As the adoption of AI accelerates across various industries, understanding how this technology can enhance business operations has become a key concern. Joining Asking for A Trend is Dialpad founder and CEO Craig Walker, who sheds light on how his company aims to empower businesses to harness the power of AI to boost efficiency.

Walker notes that Dialpad's efforts are focused on "taking all of business communications and analyzing it in real-time." This real-time analysis allows for identifying customer trends, ultimately enabling businesses to optimize productivity and efficiency within their organizations. He emphasizes that the goal is "all about making the most modern communications platform," leveraging AI to provide businesses with insights into "business conversations."

"Last year was the year of hype around AI, this year is the year AI becomes real, and then next year and beyond is when the winners really, really start to monetize the AI," Walker tells Yahoo Finance.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode.

This post was written by Angel Smith

Video Transcript

The A I hype is alive and well, we were just discussing both oracle and apple hitting record highs today.

Thanks to artificial intelligence deals with open A I.

And joining me now is Craig Walker.

He's the founder and CEO of Dial Pad.

Craig.

It is good to have you on the show maybe quickly, Craig, you know, for viewers who might not be familiar, just describe a little bit about your company, the mission and the the problem your your tech is trying to solve for Craig.

Yeah, Josh, great to be here.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah.

So at Dialpad, we have an A I powered customer intelligence platform that really takes all of business communications and analyze it in real time.

So a contact center call, how to provide better support one of your sellers making sales calls, how to close better and with real time coaching and then how to analyze trends of, you know, what is customer satisfaction for certain things, which, which uh sales motions are working better than others and really using that entire communications stack to make your company smarter and do better at their jobs.

And Craig, we are in this A I moment, you just heard us talking about apple and oracle.

So, so Craig walk us through how, how is, how is your company leveraging that technology?

Yeah.

So when you think about it, you know, I used to run the Google voice product and we started this company about 14 years ago and it was all about making the most modern communication platform.

And six years ago, we acquired a real time A I company to build that into the core of that offering to understand what's actually happening in the conversations.

Now that you fast forward to the modern day with all this generative A I and these large language models, we're sitting on our own 6 billion minutes, the training data and have built our own large language model to understand business conversations, to be able to give advice in real time.

So the real trick is understanding what's happening on a conversation.

How do you use that understanding to make your customers happier, make your prospects, buy more, help your recruiting team recruit better and just basically let everyone in the company be more productive.

So the A I is a real application in that contact center sales and recruiting space.

And, and when you, when you talk about A I, Craig, of course, you know, um and you guys obviously are sitting on a ton of data.

There's always immediate questions about um about that data, the security, the privacy.

How do you navigate that.

Craig.

Yeah.

So one of the most important things of owning your own largest language model specific to your industry or specific to us.

Business communications is since we own it, it sits within our servers, within our infrastructure and we're not sending it off to some third party to go analyze it.

So by having that built in house and running in the core of everything we do, it keeps it much more secure, doesn't go off to any third party and it really is being trained on your own data as well.

So it's actually more accurate, it's faster and it's more secure when you own it yourself.

And Craig, it's just a broader question too about this moment we find ourselves in because there are people Craig that say, listen, what you're witnessing here is a paradigm shift.

I mean, really it's, it's internet mobile and now A I, do you believe that Craig?

Absolutely.

I mean, you've seen other transitions in the past, like moving from on premise to the cloud and you'd have these cycles where, you know, early adopters would move quickly and then other cio s would, would wait to see how it plays out even over, you know, a decade or more.

And that's not gonna be the case with A I like every head of it.

Every large organization is under a mandate from their and from their management to use A I to deploy A I to make their teams more effective and make their company more competitive.

And cio s these days are not going to have the luxury of sitting around and wait and see how it plays out because your competitors are doing it.

You're under the gun to do it and you see that in budgets too, the, the budgets are going to the A I powered solutions and not to the leg want.

So it is a, it is a real, it, it's like last year was the year of hype around A I.

This year is the year that A I becomes real.

And then next year and beyond this year, the winners start to really, really monetize the A I, right.

That's when we can distinguish between the winners and, and just the marketing fluff Craig.

I wish we had more time.

That was a great conversation.

Thanks so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me, Josh.

Appreciate it.

You got it.