And welcome to the Info Tech Podcast. My name is Jimmy Huber, and this podcast is about the intersection between technology and business. And if you're a small business owner like me, you've always heard about AI this and AI that. It seems to be a buzzword these days. But it's not every day that you might get to talk to an AI founder. So if that intrigues you, then uh this is the episode for you. Um I've got my guest here today, Tom Gersik. Uh Tom is the founder and owner of UX.ai. And Tom, I'll have you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you. Yeah, awesome. Thanks so much, Jimmy. Really looking forward to the conversation today. Um, I'm Tom Gersek, uh founder of uh UX.ai. That's Y-O-U-E-X.ai. Uh you can find it at just that website. Uh our goal as a company is to close the gap between new leads and new opportunities. So it's an AI native system. Uh it's a platform for capturing leads from web agents to having agents that then research and score and route and uh ultimately turn those leads into new revenue and new business. So really excited to talk a little bit about that today and you know, sort of where I've come throughout my career and how I founded this company. So thank you. Yeah, though that sounds great. Um I actually looked at a demo in the last couple weeks myself and very intriguing. I think some other platforms have bits and pieces of this, but you kind of really put everything together. So I'm excited to kind of get into that um and and see what the value is to you know, not only our listeners, but kind of see where you're going. Um but to kind of back up just a little bit, uh it's not every day that I get a founder on here. Um so tell me a little bit about your journey and your background um and how you came to you know start this business. Yeah, thanks for asking. Um I've got about a 26-year career, so not the youngest uh youngest guy in the room, but um I started as a developer, engineer, web programmer back in 2000, working on some government kind of subcontractor uh work with a really uh innovative company downstate Illinois, and then um went on as the uh the iPhone just launched in like 2007 to work for a small consulting company that was building some of the first mobile apps for business. And it was mostly for enterprise companies that were working with Salesforce. And we over the years, especially as the iPad came out, what we found was that they're like almost every enterprise company across the planet went out and bought a bunch of iPads for their executives, CEO bought it, CIO bought it, head of sales bought it, and they immediately went, like, okay, what do we do with it? And we really were able to kind of step in and fill that gap. We were we built a sales tool for the iPad and closed loop marketing uh tool that really helped field sellers bring information in an offline fashion to their prospect and their customers. We did that uh at with Salesforce as a back end, um, sold into a bunch of Salesforce customers at a time that Salesforce really had just the basics of a mobile app that they uh themselves were offering and kind of caught the attention of Mark Benioff and the company was acquired. So um that was the model metrics acquisition of Salesforce. Uh and that uh we brought you know mobile app development experience to Salesforce services as a part of that. And I stayed there for 12 years um for a number of years, still within that kind of uh engineering architecture mobile app space, and then moved into customer success where uh I eventually led product adoption for customer success across a number of like really, really big changes in Salesforce. Uh they around 2017 launched something called Salesforce Lightning, which was a complete revamp of the UI, UX experience of Salesforce that did away with a lot of old features and brought a lot of new features and it created this gap where for the first time customers of Salesforce really had to say, like, oh, I can't just keep using it. I have to make some changes, I have to roll out something new that had never really been done before. And so we really helped Salesforce customers across that. And then use some of those same learnings, you know, the ways in which we worked with our customers and learned from them and you know, really drove adoption journeys uh to drive uh security programs, uh multi-factor authentication, and then ultimately moving Salesforce customers from their own data centers to uh the cloud, to what they called Hyperforce, which was uh mostly Amazon Web Services, uh uh Salesforce hosted on AWS. And then I moved on to uh I kind of followed a friend to uh a company called Altametric, which was one of OpenAI's first implementation partners. I think actually the first implementation partner uh that we were working with, that we worked with prior to the workers that were consulting. But we were the ones that came in and helped their top customers, uh, a lot of banks and wealth management and pharma companies uh roll out and adapt ChatGPT Enterprise and API programs, things like that. And through that, what I really saw about for about two years was a lot of companies really able to roll out 20,000 seats of ChatGPT easily and get some value out of it. They were able to integrate with email and write better emails and things like that. But when you really dug into it, they weren't getting deep workflow benefits without investing a lot. And a lot of them were just like, hey, can we why can't we just do this? And so we did a lot of projects