian Jeppesen
10:53 – 11:55
and I look back to my days in the BPO space and thinking, you know, if I if I could if I could cut my my attrition in half, cost training costs and and rehiring costs in BPO space is huge because technically, they say we we’re not gonna charge your customer for attrition training. Right? Well, they do.
because they have to build it in their margins because it’s their cost. They have to build in their margins and charge them.
So if you could cut that piece out, if you cut your attrition costs by 50%, that would have a huge, huge impact on your margins. So, you know, I look at the BPO space, and I just think of this tool, there’s so many opportunities where even just a simple call, just start with, you know, high.
impact, low effort calls that they could handle this for their customers. And I think, you know, for the BPOs, I think if you don’t go out to your customers and offer that solution, then your customers are gonna do it themselves.
You’re gonna lose that revenue. I think a lot of them are nervous of, say, thinking of offering a difference.
solution because it impacts their revenue.
Nikola Mrkšić
11:55 – 12:24
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, we, I recently had, an article with a friend of mine, Nathan, from Air Street Capital, just about, like, the changing nature of it. And, you know, there are a lot of these funds that are looking to fund companies that will kinda, like, acquire BPOs and offer kind of, like, a fully integrated service between the humans and technology doing the whole bit.
How do you feel about BPO’s ability to actually be the one pushing and selling this kind of technology?
Brian Jeppesen
12:24 – 13:01
Yeah. I yeah.
I’m a huge proponent. I and I think, you know, a lot of them I’m seeing, you know, some of them trying to create their own and build their own internally.
And I think, Nikola, how many years you’ve been around and the technology and the knowledge that you already have. And I don’t know why, you know, build versus buy.
Do you go out and you find somebody and white label their there, what they’ve already built and help present that quickly to their customers? Or do you wanna, you know, try and build something for two or three years and then you have by the time you build it, the technology is changing so. quickly that, you know,.
Nikola Mrkšić
13:01 – 13:02
It’s.
Brian Jeppesen
13:02 – 13:02
mean,.
Nikola Mrkšić
13:02 – 13:03
hard. Right?
Brian Jeppesen
13:03 – 13:04
it is.
Nikola Mrkšić
13:04 – 13:51
Yeah. I mean, it’s capital intensive.
I think that for them, it’s really just a matter of, like, can they sustain the investment and then offer it? And, I mean, there’s always that tension where, like, they are cannibalizing their revenue base. So they’re not really gonna do it on a customer they already have because it’s like I don’t know.
I’ve always just been surprised with how unwilling customers are to allow BPO to have a high margin on anything they’re selling them. Perhaps because they’re these punishers used to dealing with them that are there to ensure that they don’t get overcharged, you know, I felt, you know, and I probably shouldn’t be saying it out loud.
But I feel like, you know, top procurement guys are a bit more lenient on, you know, a relatively young AI startup because the promise is so high relative to a BPO where they’re just like, don’t stop punishing. But
Brian Jeppesen
13:51 – 13:51
Yeah.
Nikola Mrkšić
13:51 – 13:52
yeah.
Brian Jeppesen
13:52 – 14:22
Yeah. I mean, a lot of them I have a lot of great contacts and friends and that are BPRs or CEOs and BPL space.
And I think a lot of them all understand and realize that they’ve got to do it, but they’re nervous to understand how to do it effectively. I think the nervousness, you know, like I say, the impact of their current customers.
But I think there’s, obviously, the risk, and you’ve seen it, where the customer says, okay, we’ll just go directly to the,.
Nikola Mrkšić
14:22 – 14:23
Yeah.
Brian Jeppesen
14:23 – 14:58
AI company, and then you lose that revenue altogether. So, I think the ones that are gonna be smart are gonna be able to partner and use that.
I mean, they, you know, they offer solutions. They offer, you know, here’s what your costs would be domestically.
Here’s your cost. Here’s your cost of share.
