Tom Morgan: 0:35

It's time for another ACP and Alex and I are on our best behavior today because the boss is in the house. Simon Leyland, the CEO and co founder of cloud interact is with us. Hey, Simon.

Alex Baker: 0:48

Welcome,

Simon Leyland: 0:48

Tom, hey Alex. It's a, it's an absolute honor to be here. I'm now, hopefully I'll now be famous with my own daughter because we listened to this in the car. So although I, I'll probably, I'll mute or something because you can't really listen to yourself, can you? But no, Thanks for inviting me. It's it's a great thing that you've started up. And as I say, you, yeah, I'm a keen listener. I enjoy, and I enjoy all the guests you guys have. So yeah, good stuff.

Tom Morgan: 1:15

Very pleased to see you and hello, Simon's daughter, ask your dad for a mug, a clouding track mug for the podcast. But we want to talk to you because, well, we're going to go, we're going to get there in a minute, because you've just put out this blog post and I want to talk to you all about it. And actually, I've got lots of thoughts about it, but. Be really good. I think for everyone to start really kind of the beginning with an intro to you. Cause we have talked to you briefly before. I think on a previous episode at the Amazon connect independent user group which which was cool, but we didn't really have the time to dig into, into you a little bit and the kind of career history and everything that led you up until the kind of point of starting cloud interact. So yeah, over to you. What's, what's your life story,

Simon Leyland: 1:55

Yeah. Well I was well suited for the IT industry. My degree was in politics and international relations. So

Tom Morgan: 2:02

the relationships, I guess, you know,

Simon Leyland: 2:04

Yeah, exactly. So Machiavelli in the 15th century is a pretty good blueprint for some of those things, but yeah, I, I've always been in the I. T. Industry straight from university always been in the sort of telecommunications Network side of things but I would say always graduated towards the end user so I was with at& t and then some large american telcos, went into consulting with accenture for a couple years. So I had a had an interesting time, with the accenture guys. I was doing some government contract benchmarking, which was always fun You and then went out on my own. So the UK has so many really good companies that large multinationals that have got really good IT shops and and I was always lucky enough to go and work in those areas. So pharmaceutical with AstraZeneca, manufacturing with Jaguar Land Rover, I guess luxury manufacturing with Jaguar Land Rover. And then Burberry, which was a whole different experience for myself as a sort of company culture and then several others as well. So really enjoyed my time in that and I was always around the sort of digital workplace, you know, changing the way that companies operate. So with Sony Pictures, one time I would, would put the first. Networking, and this was, this was merely 15, 15 years ago now, I guess, where what they used to do in the industry is they used to do the shoot, the daily shoot and then they used to get it on a on a motorcycle, they used to, and so this was, I think, the Da Vinci code at the time, that's how far back it was. So they would get the, shoot from Paris, I think it was, onto a motorcycle, over to Eurostar, over to London, and then they would fly it back to Los Angeles and they would do like the translations and things like that almost, almost straight away. And we for the first time we actually digitized that so they didn't have to do that process So maybe it took a couple of days to before that process whereas then it kind of went so that was kind of fun james bond. He went across that He went across that thing as well. So, enough. I think that was being shot in austria so And at the time I was actually looking after the foreign and commonwealth office as well because i'd say I worked for some government so I I had the I had the fictional James Bond and also the reality of James Bond as well, because again, that That foreign and Commonwealth network, you know, that has to, that's that has to be obviously secure. Didn't actually realize this is how, I mean, this is how my politics degree didn't really help me. Didn't actually realize that, you know, what the foreign and Commonwealth office did. So so they got, I mean, I knew they did foreign affairs, but I didn't actually know they did the James Bond stuff as well, but there you go. So always transformed. telephony side, you know, in the offices, maybe 10 years ago, 10, 15 years ago. We'd go and see vendors and they'd be still selling large scale telephony platforms into a large enterprise. And it seemed to make absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. You know, this was just at the time where I guess Skype was coming around and those types of capabilities. And it just made no sense, these telephony, but they were enterprise was spending millions and millions of dollars and pounds on the, on these platforms, and then the vendors were still saying, Oh, it'll still be relevant and still be relevant. And it was just, it's just not relevant. It just. Just didn't feel right to me. And obviously over the last 10, 15 years with the help of, you know, obviously COVID was an accelerant to transformation. I think if you walk into most offices now, you don't see a single telephone anywhere other than obviously a mobile phone and then someone on a headset. So.

