David Stewart

And the options are, you know, hire enough people to hopefully answer these calls, get them trained.

Hopefully they do a good job or look at this AI tool.

And so we did our homework.

I talked to other people who had used it, spent some time with the company itself and spent maybe a week or so building it out, getting it to about 70 to 80 percent of what we think it is today.

And it was one of the things that we just had to pull the trigger on and find out, is this thing working or not?

And we pulled the trigger with it and we were able to actually do it relatively incrementally.

We started with off hours.

So the hours that were not working, we turned it on.

We said, hey, let's see how it does.

We still had some frustrated clients.

They don't like the AI automation, but hey, we'll refine it.

You're also just going to have challenges with anything.

And so then we started to increase the amount of hours that it would answer calls.

And now I believe it answers the calls going to the sales team full time.

So if a call is going to our sales team, who is meant to be outbound selling, it answers all of those calls.

And so we have it handling a couple other functions, and it's worked extremely well.

But it also was a big risk because, well, I mean, 200 people a day call and they want to talk to us, but we can't get to everybody.

And we didn't want to frustrate people.

We certainly lost a few clients because the AI didn't work well.

The phone systems didn't talk to each other well enough.