And here’s your cost if we use AI. Right? So just.
put a package together that gives them options to be able to choose those solutions and. and, you know, keep your margins.
You can keep margins on all of it. It’s gonna be cheaper than maybe for an agent.
But, I think, I think that’s just the way that they need to start going. That’s my opinion.
Nikola Mrkšić
14:58 – 15:23
Yeah. Yeah.
No. No.
For sure. I mean, I agree.
I think, like, you know, when you think of this, you know, the new wave of agenda care and everything that, you know, we’ve been doing together both to give you, like, that ability to just pick up every phone call. Like, going past that, when you think of, like, hospitality in particular, how do you think that, like, automated voice and just automated customer experience will change you going forward in the next few years?
Brian Jeppesen
15:23 – 16:00
Look. I think when I look at the ability to answer phones and answer, What’s interesting to me is how many people still call.
Right? Because I. can’t tell you the last time that I called to make a hotel reservation or an airline reservation or car rental.
Right? You do it online. You do a self-service.
But calling, as long as you do, and that’s what we started, right, was with. reservations.
I said, hey. My customers can make reservations online.
Why can’t I just teach a robot to book it for them and do the same thing? So that’s kind of the direction we went, and now it’s expanding and doing awesome.
Nikola Mrkšić
16:00 – 16:00
Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Jeppesen
16:00 – 16:45
But, I think that process of people just wanting to get their issues taken care of as quickly as possible. I, you know, I joke with my CFO, probably five years ago before we started.
I said, you know, I wanna make it so easy for people to make a reservation. They just pick up their phone and say, you know, Siri, Alexa, can you make me a reservation of the Golden Nugget tomorrow night and have it say, look at your offers, look at your ability, look at, take your credit card on your phone, already, it’s already in there and book your reservation and make it that quick.
Right? So I think that’s the technology, as you get into Adjentic now, and just not just telling, giving people information, but actually doing stuff for them. I think that’s the key, in moving forward and how you make it easy for people to get their issues taken care of.
Nikola Mrkšić
16:45 – 18:39
Yeah. I mean, I’m hugely excited about that, and especially kinda like in the context of the contact center.
The ability to actually do everything that your agents can do. I mean, I think when we started working together, we got the first use case up and running quickly.
But then there was the whole kind of like, you know, how do we support the full experience? How do we fetch the APIs? What’s going on in the back end? And, you know, not just in hospitality. In fact, I think there we you know, it took us a bit of time when we figured it out.
But whichever vertical we operate in, and we’re one of the most horizontal players in our space, I feel like I’m sending a team of archaeologists into an enterprise stack. Figure out, like, API stacks, the needs, which integration partner will ask for what, how much do this be charged for.
Can it even be done? Or if it cannot be done, like, what do we need to change? And then, you know, together between you, the business buyer, and us, we’re kinda, like, playing CIO. We’re like, okay.
You gotta flip this thing in, add this thing, and then we can do that. And it’s like a giant mission tree of just, like, everything that you have to put in place to transform that channel.
And then, you know, with the Jentek stuff, I think the computer use modules are the exciting bit. I think they’re not there yet, but they will be there quickly.
Where hopefully then our agent just sits behind the screen much like your agents do today. And at that point, it just reduces the barrier to entry of doing that reservation because we no longer have to have the API’s signatures permissions.
But instead and I think the hardest thing, I’ll be curious to get your take on it, is getting comfortable with us putting this entity inside your stack that is able to do whatever your agent would be. Because if you’re willing to do that, I think we’ll soon be able to kinda, like, just skip ahead in a lot of these things and do much of what previously would have taken us a lot of IT support, and then cost.
Right?
Brian Jeppesen
18:39 – 19:26
Right. No.
I think, you know, that was one of the great things about you guys because we started you know, it was just a very simple use case. And, the great thing I love about our partnership is anytime I’ve come to you, you know, I’ve had visions of, hey.