Tom Morgan: 5:45

Yeah,

Simon Leyland: 5:46

So that's my background.

Alex Baker: 5:47

point at one point wasn't there because I started out my career looking at Cisco and did loads of putting IP phones on desks and deploying 20, 000 phones to an organization. And suddenly it just kind of like say Skype for business. Was it, was it link came along

Simon Leyland: 6:04

Yeah.

Alex Baker: 6:05

and then into teams just transformed and then sort of dropped off a. Off a cliff, the uptake of actual phones.

Tom Morgan: 6:11

Yeah. Do you think that very specific history you had of almost being in different verticals and different environments and seeing that digitization happen, that modernization happen? Did that give you, if you like, a sense when you came, you arrived in an industry that was maybe a few years behind that? Because if you think about, yeah, maybe, I mean, often think of government as being the cutting edge, but certainly the film industry that's true. And, and technologically, and actually probably I would imagine, you know, the FCO get lots of money to keep abreast of certain things. So yeah, that as well. So did that give you almost like, you could see it happening over there and then you came in here and we're like, Oh, comms needs to go the same way. Silence.

Simon Leyland: 7:02

to have is this experience of these different cultures. So, and I, again, I can kind of articulate that really quickly, you know, really sort of quickly in the sense of Alex mentions the call manager. So we went into Sony into, in, into Sony pictures and we said, Oh, you know, you're going to, you know, there's a, there's a project ongoing that actually was, I mean, this was nearly 20 years ago. So. It was one of the first potentially Cisco call managers, and they, and we said, Oh, probably take about a year to do and they were horrified as a year, you know, we can make, you know, 12 movies. I think there were glad I think gladiator and spider man were kind of around at that time. And so that we can, we can make blockbuster movies in six months and you guys can't even do something in a year. And then literally so I was like, yeah, okay, fine. I wasn't really that interested. Anyway, I was more interested in doing the exciting stuff. And then we went and then literally I went to AstraZeneca and I had almost this awful experience where my first experience in AstraZeneca was like, yeah, we, We've got to get, we've got to maybe upgrade this, this telephone platform. I think it had been in since 1983 or something like that. So it was literally falling over. I was like, oh, it's going to take about a year and then they're going to shout at me. And then, and then I went into AstraZeneca and we said, yeah, it's going to take about a year. Like a year? Wow. It normally takes us 25 years to do something. So it's so quick. And it's like, hang on, it's the same project, but you know, it's, it's a company culture.

Tom Morgan: 8:31

come to culture. It's hard to imagine, I suppose, like what that's like for them because they've no idea. Like what a phone system is, right? So either you look at it as like, well, it's just take one thing away, put the other one in, how can it be so hard? And then the other one is like, it's a complete. Black box of mystery. I've no idea how you even start. So yeah, sounds fine. You know, it's just, yeah,

Simon Leyland: 8:50

And let's be honest, you know a film company, a pharmaceutical, a, a fashion house, a manufacturer, they have no interest in, a telephone system. I was like, why, why do we care about this? You know, this isn't core to our business. So it was kind of

Tom Morgan: 9:04

yeah, I mean, that's a really, that's a really interesting and useful segue I'm going to jump on. Because let's come to your blog post now, which starts off saying like, well, for a start, it's a series of blog posts called no excuses, CX leadership chronicles. And in the kind of first paragraph, the first blog post it says that cloud interact, we believe there's no excuse for bad customer service. And so. That's an interesting thing you said about, they have no knowledge and they don't really care about their phone system, but they do care about customer experience. Right. Or at least they should do. Do they is the first question. Because yeah, I mean, we, Alex and I have the benefit of, of listening to you every day. And, and this is a thing that I know you say internally around this kind of no excuse for bad customer service. So yeah. Do you think that is a problem for companies at the moment?

