#TDSU Episode 258:

⏱️ Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:35 - Rethinking customer communication

00:03:02 - Say goodbye to repeating yourself

00:04:43 - You're not Steve: The pain of support calls

00:05:09 - Envisioning autonomous customer success

00:07:03 - The high cost of ignoring AI

00:07:47 - Real-world AI use case: Bug-fixing bots

00:08:39 - Revenue generation over cost cutting

00:10:42 - Wrapping up and what's next in AI CS

📺 Lifetime Value: Your Destination for GTM content

Website: https://www.lifetimevaluemedia.com

🤝 Connect with the hosts:

Dillon's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dillonryoung

JP's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanpierrefrost/

Rob's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-zambito/

👋 Connect with Majd Maksad:

Majd's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/majdmaksad/

[Majd] (0:00 - 0:26)

Because the upside there is effectively infinite as opposed to on the expense side, where you're obviously limited with X percentage of savings that you could pull out of the system. And on the revenue generation front, there's so many use cases. Every company is thinking, how are they going to use this to drive new business?

Whether it be on the sales front, I think there's a ton of work being done. And frankly, it's a very competitive space from a startup perspective.

[Dillon] (0:35 - 1:00)

What's up, lifers, and welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man JP with us. JP, do you want to say hi?

How are you doing? Good. I'm doing very good.

And we have Majd with us. Majd, can you say hi? Hi.

Hi. And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

Majd, thank you so much for being here. Can you please introduce yourself?

[Majd] (1:01 - 1:29)

Happy to. And thank you for having me, Dillon. I'm Majd.

I'm one of the co-founders and the CEO at a new company called TruAgents. Prior to that, I founded another company in the FinTech space. We were trying to bring social media and personal finance together, a company called Status Money.

And prior to that, I was at Citibank for almost 10 years. I ran some of their customer engagement analytics, which translates very well into what we're trying to change today in the way of customer communications.

[Dillon] (1:30 - 1:35)

Really briefly, before we get into the topic, can you explain what TruAgents does?

[Majd] (1:35 - 2:35)

Yes, happy to. And I'll first up-level it by saying the way that companies communicate with customers is about to be very radically transformed. And what we're seeing now is kind of a paradigm shift from, if we take it back, it was brick and mortar where you have a personal relationship with customers that come through the door.

And then there were websites and the dot-com boom, and then there were mobile apps. And now you've got this concept of AI agents. And what these agents are effectively human-like large language models that are able to communicate with customers on a one-on-one basis and do that across every communication channel.

So think about not just chatbots, where I think the whole revolution started, but phone, email, text messages, push notifications, in-app. And so that's what we're building. Effectively, the brain that enables companies to consolidate all of their institutional knowledge and knowledge of every particular customer and have one-on-one relationships at scale.

[Dillon] (2:35 - 3:01)

Yeah. So disclosure, you and I have talked about this previously. I think this is a fascinating topic.

It's sort of like when you call Geico and they know about every conversation you've had with them previously, email, chat, whatever, this is that, but with AI agents. So not only does the person know your history, but it's as though you're talking to the same person every time.

[Majd] (3:02 - 3:39)

Exactly. That's exactly it. And from a customer standpoint, it is the experience we've kind of all craved, where when you call, you don't want to have to re-explain who you are and why you're calling if you just had a chat session, or if you have exchanged an email, or if you were just on the website clicking around furiously and not getting anywhere.

Well, now the agent has this superhuman knowledge and memory to recall every interaction you've ever had with the company across every touchpoint and to serve you kind of proactively in many ways.

[Dillon] (3:40 - 3:48)

Or the insanely maddening thing that still happens in 2025 somehow. Can I put you on hold for a few minutes while I review the account?

[Majd] (3:49 - 4:23)

Yes, there is that. And unfortunately, I think for brands that care about how they're being perceived by customers, I don't think they've had a lot of options in terms of how to manage that customer relationship. You either hire an army of people and you put them in the United States so you can actually have the lack of a language barrier, or you offshore it because the costs are just too prohibitive, and you end up talking to people that say their name is Steve, but it's probably not.

[JP] (4:23 - 4:25)

I knew you couldn't come here.

[Majd] (4:26 - 4:40)

You're not Steve, right? Yeah, yeah. And every time you call, you get a different person, and the experience is horrible.

It's quite horrible. There are a lot of Steve's floating around offshore.

[JP] (4:42 - 4:43)

That's the episode name.

[Dillon] (4:43 - 5:08)

You're not Steve. That's the title. Too many Steve's.

So we've gone pretty far into this episode without actually touching on your topic. I wonder if it is a variation on things we've already talked about. But Majd, what we do here is we ask every single guest one simple question, and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success?

So can you please tell us what that is for you?