I’d love to be able to do this. I’d love to be able to do that.
And it was never now we don’t do that. It was, let’s figure out how to make that happen.
Right? I didn’t have a lot of the resources internally. And that was a great thing if you guys had the engineers.
I can say, this is what I wanna do. And you guys just went out and started building.
So this is what we can do and how to make that happen. Right? So you’ve always been open to looking at how to make things better? How do we, how do we get smarter? How do we do things? So I’d love that about our relationship.
Nikola Mrkšić
19:26 – 20:25
Yeah. I mean, look.
I think that, like, the whole ability to have these forward deployed engineers that get stuck in and learn about the tech stack there and what’s possible, what’s not. And, you know, I think communicating candidly around what we can and cannot do has been really important.
I think equally, like, you know, your patience with us in many places where, you know, we hit some snacks, something didn’t work, you know. I think it really has been a partnership.
And I think that, a lot of people when they think of buying AI don’t really know just what it is. Right? In terms of, you know, I think that at this point you’re one of the, you know, most experienced subject matter experts of what AI can do for automated voice.
I think there are a lot of people coming now that were the past wave first wave of these, like, you know, visionary adopters, where people are just expecting to plug something in as if it’s electricity and go like, alright. Like, AI is in.
Like, I’m done. Right? And I think that it’s kinda like a bit of a rude awakening for a lot of them.
Brian Jeppesen
20:25 – 20:51
Right. Yeah.
Yeah. I think, I think a lot of people, you know, now everybody says that we gotta get AI.
Like I mentioned before, everybody wants AI. But I think, we’re we’re because people, you know, being on the board of, the contact center AI association and we get people all the time say, how do I you know, you’ve done this.
How do I do it? How do I do it? And, you know, I really kick back from them and say, you know, you need to figure out why first. Why?
Nikola Mrkšić
20:51 – 20:51
Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Jeppesen
20:51 – 21:43
or is it where your customers have challenges? What makes it hard for your customers to do business with you? And is there technology that you can put in place to make it easier for them? So in my case, I was abandoning all these calls. I couldn’t answer these, you know, simple calls, and you guys fixed it.
So, but I think you gotta figure out the reason why first and then and then implement the solutions that fix it instead of just going out and just throwing AI out there and thinking it’s gonna magically solve all your problems. So if you do it smart, you do it the right way, which you guys helped me do.
I mean, you saw the Forrester report that showed the ROIs. You know, we were part of that and to see those ROIs are real.
And then and and, if you do it right, it gives your customers a better experience, and it helps your bottom line.
Nikola Mrkšić
21:43 – 22:40
Yeah. And look.
I mean, I’ve always loved that, you know, we have such a big footprint in hospitality. Right? From you guys to other, like, casino groups, hotel groups like Marriott, restaurant groups.
Because, there’s something, you know, there’s like the one side of the spectrum. Kind Kinda like where you have like 12,000 agents and some technology gets it down to 9,000.
And at that point, it’s quite calculated, you know, like CFO and COO, where’d a pen go? This is to be done. Click.
They don’t even know what it does for the experience. Whereas what I’ve always found in hospitality is, like, everyone there knows how it works.
People are very, like, oriented towards operations, towards the experience. And I think if you guys wanna do it, and then, like, we achieve success, that was, like, I think the most impactful thing for us around people believing that AI is there to be a force for a better experience, not just like a CFO’s toolkit for cutting operational expenses.
Right?
Brian Jeppesen
22:40 – 23:20
Right. No.
And I think that’s one thing I’ve told you in the beginning. I said, hey, I’ll be your guinea pig.
Right? Do you want to try some new things? Let’s see if we can do this, see if we can do that. So I’ve always been open to solutions to see what we can do to make it better.
And, ultimately, you know, my my thought is you, you automate everything you can, but. but also give your customers options.
We also know that there’s still a lot of people that just wanna speak to a live person. And
I think studies show that, you know, 70% of the people say they’d rather speak to a live person. But a.