Simon Leyland: 9:52

Yeah. I, I, I, I think it is, I think it's patent. I think it would be patently absurd if I ca if someone came onto any podcast or any public forum and said, you know what? humans. You know, we've cracked customer service. We do it really well. I mean, they just like everyone would laugh They would laugh they would throw things at you. It's patently obvious that we don't do customer service Well as you know within within our world within within the world. We don't it's obvious phone up. No one

Tom Morgan: 10:25

everyone's got a story. You know, like everybody has a story.

Simon Leyland: 10:27

Yeah, and and so it's patently absurd. However Just the second sort of counterbalance that is Every company because you asked the questions in your time, you know, everyone cares about customer service I mean it feels like they don't care about customer service, right? but they clearly do every you know, if you went to the ceo of any company or c suite or People in charge of marketing or even people at this Within the company themselves and said hey, do you want to give your customers a really good service? They clearly do they they obviously do they don't turn up at work and go now i'll tell you what We want to we want to give them a really bad experience and made them fun,

Alex Baker: 11:03

It does seem like that sometimes, though it's kind of seems like actually bad customer service can almost be a strategy at times, kind of

Simon Leyland: 11:09

Yeah, well, I, I think, yeah, no, I think it might be in some Alex, but I think there's no doubt about that. But, or I think, I think that's a perfectly valid kind of thing to say, but I think it's in such a small number of organizations. And that's kind of why. Myself and Nick and then we got all you guys involved in that with cloud interact in that we know that the customers want to have a really efficient customer service And we know there's lots of people within organizations that want to provide really good customer service, but there's there's a problem There's an obvious problem somewhere. Now, part of that's technology and part of that is process. And we're kind of seeing both, we, we are obviously committed to the tech, we'll fix the technology problem. We know how to fix it. We know, we know, we know it. We've proven it. We've done it over the last 18 months. Now there might be a business process challenge as well, but we're actually sort of bringing that up as well. You know, so, I guess the point is. It's fixable. It's, it's not, there is no real excuse for poor customer service. And, and, you know, I think some business people would say, Oh, it's because of the technology. I think that'd be fair. We're, we're aiming to get rid of that objection.

Tom Morgan: 12:21

And I think that is exactly what I was going to say, actually, like the, if you could find the chief. Well, a lot of companies don't have a chief customer service person, right? But like whoever it is, it's responsible for that customer experience. They would say we'd love to, but it's the technology. Like we can't because of the technology. Like, is that the core kind of excuse you're getting at? Is that actually the technology isn't the problem anymore? Or, or needn't be the problem.

Simon Leyland: 12:45

Yeah, I think, I think it, I think it's that classic. So, when I, when I was finding complex problems, no matter, no matter where, there's often not just a single issue that's creating that complex problem. It's often two things at the same time. And I, I firmly believe it's technology and business process that need to interact together. And I think, I think you can have, I think it's rare to see really good technology and poor process. If I'm being honest, I think it's more likely that you might have poor process and poor technology, but there's definitely a demand for, in the customer support areas. Like, you know, we want to, we want to provide a really good service. So so, so our job is absolutely to fix the technology element. So you've got it's, and to, and to just almost be. You know, be really articulate. It's like, and I know this sounds terrible. I probably shouldn't say this, but I don't really care if it's us doing it or I don't care what partners doing it or what vendors doing it really just, you know, it's just not acceptable anymore. It's just like, don't accept it. You know, don't and on the customer support side, it don't feel don't feel kind of, you know, it's just intractable. It's not intractable. We can fix it.

Tom Morgan: 13:59

Historically, The customer experience has always been owned by it, right? Because there, there's been a lot of tech needed, like a lot of servers and a lot of like material stuff. And obviously that's changed a lot with the cloud. Is that a sticking point at the moment? Is that the ownership is, is shifting out of it to somewhere else? And there's a bit of resistance there or, or is, is that not the case? It's just that the customer service don't realize that it's theirs to own now.

