Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Conversica CEO Alex Terry (Part 1)

The use of intelligent agents to automate various functions is an area that I am personally very interested in. This conversation dives into the specific area of Intelligent Sales Assistants.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some introduction about Conversica and yourself.

Alex Terry: I’m the CEO of Conversica. We’re a private equity and venture capital-backed technology startup here in the Bay Area. Our headquarters is in Foster City although we have our development office up in Washington. We also have a large sales team in Kansas City, Missouri. We’re a little bit spread out. We’ve built an artificial intelligence-based sales assistant that helps any organization improve their sales and also their marketing and sales alignment. I can go into more detail on what that means later on. At the high level, we have an AI-powered sales assistant that operates at the top of that sales funnel. It engages and qualifies inbound leads and helps sift out the good leads and elevate them for immediate sales attention. It can also sift out the time-waiting leads and does it in a fully automated way so that it doesn’t waste the time of the sales people.

Sramana Mitra: In this lead qualification and artificial intelligence area, we have seen at least a couple of other companies. I did a sales lead generation and qualification startup a long time ago. I founded that one in 1997.

Alex Terry: That’s hardcore – early days.

Sramana Mitra: Very early days. That was sold in 2001 I think. That was a long, long time ago. I know a lot about that space. I’ll tell you which ones we have covered already. Everstring is one that we’ve covered in this mode. We’ve also covered a company called TAS Group in the Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence series also in the area of sales lead qualification and sales cycle optimization.

Our audience, at this point, has been exposed to the use of AI in the sales optimization domain. You have a very informed and astute audience to speak to. First and foremost, I guess we acknowledge the trend that this is something that is happening. Other people are pursuing this line of thought. Let’s start by figuring out what customers you’re going after specifically, and what does the customer use case look like in your particular solution?

Alex Terry: Should I summarize the three trends that we talk about with our investors?

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely.

Alex Terry: I understand your audience is probably already aware of this. At a high level, going from biggest to smallest, we look at the first being the overall digital convergence. Moving many aspects of our lives into a digital and online world. There are obviously a lot of technology startups that are surfing that very large wave that we’re seeing. The second is around marketing and sales automation. You can even look at them as separate, but certainly, a lot of money has gone into marketing automation and sales automation.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Conversica CEO Alex Terry
1 2 3 4 5 6