100% of the people just wanna get their issue taken care of quickly and efficiently.
Nikola Mrkšić
23:20 – 23:21
Yep.
Brian Jeppesen
23:21 – 23:53
So how do you do that? They would much rather use a virtual assistant than wait thirty minutes on the phone waiting for a live person. So if you can give them options.
and you make it easy for them to do that, once they start doing it, I think I think a lot of it is training people because they’ve had bad experiences. Once they start having good experiences, they adopt it better.
So I think that the process over time is getting people to realize that these virtual assistants really can help you if you give them the opportunity. And,.
Nikola Mrkšić
23:53 – 23:54
Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Jeppesen
23:54 – 23:56
changing people’s mindsets is gonna be the key.
Nikola Mrkšić
23:56 – 24:20
Totally. And, you know, I think there’s a lot of bad experiences to undo.
So despite all the kind of, like, adoption, there’s still quite a heavy baggage of those past experiences. When you think of kind of, like, you know, you’re on the, kind of a contact center AI associations board.
Like, what else are you seeing in the wider industry that is interesting with AI changing customer experience as a whole?
Brian Jeppesen
24:20 – 25:53
Well, I think, you know, everything from the conversational voice to the back end, the agent automation. Right? Look at the agent.
What is the agent doing? How’s the agent handling the calls? And, you know, we’ve moved from our initial, you know, scripted bot to a Gen AI bot, and I think we’re seeing some great successes. So, it’s giving more opportunities to be able to understand and answer more questions.
The key, I think, is to understand when it speaks to the virtual assistant and it wants to speak to an agent, and we understand why it wants to speak to an agent, then. follow that call to the agent and see how the agent handles that call type, and how all my agents handle that call type, and and and to be able to integrate how agents handle the calls, integrate it back into how the virtual assistant handles those calls.
And, really, you work together as a team. Right? It’s not a virtual assistant is one thing and agents are certainly a separate thing.
I think you all have to be the same and work together in providing, helping and providing. Agent assist, I think, is one thing that I see a lot of, you know, people wanting, some virtual AI to be able to pop up.
You know, this is what you should do. You should handle this call.
Your virtual assistant already has that stuff, and it could handle it for the customer, but they wanna speak to an agent. So it goes to an agent.
The virtual assistant is in the background still helping the agent, but they could have helped the customer themselves. So that’s that.
Nikola Mrkšić
25:53 – 27:16
Totally. Another one of our customers, after working with us for, I think, about two years, told me about the initial pitches from vendors that, like, agent assist things.
And, it was really funny because she asked them, like, hey. Okay.
Well, does it work all the time? Or if it’s extremely accurate, reliable, etcetera, etcetera? She was like, yeah. They were like, yeah.
But why wouldn’t I just have it talking to the customer then? And I was like, and, like, it fell through. But I think for a lot of people, it is kinda like where it flips over.
Like, they’ve been told to buy AI. Maybe they don’t even have such a big problem.
Otherwise, they would be thinking a bit more surely and directly. Right? And then yeah.
I mean, they’re putting the I mean, like, I think part of it is the BPO experience where if you’re churning a 100% of the whole thing, but as you said, it’s probably churning over the bottom third like, three times over. Like, they don’t know what’s going on.
And I did it when we started the company. I deliberately went into a few of the customer’s contact centers, and I was putting in the phone.
Right? And look, I’ve studied the materials and stuff for, you know, a few hours and, you know, behind a specific skill queue so that I’m doing the same thing. I was petrified because, like, it’s quite daunting.
It’s kinda like, you know, someone gives you, like, a tennis bat and goes, like, okay. Like, you’re gonna have Novak Djokovic on the other side serving at you.
And you’re like, well, like, he’s probably gonna kill me if he gets to move the ball. Right?
Brian Jeppesen
27:16 – 27:16
Right.