where we were kind of building kind of deep workflow integrations, but with AI, people want to move fast. And when you you show up and you're like, hey, it's gonna be six months of work, then it, you know, you kind of lose the you lose the interest pretty quickly and people start looking for point solutions. Um so that's that's why I founded UX at the beginning of this year. I founded it in February. The idea was really to say, let's try to automate a workflow and to really not try to automate away from people. And that's why the name is very intentional. The name is UX because intelligence is not enough. The user experience, your experience is what really matters, what really drives value. And that's the seller experience in this case. You know, we want to have a tool that is really helping sellers to be the best of their, you know, do the best that they can to supercharge their own abilities to automate away a lot of the things that are just, you know, time sucks. So, you know, if you're spending a ton of time researching people before you call them, like just let's just do all of that so you have a research report to read. You know, do the things that the best sellers do, because that's what we really found with a lot of both at Salesforce and working with open AI customers. What we really found was that if you could help a company identify who their best people are in any one scenario and help them drive, like figure out like what makes them even better, that kind of raises the bar for everybody. And then then if you're able to make that person like solve their problems, you're able to solve other people's problems because they're probably relying on that person for some things. And you can really help everybody and really understand a use case that much better. And that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to say, okay, who are your bestsellers? What do they do? They research, they like score, they qualify, like do a lot of those things and free up that person's time to spend more time building relationships and you know, really kind of building trust and ultimately selling uh in a B2B space. So that's the goal of UX. I love that. Um, you've covered a lot of ground there. So basically, you took an enterprise career and identified some holes that this product literally fills because I feel like a lead gen and the back office work for most entrepreneurs or owner uh-led sales companies is the bane of our existence. I mean, I don't I've been there myself. Um, you get me on the phone with somebody, I'm good. But the the minutia of, like you said, the research, the lead gen, all that back office work is it can get pretty sticky and and and drawn out. So you're not saying abdicate to AI. It's not like it's going to replace people, but would you say like it will enhance what's already working for people and make them more effective faster? Is that kind of the idea? Yeah, that's the idea. And I think right now the industry is missing that point a little bit. It's really missing because you talk to leaders like you know, sales leaders or IT leaders, and they're really trying to determine if I roll out AI, how many SDRs can I get rid of? That kind of a thing. I don't think that's the right lens. I don't think that's the right way to look at it. Because if you look at areas in the industry where we are seeing a ton of success with AI, it's actually creating job growth. You know, if you look at anthropics numbers around adoption of, you know, clawed within enterprise, you know, use cases or business use cases at least, engineering, way ahead. It's like 50 plus percent of engineers are using, you know, uh uh clawed code and tools like that in their day-to-day jobs. And the people that are are the ones that are growing their career, are the what that's the hot ticket right now. And it's you know, you're getting more and more uh demand for those jobs where you have people that are really comfortable with using AI tools and going that much faster. So I don't think what we have, like there's always going to be job disruption with any technology, but I think, you know, as a you know person who works, you know, the the thing that you can really identify is where can you succeed? And where you can succeed is knowing how to use the tools, being really good at using those tools. And so I think one of the things that's missing in the space is really tools designed for sellers. You know, if you take a tool that was designed for an engineer and think about like, okay, now we're gonna ask them to stitch together eight different point solutions with something called Zapier or something called N8N or you know, uh something called Open Claw, you know, like is that really if you're a sales leader, is that really what you want your team like working on? Or you would you rather they're just talking to people and selling deals, you know? Like it's you got two sides of the the brain there. Uh yeah, they're not gonna be compatible. