181 - Voice AI For Small Businesses with Laurent Cohen

Welcome to Product Led Growth Leaders. We've got a great guest for the show today, Laurent Cohen. Laurent has a background in leading laboratories, microbiology, testing, environmental work. Today he is the CTO of GetOblick.

Laurent, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Thomas. It's a pleasure. I'm looking forward to having a great discussion with you here today.

Absolutely. And a pleasure to have you on. And before we go any further, the short intro that I gave, is there anything you'd like to do to correct or enrich that intro for folks? No, let's just go overflow.

All right, sounds good. So let's start off by uh for the audience understanding what the problem is out there. Before we get into the solution that you're offering to the world, what's the problem? The problem is quite simple.

Uh to put it in a very few words, I would say uh not every call deserves an interruption, but uh no opportunity should be missed. So this is really the framework of what voice AI is. Now, if we deep a lot further about what voice AI can provide to businesses today, uh it's almost unlimited. The fun thing I would say is that as today, I believe only 3% of the companies worldwide are using voice AI.

And you can imagine for a fact that five years from now, every voice AI will have replaced its current uh voicemail with voice AI. So as a business owner, you have this immense gap to fulfill. And this gap basically is not technology, it's trust. How do you make people business owners do the shift from old mediums such as uh voice mail, such as uh chatbots, to what currently voice AI can offer?

Okay, so essentially we've always got a big influx of people trying to talk to us. All of us have you know our in mail box and and people trying to reach us, and it's too noisy, so we tune everything out. We probably overcorrect, and by that we miss opportunities. So your opening statement: not every call should be uh answered at an ending point, which was a good quote there.

Um, but not any opportunity should be missed. So is it helping us deal with the signal noise? It's exactly what it is for. Initially, um, we've all been experienced time calls, you know, and especially because that's what we're focusing here at Get Oblig on small and local businesses.

Let's put it this way you have a 30,000 persons company, you know, one call doesn't change much. But when you're a small business, one call is very decisive. I mean, you can miss the contract of the year, you can have this customer that's not that's totally unhappy that you need to serve. And also, you know, you have things to do during the day, you have many things to take care of.

One phone call will dramatically change the course of your activity, the work, but also there's the psychological factor. You know, you start your week, you have this call that you've missed, you know, it messes up with your head. And there's also all sorts of other things, you know. You return to your family when the day is over, the weekend comes.

What do you do? You still answer the call, you know, you do or do good time with your family. All those things are the core life of a small business owners. And do things now can be changed with voice AI.

Now, were we talking just a level set about what we mean about calls? We're talking about phone calls, but just also any kind of calls just coming in digitally. And and are we also including email in that? Voice AI mainly focuses on phone calls and also connects with chat uh like WhatsApp.

So you can literally connect your WhatsApp and have conversational interactions between WhatsApp callers and voice AI. So it's basically multi-channels. You also have widgets like the one you have here that literally engage with customers on your website using the voice media. And we're talking about incoming calls.

We are talking about incoming calls. Outbound calls uh as a feature is technically feasible using voice AI. As now, we do not push people to use it. The reason is very simple.

Uh, you have all those uh telecom companies that are really strict on how many calls you know you have you can put outbound. And you start using AI to do those phone calls, you're at risk of uh messing with your phone line and WhatsApp and so on. So as now, Voice AI is doesn't have a technology issue. It's as more of a structural issue.

Let's talk about some of the business use cases for some of those incoming calls. I imagine it could be, you know, I'm uh selling a product and people are calling to ask details about the services, or I have a main street business and people are calling to ask what time I close or whether they have I have a certain product in stock. Is it broad scope, like any type of business, or are we focused on certain types of business use cases? It's very broad, Thomas.

Uh first layer would be the spam calls, the obvious layer, the calls you do not want to have to deal with. Then the second call is a service you're providing. The service you're providing is ours answering any questions, services, pricing, uh you name it, you know, everything is in that scope. Now you have a third layer that's very interesting.

Voice AI is smart enough today to deal with hubs and cross sales. So you can easily, as voice AI, dealing with a phone call and saying, okay, I'm calling my wife is calling with uh her salon, she wants a balayage, and then the voice AI will say, Ah, you know that we can offer you a free treatment. Would you like to have that? Those things obviously a human can do.

But as again, a business owner that is busy during his day thinks about doing it, does it do it properly? Not necessarily. Voice AI is very rigorous, it is patient, it is elegant, so and it's working 24-7. So all those things are really upset and cross-sell that are very interesting.

And there's also another layer again, Thomas. And this layer is when it gets very interesting. The way we build GetOblick is not a SaaS company selling voice AI, it's a voice infrastructure. Let me explain that to you.

We are a business directory. Every single business has a page listed on our directory. As now, we have 1.8 million pages, which means that we have 1.