Nikola Mrkšić
27:16 – 27:23
And, daunting. So I think for them, it might be just the promise of getting those guys ramped or getting them to be more accurate.
Brian Jeppesen
27:23 – 27:23
Yeah.
Nikola Mrkšić
27:23 – 27:25
Or.
Brian Jeppesen
27:25 – 29:01
I agree. I think, even myself when I hire, because all my agents are domestic, but when I hire new people to be able to have some type of help and support for my new agents to get up to speed quicker because with having that knowledge, I can tell them where to go find it.
Right? But they don’t always know how to search. But if I could just prompt it to them, that would just make that time go much, much quicker.
I think, you know, when you talk about BPOs, I mean, there’s certain calls, you know, we I I’ve I’ve had my business in The Philippines before and great people, and they follow a script very well. But if you get off script, sometimes it gets a little more complex.
It’s a little harder for them. So, but my virtual assistant can do basically the same thing.
So, why would I send my business out there when I can get a virtual assistant at, you know, a cheaper price to be able to handle the same, the same issues? And then, you know, the more complex stuff, people and people, you know, they get somebody international, the American you know, they that’s that’s I think it’s legislation where they say they wanna bring it back in because people think they wanna. speak to an American.
And then you’ve got. the different companies out there that are doing the accent neutralization stuff, right, to make it sound like you’re speaking to more of an American.
And it really it really is, it really comes down to, you know, you got a good core of people who are knowledgeable and can help with more complex stuff. Let your virtual assistant handle the simple stuff that you don’t have to, and then you can train your core people.
And then maybe you have enough people in The US to do it. I don’t know.
Nikola Mrkšić
29:01 – 29:09
Yeah. I mean, like, I, you know, I mean, we all know what the demographic pyramid looks like, well, around the Western world.
Right? Well, around the world mostly. Right?
Brian Jeppesen
29:09 – 29:10
Right.
Nikola Mrkšić
29:10 – 30:20
And it’s, you think of, like, just, like, the shape converting, and yet, like, we have these products that are more and more complicated. So we see more customer contact overall, invoice and chat, everywhere.
Right? And, like, whether it’s, like, swinging 5% up or down for one channel or the other is almost immaterial. That’s why I never really bothered much around, like, our positioning with one and the other even though we do both.
But, when you think of the future of that contact center and those agents, right, especially those kinda like high empathy, very knowledgeable people in your business, right, that have been with you for many years, I mean, they’re really core ops people. They’re not contact centers.
Right? And giving. then the ability to kinda branch out into other parts of the org to, like, surface demand and other things.
Like, my thoughts are that their jobs just get more and more interesting as these tools get better because it kinda shifts from, like, 80% to, like, onboarding new people, interviewing new people, like, checking that they’re doing an okay job into, like, okay. I know that it will reliably do what I told them for simple calls.
Let me look at kinda, like, the edge cases where it didn’t work and reprogram it. Right? And that’s something.
We’re doing a lot of work, going with you guys. But how did you find the whole generative switch from the old intent based models?
Brian Jeppesen
30:20 – 30:45
it was, it was interesting at first. You know, here’s what’s interesting is, you know, I loved my voice that we had because, you know, we said, hey.
This is, this is what I wanted to sound like. And so I’ve always loved the voice of the life talent that that we that we started out with.
And so we started to go to generative AI, and and and, you know, Rob gave me a few voices to listen to. And, I listened to him.
I thought, yeah,.
Nikola Mrkšić
30:45 – 30:45
Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Jeppesen
30:45 – 31:41
That’s pretty good. That’s pretty good, but I really like my voice.
And so, I believe what you did is you cloned her. Right? So, and so so then I still had my same voice.
It was awesome. And so that part of it still seemed very, very natural.
And then. when asking the questions, it seemed to go generative.
You know, before, obviously, it was scripted. Right? We recorded a script, and I knew exactly how it was gonna respond.
to the script. And now it’s, it’s a little more, it’s more conversational.