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think this is great. I mean, I um as one that kind of has my foot in both areas, like I can kind of geek out about the tech speak, but the prospect does not care. The prospect needs a human that can interact, right? So it makes me wince when these other products come out that are like, hey, replace all your SDRs, like you said. Like, we'll do everything for you. Well, people are already trying to figure out, like, oh, this isn't a human. You know, Kevin in my email is somebody else. And there's a place for, you know, that kind of thing, but people still want the human interaction. And I think that's gonna be the differentiator in the next several years is like the human piece, like in-person events, people with that human interaction, like they're gonna crave that because it's being uh wiped away in a hurry. So I love the fact that this platform uh wants the the human aspect. It's just an enhancement of what people are already doing. So if you're um a user, what what can you expect practically? What are some steps? Like, is this gonna help me, you know, it's gonna give me a list of prospects already pre-vetted that I can then reach out to? Or what what are the actual use cases for a typical salesperson? Yeah, so our goal and our theory and what what we kind of believe is really that most companies have more leads than they really know what to do with. And you know, if you think about you can buy a thousand leads almost as a commodity right now for 50 bucks from a variety of vendors, right? Like getting email addresses that meet your ICP is like is not that hard at this point. Getting people on the phone, however, is. Um and so I think if you really design a system where you're able to capture leads that much faster, and so the first aspect of what we have is a web agent that you can put on your website in order to collect information uh from the visitors of your website. And the reason we think that that's important, um statistics show web agents, like chat agents that people use and find value in are two to three times more uh successful in converting ultimate business than web forms. And the reason for that is if you're on a website and you can't find what you're looking for because the website is too complex or the data is just not there, or whatever the reason is you haven't found the answer to your thing. If you're filling out a form, you're probably annoyed at that point, right? Like you wanted the answer, you didn't want the answer tomorrow, you wanted the answer today, but you're filling out the form and now you got to wait for someone to follow up, and the person that follows up might not be the right person, and they got to forward it to somebody else. And so you're already in this like annoying kind of category of problem. However, web agents are really good at having agency and answering your question, right? Like that's the idea. You have a web chat bot that's able to index your entire website, and your website might not be that well organized. You might have 200 blog posts with a customer just the other day that has this problem or a lot of their content area on blog posts, or it's not grown over the last 10, 15 years and isn't really, really well organized. But the data's there, the content's there, you just can't find it. So we index all of it. You can deploy a web agent to a website in five minutes. And I've if you go to UXII's YouTube channel, you can see this. Like I proved it that you can it'll index a website, you can get it on your website in five minutes or less. And the really important part of that is that then it will help a person navigate and find information on your website, but it'll also ask for their information. It'll capture their name, their email address, the lead information that you're looking for in exchange for an offer, right? Like you, if you want to say, here's a here's our recent Gartner magic quadrant. Like people do this with forums today, which you have to fill out information to get. So just say, here we can give you the magic quadrant. We'd love to send it to you. What's your name and email? And and get that. My own website, if you go to a ux.ai, we were just talking about this. If you know to ask, you can ask the agent for 50% discount. It will give you a 50% discount uh for the first six months of using UX.ai Oh, that's cool. So you just have to know to ask for it. Little Easter egg in it. Umly on the InfoTech podcast, right? You can't get that anywhere else. Not anywhere else. You have to know from InfoTech. Absolutely. There you go. Um, and so you can offer uh calendar invites, you can offer all sorts of things uh uh with an agent in order to get that information. We also have uh business card capture if you're at a conference. I think conferences are a really interesting space for lead generation too. Oh, absolutely. Which is you know, Salesforce. I've been to more Dream Forces than I can count. Um I've been to more industry like Money2020, I've been to Google Next and AI conferences, and everyone you go to, there's a bunch, there's an expo, right? And everybody's got their booth and they're showing things off and they're badge scanning with the whoever hosting that event's badge scanner. Yep. And by the end of that event, you've got like a thousand leads in a spreadsheet getting sent to you from Salesforce or from Google. And all of it has is like just name, email, whatever notes the person happened to type in before they went and talked to the next person. And following up on those leads is just this like horribly futile task because you're like, okay, I need to sort through them and figure out which ones are the hot leads and which ones are the not hot leads and which ones do I need. And it's and by the time a lot of companies follow up with more than a marketing email, like a lot of people will just upload them to the marketing platform and get email like, hey, great to meet you. And it's like, okay, great. Um, and everybody deletes it. But really following up and