8 million voice AI already deployed and answering customers. What does it do? As a platform, we have so many interactions every day that every single interaction becomes a use case. And this use case is integrated within what we call a graph and re-injected after stripped of any confidential information, obviously, reinjected to train even more every single voice AI we have on our platform.

So this is very, very interesting. Business A as an interaction, it becomes a use case, and this use case is now served to business B. So as now, you know, you have to understand something, Thomas. And it's gonna be well, once I told you, you're gonna say it's obvious.

You have a company like Google, from the moment you open your laptop, you know, you use Gmail, you go on Google to do search, you go to Amazon, you name it, they know every single thing about you. But once they end off the business phone number, you know, the information is broken. The voice voice interaction as itself is a layer that hasn't been really searched and structured. And now we see that we have the opportunity here at GetOblick to structure that infrastructure.

So we use all those data, we put them as a data set, and we provide it again to train the voice. So this is very, very strong. And you don't need to have it be uh like a call center to provide the training data or something like that. It's the big massive thing.

It's able to sort of self-correct and get better and improve over time uh off of these use cases. There are two layers, and that's very interesting. The first layer is the AI agents that we are using. But that's not all.

That's really not enough. AI is only as good as the data you provide. Data is front and center of any company that will succeed in the future within AI. So we see ourselves as a data company, not an AI company.

Not because we do not use AI, we use it every day and in every single aspect of our company. But at the end of the day, it's the data that we use and provide to our overhaul infrastructure that gives the strength to our company. And now, because that's a question that's also very important for you to understand, as today, voice AI is capable of understanding the user's emotions. So it changes dramatically everything.

Uh, once you have a voice AI that understands that the customer is upset, it will react appropriately to that interaction. So that's something, again, that as a small business owner, you know, you're supposed to do, but do you do it well? Are you tired? Are you busy?

You know, uh, are you getting upset when you shouldn't or shouldn't? Well, voice AI can adjust to that. So if you put all those things all together, you see that voice AI has to be replacing voicemail, and it will. So this is largely about scale, isn't it?

Because even in the examples you give, whether you're a spa or you know, you provide you know legal services or something, or you're you have to be able to deal with this influx of calls that come in. Um, and you want to have a good system for the user, I think. You don't, you know, nobody likes to call and then they just tell you to go to the website or their their voice system where your dialing is too crude to get you what you want, and you're and you're sitting there listening to this long kind of conversation tree segments and trying to get through, and it's frustrating, right?

There's many things here. Uh you're absolutely right. First thing, uh let's be honest, we've all been dealing with uh voice center call centers, you know. And do those people have been working appropriately and doing their job the proper way?

Not necessarily, but remember, those things were never accessible to small businesses. And now AI is leveling the game. Now you have access to the equivalent of a call center being your voice AI that responds in 24-7. And not only that, Thomas, it handles multiple languages.

So even in a when you're even working locally, I uh we we had that experience just a few weeks ago where we had a clinic that was very happy that it could reply in Portuguese because it was based out of Boston. Nevertheless, 30% of the customer space were Brazilian. So it changed everything. Uh so all those things now are accessible for small businesses, and that's really something that's gonna create wealth.

Why? Because if you can provide that level of service now, as a business owner, what's your main focus? Growth. So in that as in that aspect, AI is not replacing human, it's enhancing human, it's enhancing, improving every aspect of the company.

Um, so we walk us through, ladies and gentlemen, we've we've been speaking with Laurent Cohen of GetOblick. Get and then O B L I C get Oblik. When people get set up with GetOblick, when a company gets set with up with it, what does that look like? Is it something that integrates with your website usually?

Is it some back-end stuff, or do you guys consult and help get them get them there? What does that look like? Remember what we said earlier, Thomas? We said everything is about trust.

Uh, if we think ourselves a trust company, we have to prove business owner that what we do is done in the best practice. So that's why we create Get Object the way it is. As a business directory, any business can go on GetObic.com and create their business listing within less than five minutes.

Once that business is approved, immediately when the page is available on the directory, the AI is deployed. And the business owner can start interacting with the voice AI. And this voice AI will be pre-trained not only on the information provided by the business, but also, again, by the graph with the graph that we've built from other use cases. So now you have a business owner that for free has a listing and a voice AI already working.

And he can start with having his customers access that page and interacting with it. So, you know, it's it's really building the trust. And once the business is happy, it can subscribe to our solution where we provide a phone line that will be used to transfer calls. We can connect it to its WhatsApp, we can insert the widget with a very small code here on his website.

And although things now the business has many solutions, and he can also decide to start building on top of it. And what I'm meaning by building on top of it is that okay, I'm gonna start by transferring the call on the weekend. Because you know, there's a lot of AI bashing. Will AI respond the way it should be?

We're gonna try on the weekend. Now, what we've built is that the voice AI is only as strong as the guard revenue you put, only as strong as the fallback you put. So you want to make sure that not only the AI can answer properly, but knows when it's time to fall back to the business owner. You know, so that's very important.