Right. And
it’s more, it’s more natural. You can talk to it and it will, it responds in a more natural conversation way.
And so I like, I like that. You know, there were obviously some struggles in the beginning saying, oh, wait, we, you know, we need to, we need to change this.
We need to update this as long as you keep it. guardrails in and, and, you know, we have the knowledge base now where we can go in and we can, I think those are some of the cool things being of the generative gives me more control.
Nikola Mrkšić
31:41 – 31:42
Yep.
Brian Jeppesen
31:42 – 31:42
now.
Nikola Mrkšić
31:42 – 31:42
Yep.
Brian Jeppesen
31:42 – 31:52
that I can ensure that, you know, hey? We just changed our resort fees here. I need to go in and just change that rate.
Right? Instead of having to rerecord it all over again. So it makes things.
Nikola Mrkšić
31:52 – 32:23
I mean, I you. remember the pre yeah.
I mean, you remember the previous thing, and I think that, like, you know, we spend years trying to get those things to look as kind of, like, intuitive as possible. But you remember, I mean, not only it kinda looked like, you know, an action thriller and, you know, they get to the bomb, they open it up and see all those wires.
Right? It kinda, like, felt like we were always giving customers that in the past. And now, with kinda, like, LLM first models, it’s a lot easier to just kinda, like, expose the knowledge base and have the model figure out a lot of it.
Brian Jeppesen
32:23 – 32:23
Yeah.
Nikola Mrkšić
32:23 – 32:25
So I’m yeah.
Brian Jeppesen
32:25 – 33:13
Yeah. It’s been interesting.
You know, before when it’s scripted, I knew I knew what path I was gonna take my customers down. Right? And
now it’s it it goes, it can go some different ways in a good way. Right? It’s not the customer in the middle who wants to change something in the middle.
It’s much easier to be able to make those switches and changes along the way in a conversation. And so I think I found it to be, it’s obviously the way of the future.
You gotta go that way. Right? Right.
That’s the first step to what we’re doing. And now as we get into more agentic and, like you said, we get into, letting it really be an agent, right, and be one of my team members, it is gonna be, is gonna be interesting.
Nikola Mrkšić
33:13 – 33:26
Yeah. Well, look, we’re hugely excited about everything that we’re doing with you.
You can be confident that all the, kinda, like, new releases and stuff will go to you first, and I’m really excited about a lot of things that we’re pushing in that direction.
Brian Jeppesen
33:26 – 33:47
Yeah. I’m excited to explore and grow.
And like I said, I love you guys. You know, we’ve been partners for four and a half years, and I look for a lot of, I mean, you’re you’re part of what we do.
Everything we do, we. think, well, how do we do how PolyAI integrates with all this? How do we do so?
decisions we make are all part.
Nikola Mrkšić
33:47 – 34:13
one of the happiest encounters was I think it was maybe a year, year and a half ago, back in Houston when Rick, your CFO, kinda like from the other side of the room, he’s like, AI guy. And I was like, oof, I’ve made it.
I’m an AI guy. I said it with a lot of kinda, like, joy because, yeah, it really is like, you know, kinda like with BPOs or anything else.
Like, this stuff is an extension of your brand, and we take that, like, so seriously.
Brian Jeppesen
34:13 – 34:22
Yeah. Well, you are, and, we appreciate all you do and look forward to, integrating more and more and doing more stuff.
Nikola Mrkšić
34:22 – 34:41
Absolutely. Well, Brian, I look forward to seeing you later this week in person.
Thank you so much for agreeing to be on our podcast, and I look forward to seeing people’s reactions. For everyone watching, please like, share, subscribe.
I’ve been told by the team that I must start doing this in that podcast. So, thanks for watching, Brian.
Thanks for being here with us.
Brian Jeppesen
34:41 – 34:44
Thank you very much. Great to see you.
Talk to you soon.