saying, great meeting you. Remember, we talked about X, uh, you know, uh I'd love to set up some time. By the time a lot of companies get that email out, the person's totally forgotten about them, forgotten about the product. Like, you know, you were at a conference, you went to 10 different booths, 100 different booths, whatever it was, you've forgotten about them. So, really, how do you make it that much faster and say, okay, I have the spreadsheet. I can upload the spreadsheet from them on Monday and have the emails out on Monday, you know, and not wait a week of moving them around. And then that way you can also route using AI to the right seller at the right time and make sure, okay, this person was interested in our healthcare product. Let's make sure the person that talks to them is our healthcare expert and do that in an automated AI-based way so that the first call isn't with some random person who doesn't know that product that you then have to schedule a follow-up call because you had the chance, you had the first call, and you don't want to blow that first call, you know. So uh ultimately, those are some of the things that we do. We make it really easy to capture leads. You can get a lead into UX through the web agent, through a spreadsheet, through a business card, through Zapier, through eventually Salesforce. We'll have a Salesforce integration pretty soon. But we want to have, you know, any way you can get a lead in there because at that point we can really research it, we present a really great research report. That research report, based on each individual person, is then used for each next step of that journey, uh, scoring, routing, nurturing, sending the emails, helping somebody with their first call, prepare for that first call. And then it's also important for that first call. And, you know, as the person's looking at it, the best sellers are doing research. And if you're selling in a B2B space and you're selling hundred thousand dollar or million dollar contracts, you're probably actually spending a lot of time doing research. It's not just a three five-minute research, right? Like it's you're you're you're taking the time to really know. And most good sellers I know are also then mapping out their the account. You know, they're talking to this person, they know that person's boss, they know that person's boss's boss, they know this guy, right? They're they're mapping out that network of people within that account. So that's the next thing we're adding right now is the ability to uh take a person you're talking to and find out who their peers are, who who's in procurement, who's in sales, who's in, you know, who are these other people within the company. So you can understand that much more about the company that you're working with. Yeah. So you're bringing not only the speed of the follow-up and the the churning through the tons of data, but you're actually enhancing that data and making it more relevant for that salesperson. So say I get home from an event, I've got all my stuff uploaded. The next day or whatever, I can go through and I get what, a report of like, hey, here's the top 20 that you should contact. Here are the notes, type of thing, or what what's it, what's it kind of look like for that person? I mean, they don't have to do anything in the middle, they're ready to kind of make those outreaches themselves. Like it basically just serves it up to them. Yeah, even better than a report, and it we do have reports, um, you can upload that spreadsheet of a thousand leads. It will go through each individual one, research each individual lead, present a report based on uh four factors. Uh the first is really is this a is this a worthwhile lead to follow up with an individually? The second is who is this person at the company they work for? Are they an executive? Are they a buyer? Is their title something like procurement? Is are they a C-level executive? Are they somebody who has purchasing authority or influence based on what you can tell from their own website? You know, the the executives on that website are usually listed somewhere on their site and you can find out who they are. Um or they have a title listed on LinkedIn that says procurement, things like that. Like those are you know important leads to follow up with. Yeah. Um we also do a broader search of the internet about the person. And that's important too. As you have a conversation with somebody, what are the things you want to bring up and talk about? You know, uh, usually you don't want to just jump right in and start pitching. You want to have a we went to the same school. You want to connect with them. Sure. You want to connect, you know. So it gives you some of that kind of background. Like, what is this person interested in? What do they write about? What are they, you know, on LinkedIn posting about, things like that. And then the fourth step is to really target some individual sites to give better information based on and this is important in certain industries where you might have like uh in the tech industry, people post on LinkedIn and Substack and those kind of things, right? In if you're in medical like industries, doctors probably aren't that much on LinkedIn, but they're on other sites. You know, they're on you know, physicians' registries and things like that with reviews, and so finding information on specific sites can be really important too. So we do all of that. And then yeah, it does uh it we really try to automate a lot of that busy