[Majd] (5:09 - 7:01)

I would like to not have to think about it. Honestly, I think we've now gotten to the point where we started to be able to really envision what a state looks like where a lot of these systems become autonomous. And I think in the past two years, since ChatGPT came on the scene and everybody woke up to how incredible AI is becoming, since then, I think it's improved several fold.

And if you want to hear what some of the researchers are saying, there are predictions out there that it's going to become a million times more powerful in the next four years, a million times more powerful. And that's a combination of what's happening at the chip level, what's happening with models and what's happening with networking GPUs together. And so it's incredibly hard to fathom for us what this kind of exponential curve looks like.

But I think we have to force ourselves to think about not just personally and professionally, but as business owners, how are you going to adapt and how are you kind of setting your goalposts for the world that's going to be as opposed to the world that is? And it's a very hard thing to do. But when it comes to customer success, I think we have to at least start thinking about how do we walk our way forward into the co-pilot systems, which I think a lot of companies are starting to build today.

So they're augmenting existing workflows and making them more efficient into a place where there is an overarching AI that is actually orchestrating the workflows end to end. That's what's kind of been really on my mind on how we create those systems and start to envision the building blocks that are going to get us there as opposed to kind of painting ourselves into a corner with the existing technology.

[Dillon] (7:01 - 7:02)

JP, jump in here.

[JP] (7:03 - 7:46)

Yeah, this is great. Something that I was really thinking of is, I know that you have this financial background. I'm really curious about what is, let's say, the opportunity cost of not utilizing AI right now.

What kind of savings are people having? I'm sort of trying to think about what kind of decisions leaders today are making, especially in the ICS, with the realities of AI and, say, a challenging US economy. Can you sort of give me some ideas of figures, of course, without disclosing anyone's information, but just your idea of the money?

[Majd] (7:47 - 10:41)

When I think about it from a financial standpoint, I always kind of go back to one of two priorities for businesses. One is cost savings. How do you reduce your expenses?

How do you become more efficient? How do you re-envision processes and take some of the grunt work out of the work that everybody has to do and the time that they spend? And I think there's a lot of companies trying to attack that problem, whether it be in call center automation or resolution of tickets and bugs.

I've seen one company, for example, that anytime a new bug is reported in their software, that triggers a ticket to be generated in their ticketing system and a large language model to generate the code to fix that bug. And all the engineer has to do is actually come in and review that code and push it to production and the bug is fixed. So that's on the cost savings and kind of quality assurance side of things.

But I like to focus more on the revenue generation side of it, because the upside there is effectively infinite as opposed to on the expense side, where you're obviously limited with X percentage of savings that you could pull out of the system. And on the revenue generation front, there's so many use cases. Every company is thinking, how are they going to use this to drive new business?

Whether it be on the sales front, I think there's a ton of work being done. And frankly, it's a very competitive space from a startup perspective right now. How do you get new leads through the pipeline?

How do you get them through your sales cycles? But where I tend to focus on is on the existing customers. And I think for most companies, they kind of drop the ball after a customer is in their ecosystem.

They just kind of say, okay, let's go focus on new business. But there's so much to be gained from improved upsell, cross-sell communication with customers and really kind of serving them well in the CS space. And so it really differs by vertical.

Where I tend to focus is on the consumer use cases, where you have today, mass marketing and broadcast types of communications, because there's no possible way you can communicate in a personal way when you're talking to a million plus people, right? So we're talking large insurers, for example, banks, retailers of scale. When you've got a handful of enterprise customers as a business, you could, in theory, dedicate a certain amount of resources to serve those customers incredibly well.

But when you're talking about scale, you run into the situation where there aren't enough humans on the planet that could possibly enable that. And that's where I think this technology really shines, because it is augmenting intellectual resources as opposed to labor, or as opposed to something that is very mundane that can be automated away with deterministic software.

[Dillon] (10:42 - 11:16)

Well, you're blowing my mind. You did when we initially talked, Majd, and I know you're doing it for JP, because I saw the revelatory look on his face halfway through that last part. That is our time, Majd, but I would love for you to come back and talk more about this.

I do believe it's fascinating. This is one part of the AI conversation that I do not believe is like overcooked steak at this point. Tough and chewy.

This is good.

[JP] (11:16 - 11:17)

Swag you.

[Dillon] (11:17 - 11:25)

Worth our time. Thank you. Anyway, that is our time, Majd.

Thank you so much for being here. But for now, we do have to say goodbye.

[Majd] (11:26 - 11:27)

Thank you. Thank you, Dillon. Thank you, JP.

Cheers.

[VO] (11:33 - 12:09)

You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all general inquiries, please reach out via email to hello at LifetimeValueMedia.com.

To learn more about advertising on The Daily Standup and the Lifetime Value Media Network, please reach out via email to advertising at LifetimeValueMedia.com. Find us on YouTube at Lifetime Value and find us on the socials at Lifetime Value Media. Until next time.

Do you have a story to tell, an opinion to share?

Join us on The Daily Standup.