Simon Leyland: 14:28

Yeah. So I still don't think that the business on the budget for customer service. I still think it's it. And I think what you're probably finding is, and we found this, you know, 10, 15 years ago where when link and Skype for business did come along the exchange guys within the organization, they, they were very skeptical of it. And then the network guys said, was it a network thing or was it a exchange? Application. I think we're in exactly the same point that we, that we are now sort of 10, 15 years ago, where the telecoms guys they're saying, well, we've got a contact center to run and you expect us to run it at 99. 999 and we're going to run it in this fairly traditional way. And then the cloud engineering team are going, well, that's not, that doesn't, you know, it's, it could be on premise. It's not scalable. It's not the consumption model is, is we don't want to pay licenses. We want to rather consume it. And, and then the cloud guys are going, can we do this? And then there's probably an internal tension going on within that IT. So one of the things that we try and do is actually bring those two teams together and say, look, there is a way forward. We can, we can provide a really scalable, absolutely rock solid platform that meets The business, demands for it being constantly available, et cetera, but also gives you all the latest capabilities as well. So that then you can go to your businesses and say, Hey, look, we can provide these things.

Tom Morgan: 15:51

And just to bring us, bring us up to a couple of years ago, that's why you created cloud Interact, right? To try and change that, or at least gi give somewhere for these companies to go to or change that. And how much of it is, is the industry changing anyway? And, and, and you are there kind of seeing it and reacting to it, or, or you. Like it sometimes feels like you're genuinely trying to almost change the industry and like get people to wake up. And I think, you know, we, inside cloud interacts, like there's this persona, mostly, mostly persona. Not true. Honestly, I was like, you know, grumpy Simon stomping around, blaming it, not blaming the industry, talking about the industry. It's like, why don't they change? Why don't they change? You know are you frustrated by the industry and, and like how it's not changing fast enough? Yeah. Silence.

Simon Leyland: 16:39

It's just, if I'm being honest, I think it's a huge opportunity for not just us, but for people who want to change. And again, going back to going back to the background And

Tom Morgan: 16:49

Silence.

Simon Leyland: 16:53

of Cloud Track was, was involved, but we, we were in AstraZeneca and they, people didn't believe that, you know, the sort of instant messaging would, would take off in the enterprise or, you know, the voice of the video. But we, we knew it was gonna happen. It it, so we ran this pilot. It was only supposed to be, what, 1500 users? It turned into 28,000 users as a pilot, you know, because. It was just, it was just so obvious, but there was, there was still skepticism and we're at, we're at exactly that point. So we just need to go and articulate it is possible. I say to people mostly, You know, as, as a council and as a guide to people within enterprise who've probably been in contact center for a long time, it's like, either do it, or it will be done to you eventually, because it will happen, you know, it's, you know, we're not when, you know, I, my grumpiness isn't going to shift in industry at all, you know, but, and it will happen, but we're, we're the accelerator,

Tom Morgan: 17:52

is that like, if you don't do it, somebody else will, and they'll overtake you.

Simon Leyland: 17:56

Yeah, and and companies will not be around, you know That's that's the scale of change that's going to happen in the next three and it's already happening And but but you know companies that are doing things in a traditional way as in the vendors and potentially those around those vendors. It's just it's just you know, the business case is Is is good is generally good for the transition as from a sort of technology business case, but once you start seeing you know the capabilities opened up to the business then it becomes an absolute no brainer. It's just going to change

Alex Baker: 18:31

Must be quite satisfying to have this proven out, you know, over the 18 months or whatever it is, since you founded cloud interact, having some really good strong case studies. Coming out now around how that, that transformation that you mentioned has become, has become true.