Then you start transferring the call after hours. And when you're very confident that the AI is going to be good for you and it will, now you start transferring the call during the day because you are busy, you know, and it's taking over all the infrastructure and it's freeing you as a business owner, and it changes everything. Wow, this is so exciting, Laurent, because it's kind of a gold rush right now from products I'm seeing. I haven't heard something exactly like this, but there's folks who are trying to slide in on the little opportunity around voice, the voice interaction.

And some are on the sort of voice outgoing, ingoing, uh, you know, but just dealing with that space of how do you handle that volume of humans wanting to interact via voice and being able to get people what they need and getting the leaders the opportunities, uh letting them see those opportunities. So, where do you see um in the next few years um uh uh GetOblick uh providing for its clients? Obviously, we're gonna grow internationally. It's already happening.

We have people from all over the world starting to claim and create pages on our website. So this is really something we're gonna go on. But let's go even further now, Thomas. The thing that has been very, very cool is that as we were building the graph, now we started to build a search engine.

And when you we we used to call ourselves a voice first directory, but we think now that we are a voice-only directory, it means that anybody can go on GetOblick, start interacting with digit widgets, or even call one of our 1-800 numbers and say, Hey, I'd like to find a barbershop near me. Okay, then the voice AI starts fetching for barbershop near and start giving information. Now we can schedule appointment over the phone. So all those interactions, and believe it or not, you know, a lot of people nowadays interact with voice with Chat GPT or Gemini.

But those LLMs are not very good when it comes to local businesses. So there's an old thing that we can build there that is gonna be uh very, very interesting. That's another huge area that folks are trying to solve because the big expensive uh uh issues and use cases are being addressed more, but what's left out of that is local. That's such a hard problem to solve.

Local SEO, for example, a company being able to uh be looked up and um handling that. Okay, so you're you're dealing with like a sort of an overlap of a number of kind of niche areas. It'll be interesting to see how the space evolves and makes a way for you guys to become a category leader. Yes, and you pinpointed just right now something that is very important.

First, let me answer why not everybody wants to do what we do. As a business, the small business world is the hardest one. I mean, it's a lot easier, believe it or not, to go to a big company and sell it product. You know, it takes time, but these people know what they need and know what they want.

A business owner doesn't really know because a business owner lives in the moment. He doesn't have quarterly, he doesn't have yearly, it doesn't have boards, you know. So he has to take proper decisions. And again, the business owner has been building his company on the trust that is built with his customers.

And how do you convince him that a voice AI can ensure that this trust is protected? That's very hard. That's very hard. So this is what the challenge is.

Now you're talking about SEO, and again, that's something that was a case of serendipity for us. Let me explain to you. What really gave GetOblick its push is that within three months, we have had tremendous SEO results as a directory. And the reason is not necessarily the work we've done as SEO directory, but it was directly linked to the voice AI that we have on our pages.

And let me explain you why. If you have a voice AI on your page, and now what I'm saying here, Thomas, is for everybody that's listening here, it's really a piece of advice that everybody should be listening to. If you have a voice AI on your website, a user that visits your website will start interacting with that voice AI, right? Instead of just browsing.

So what will happen? It's gonna create retention on the website. So basically, a visitor on your website that used to spend 30 seconds on your page will start spending two to three minutes on your page. And you know what?

Google calculates that. Google likes that. And when Google sees that you have retention on your website, he says, hey, something's happening here. You know what?

I'm gonna push indexation. So now we've had those tremendous SEO results because of the voice AI. And what we do now is by offering the widgets on the user's websites, we are even more uh integrating to their SEO uh practices, and it's used for indexing. So actually, it's very funny because I would say that as now we have probably 20% of our customer base that have subscribed to our service mainly for the SEO retention.

They care about the voice, but the SEO retention is very powerful. Let us know what the website is. Um get oblig.com.

Yes. GetOblik.com. Um, so how do people get started?

They just go to getOblick.com and and they uh contact you guys. They go to the link on top, get oblink for business, and they add a listing. And it goes from there.

There's a great funnel, you know. You're taking and again, once your listing is done and you have your voice AI, it's still free. You can use it, you know, you can play with it, and you can always edit the information to make it even smarter. And again, when you are ready, when you trust us as a company, now you can deploy the voice AI.

We let's be fair, Thomas. There's everybody and their mother now trying to sell voice AI. You know, you open X, you have all those people. But you know the difference?

All those people are trying to sell stars. You know, they're looking at the stars. Oh, my voice is sexy, it humms, it siles, you know, it's it's beautiful, right? But they don't look at the instruments.

The instruments are the data, are the guardrails, are the fallbacks. We as a company focus on those instruments, not the stars. Excellent. Really exciting stuff.

Look forward to seeing everywhere where you go and uh where uh get oblig goes from here. Lauren, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you, Damas. It was very a great discussion.