Simon Leyland: 18:47

Yeah, so what's really exciting so and obviously You've been, you know, a key part of that. We focus the business case initially on the first couple on the technology on itself. So we said, look, legacy technology, you can maybe save, you know, 50 percent or whatever. And actually the business cases have actually been too conservative. They've say, you know, these companies are saving more because And again, we kind of sit around, don't we? So not, not quite scratching our heads, but we think, well, why did we undershoot the number, the saving, which is a great problem to have, right? It's if we, if we overshot the saving, we didn't, we never want to do that, but we undershoot the saving. Let's talk about telephony into these, into these platforms. I just think the new global platforms are just more efficient and, and, you know, calls aren't being dropped and things like that. So I think that reduces call volumes within the new platform. So that's, that's great in itself, but what we're right on the edge of right now, and I think more exciting is because we've done a couple of these large programs over the last 18 months, you can't do the technology transition and also the business transformation at the same time. I don't think, I think it's just too much. And I just don't think, I think you just can't almost build the case internally. It's just almost too complicated. There's almost too many stakeholders to get it, to get involved. But what we've noticed is we do it, we do the business case initially on the technology. We do get the business involved and say, Hey, look, we're making this change, but we're pretty much going to do like do no harm. We'll do an as is kind of like service. And then let's see what the public possibilities and we're at the and we're right at that stage and I'm talking to the businesses and that's what's really exciting and to give you an idea of. You know, the kind of the difference in transformation, you know, maybe a technology saving, maybe I'm just going to make the numbers up just just for the, just for the scale and let's say the contact center was costing you 2 million dollars a year, 2 million pounds a year, and we've got it down to a million pounds a year. Okay, that's great. That's a million pounds, but the actual business that that's that technology supporting is probably a cost of 20 million. So 2 million technology costs 20 million like on on agents and costs and all that kind of stuff. Now, you know, we've been working on things where we can hopefully automate that stuff, but automate it in a really, in a really good way. And if we can, you know, save 10, 15, 20 percent of that 20 million, then we're, we're double or tripling our, our savings as well for the customers for the, for the end user for the end user organization.

Tom Morgan: 21:26

Yeah, that makes sense. I want to think about that in a minute and talk about AI because we always like to talk about AI on every podcast we do, because it's like the thing of the moment. But, but I just wanted to kind of mention as well, also, because I'll get told if I don't you've got you're doing a webinar soon. And the reason that the reason I'm bringing that up really is like, you're quite open about talking about this stuff. Like there's the blog post and I know there's more blog posts to come about talking about this stuff and you're doing a webinar about it. So it comes back to that. Yes. You're being very open, I think, in talking about the industry and how it is changing. And, and as you say, some of those opportunities for, for whoever, like for us, but for, for other partners as well, it's, it's a really big, it's a really big space. And I, and I can say that You've got some guest speakers from AWS on that webinar as well. So that's gonna be really interesting. How, how does AWS fit into all of this? Like, are they, you know, how influential and, you know, have they been in making this happen and in this process?

Simon Leyland: 22:22

Oh yeah. So, so again, we didn't really talk about background in terms of technology, but you know, I'm not from a AWS background. No, you know, I haven't been. But, you know, the story of Amazon and how they went to market, I think it's probably the perfect anecdote of, the change required within the industry. Amazon. com, biggest company in the world. They went to market. I don't know when it was, maybe 10 years ago, maybe, maybe eight years ago, something like that. And they wanted a customer support, a customer experience platform to support amazon. com and classic Amazon you know, customer obsession, put the customer first. And they went to market, they couldn't find anything and they built their own. And, you know, it's, it's seven or eight years in the making. Maybe, and like any new technology, maybe in those first few years, it, it probably wasn't as mature as, but for, you know, maybe more conservative enterprise. But right now it's absolutely rock solid. It's it's an amazing platform. And you know, we would happily work, you know, with other large platforms as well. But right now Amazon are in AWS and Amazon Connect are in a Are in a really, really strong position. They've got a great product and a great platform. I also think the way that they, they, they do their consumption based approach, I think is, is, is really good. So you can almost get to that stage one of, okay, let's get rid of the legacy. Let's get you onto modern cloud platform with lots of different capabilities. And then, of course, it doesn't stop there with Amazon or AWS. You know, you then go on to the, we'll talk a little bit more in a while about Gen AI and AI capabilities and, you know, all those types of things. I think You know, it's a really strong platform and, and, you know, they're, they're obviously in, in a lot of large enterprises. So we're, we're trying to work really hand in hand with AWS and try and tell that story of there are real opportunities for the end end user organizations to, to exploit these new capabilities.

Alex Baker: 24:23

It's refreshing how they, how they continue to update those capabilities as well. It's sort of not rest on the laurels, but keep iterating on the platform, making it better all the time.

Simon Leyland: 24:33

Yeah, well one of my favorite things is alex's, you know end of month update on what's new with amazon connect I I look out for that one as well. So

Alex Baker: 24:42

Never short of something to talk about in that meeting, are we?

Tom Morgan: 24:47

definitely.

Simon Leyland: 24:49

and and it just shows you the pace of change

Tom Morgan: 24:51

Yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot to be said as well from that kind of building a product against an actual real need that they had versus anything else. Like it, it's quite a powerful thing. Like when you're talking through the customers as well, you know, we have this really, really specific odd business process, the way we work. So we, we need it to work like this. It's like, well, we can do that if you want to throw enough money at it, but, but actually like. It might be your process because look, this works and it works at Amazon scale. So, you know, and, and that actually makes a lot of arguments go away quite quickly. And it makes people rethink, actually, we've got this process, but we've had this process for 20 years because we've had the process for 20 years rather than it's the best process. But anyway, let's talk about AI because it's, it's the thing equally, equally revolutionary. Do you think and how do you think it's going to impact like the next three years, five years?

Simon Leyland: 25:43

yeah, so actually if we're talking about grumpy simon, grumpy simon gets Definitely rears its head with ai and the industry as a whole because the way that people articulate it and You know, it's that classic hype cycle of oh, it's going to fix everything. You know, you just turn it on and it just works or you pay a license. I think it's rubbish. I think, I think that the way to, I think the way that our industry is articulating how to implement AI and what the benefits are of AI is, is actually doing the technology of this service. So, If I if I level set and say I think it is the most transformative technology since Since the advent of the Internet, I absolutely believe that I think it's going to significantly affect positively the way that, and let's just talk about customer experience, because obviously that's what that's what we're here here to talk about. I think I actually think it's AI and customer experience is probably one of the very first areas that it can really, it can really make a significant difference. But I get very frustrated. I've always been frustrated with people that say. Okay. Oh, yeah, you just basically, you know, turn on a license or just flick a switch and the AI will sort it out. It just doesn't happen like that. It's, it will take work. It'll take work. It'll take, dedication and, it's not just a flick of a switch. It's a process that we need to go through. And that's kind of what we're talking about in the blog with kind of talking about, okay, you just can't go from a legacy platform and then we'll just buy an AI platform and all work together. And again, this is probably an industry. This is probably just a human level thing. There's nothing more frustrating than someone saying, Oh, now we've got this AI bot and we're going to put it on the website. And it's just, it's just not living up to the expectations of, of, of anyone.

Tom Morgan: 27:37

back to back to poor customer experience again. Then like it's yeah. Using the technology as a crutch. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Simon Leyland: 27:43

Yeah, now I think what's possibly happening is I think I think again with the technology change I think there's probably that bit of tension within the business where oh, we've got a new technology We can we can we can actually grab it from the business and then deploy it And then we don't really have to talk to it Well, you'll just get yourselves into all sorts of trouble there compliance wise, but it just won't work particularly well. And then, and then, you know, the other way, you know, is it quick responding quickly enough to building up enough intellectual muscle within their organization to build to build a capable systems? Probably not, you know,

Tom Morgan: 28:22

yeah, definitely like it's somewhere in the between, isn't it? It's like, you can't completely ignore it because like they, they do this stuff. They know how to roll out big products compliantly and safely, and they've done it before, but at the same time, like they can't completely ignore this either because it's coming and it's that competitive advantage thing.

Simon Leyland: 28:39

and we see it as well. Don't we? I guess when we speak to customers, we get a, an impression pretty quickly of where they are in their, in their sort of journey to the cloud or what their thoughts are. And you can almost see the maturity of the organization, you know and it makes an in, it will absolutely make an impact on, on, on the success of AI. But, and again, I think it's probably so transformative. If you don't do it right, then you're probably going to get beat in your marketplace because someone will do it right. And they'll save a whole bunch of cost. And they'll, they'll increase the quality. So a couple of examples with AI and customer experience at the moment that we're witnessing and part of, the first thing about an AI, you know, bot or, and again, you've got to assume that the quality is right. Obviously the significant difference is a human is, is only available for probably eight hours. Unless you, unless you take significant costs and have two humans available for 16 hours or three humans available for 24 hours in different time zones and whatever. Well, this bot's available 24 hours. It's always there. It's available on weekends. It's, it's there.

Tom Morgan: 29:50

Okay.

Simon Leyland: 30:19

as accurate and also compliance issues

Tom Morgan: 30:22

You wouldn't bring someone in off the street, put them in your contact center without any training, right?

Simon Leyland: 30:26

Yeah, or say well they've trained over there and You know, they'll bring their answers across so yeah exactly right It's it's exactly right to think of it in that way. So you get the you get the right answer You And again, I think with the way you deploy AI, you don't expect that 24 hour agent to be 100 percent accurate all the time, but because they don't have to be 100 percent accurate. They just because humans aren't 100 percent accurate. So if you make 1000 calls into a contact center, If 90 percent of them are completely accurate, then that means that 10 percent are still not accurate. So, if we can just get to a level of, in the first stage of, we're definitely as good as the human interaction. And then once you train it, You see, that's, that's the sort of, that's the sort of multiplier effect. Once you train it, it then becomes better than the human. So then, and more available and, you know, and I think we also have to be realistic. It's cheap, it's cheaper, right? It's, you know, there isn't that human cost as well.

Tom Morgan: 31:28

Well, and it saves the humans for those more interesting, more intricate detailed things that you're never going to completely be able to automate, but it takes away the drudgery of the, you know, the repetitive work.

Alex Baker: 31:38

Both the, both the human and the bot, you need some kind of feedback loop there to make sure that you're, you're picking up on those failures and you can, you can train them to get better.

Simon Leyland: 31:50

Absolutely. And, and again, one, it's one of those great sort of, highlight points of a poorly implemented AI bot in customer experience that isn't a way to say, there isn't a simple way to say, I just need to speak to a human. I'm sorry, you just can't answer what I need. I just need to speak to a human. And, and for me, there's too many of those bots out there at the moment that again, company, I think that companies have implemented the panicked and they said, Oh, we just got to get something out there. Don't just get it out there. Just think about it and do it in a, in a, in a considered way. And that is one of those things I need to speak to a human. And as, and as you say, Tom, I think that's where. You know, I did, I did politics and I actually did economic history as well. And, you know, everyone's always concerned about, you know, the human impact of tech of technology. But I'm a big, I'm a kind of big optimist and that the more time that, we're able to automate, the more costs and money can go onto, as you say, more, more pressing things. And that's the other thing. There will always be a need for a human to be on the end of a telephone, whether, whether that's for a particular customer who just wants to use the telephone or it's so urgent and so complex that they just sometimes the AI will never be better than the best humans.

Tom Morgan: 33:09

Yeah. And there's, there's always somebody with the first instance of a problem. Like, there's that problem that happens first, at least once for every problem, you know? So,

Simon Leyland: 33:18

exactly. Which the AI just, I mean, again, maybe it'll get to be able to, to do that one day, but probably not. I mean, the classic example for me is, Just going back to a holiday experience. We 18 months ago, we went into a travel agents and we had a particular place where we wanted to go and we had a particular set of requirements. I think we wanted to go to Orlando, but we didn't really have that much of the parameters, but we spoke to this lady. At the desk, it was in one of those, you know, travel agents, she was absolutely brilliant. She knew exactly what we wanted and was like, bing, bing, bing, do this, do that, do that. And, you know, within half an hour, we'd, you know, spend thousands of pounds with, with this travel agent, you know, because she was just brilliant. And as we were walking out, obviously this was, you know, maybe 18 months ago, I was I was saying. You need to, they need to, you know, bottle that, that up and put that in an AI agent. And I think you can, but sometimes you maybe you can't as well.

Tom Morgan: 34:14

Yeah, no, definitely. That's really interesting. We could talk all day. We should probably stop Simon. Thank you ever so much for your time. It's been really, really interesting. And thank you, Alex, as well. thank you everyone for

Simon Leyland: 34:26

Yeah. Thank you.

Tom Morgan: 34:27

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