work so that when you have a lead assigned, you get an email um with that you know lead assigned to you. That's based on uh the research, the uh intent that was captured with the lead initially. It's matched to you based on what we know about you as a seller. If you're good at this, you know, you describe yourself basically in the system so that there's an AI-based match, and then uh you have the lead to follow up with. So yeah, um, there's a report of all leads, but also it's individually uh assigning leads to the right seller at the right time with the right information. No, that's so cool. I mean, I'm I'm going back into my own sales career, and almost everything you said I've had to do manually. You know, uh LinkedIn like sales navigator, that's a great tool, but you have to go in and click all the things and find all the people, you know, for you. Like this is basically doing a lot of that work that takes a lot of time and serving it up. Um so I I think that's really useful. Um I've I've dabbled with a couple of these things, but they don't they don't do it all like you do. Like at InfoTech, we do have kind of a chat bot on our website, but that's all it does. It doesn't like hook into anything. It's just to get people that are on our website to you know do something more. Um I mean I've done like the email cult outreach, but it's that's kind of all it does, right? It goes back and forth, and then when they start responding, then I jump in, right? So it's it's getting there. This seems to be like a more inclusive thing where you know you you're getting you're capturing the data and then it's it's producing something for you to then take it to the next step, which is really cool. Um you you mentioned that you know you got I think you started in February, you said. So this is this company's pretty much brand new, right? So what have you seen as you've grown this out? I mean, uh you've clearly come a long way in a short amount of time. You have a ton of great experience behind you. What are some struggles that you've seen, you know, from the business side that you want to address, you know, in the next three to six months? Are there sticking points that you can see maybe even this tool helping you get your own prospects and people in the door, or or what's what's your perspective? Perspective. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, like the thing that I knew that I'd be able to do really well was to build to build a team to build the app to get the app to market, right? Like that's the thing that I've done again and again and was not concerned about whatsoever. So we've gotten the app to market in a little under three months from February and launched it in May. Um, so we're really excited to have it in the market and really starting to get feedback from our first customers and and really be able to kind of grow with them. I think that's one thing I also learned right driving adoption at Salesforce was if you could get something out before it was 100% finished and get feedback, you'd have that much better of a product app feature, whatever it was. Oh, sure. Because you you'd start to hear, you know, people would be like, why does it do this? And you're like, I don't know. That's a good question. You know, we should change that, you know. Yeah. Um so those are the things that are are going well. You know, uh, as a new company and uh as a startup, uh, you know, I I think one of the biggest challenges is just getting the word out, marketing and having, you know, getting people to start to trust you and and to believe that this is like this is the app for them. Because there's always, you know, there's always competition and there's always people doing something similar and you want to stand out. Um and you forget when you're working at a company that's I mean, Salesforce is 80,000 people, um, Altametric was about 10,000 when I left. OpenAI is obviously huge. You forget how much of the machinery is helping you. And so when you're like, okay, it's me and some friends, um you uh uh you have a little bit less of that. So that's where we're starting to build some channels. You know, we'll we'll have an offering on the ChatGPT app store pretty soon. Um, offering within the Zapier, Zapier uh app kind of exchange and the Salesforce app. Well, now they're calling it Agent Exchange, but we'll have an app in there as well. So we're building channel channel distribution to really get more into the into the marketplace that way as well. Yeah, so people are gonna find you easier. I mean, you kind of you beat me to my next question, which is what's next to come. So like you're you're wanting to position yourself as the end all be all in that space for salespeople. So yeah, I can totally understand. They're already using chat or whatever, they're gonna be able to find you and and and dump that in. Um what where do you see it going in the next you know one to three years? It it seems like the pace is so compressed. Like, you know, the doubling of value, which used to be every 18 months, I feel like now is about every three weeks. You know, they're uh the last couple uh weeks, uh, other things I've seen online, they're they're actually rolling back, it seems like, the um the AI hype a little bit and saying, hey, it's actually, you know, you still need the humans, uh, and and they're pulling back a little bit. So where do you see this going? I mean, I obviously the human piece is super important to you, which I think is like 100% spot on. Um, yeah, where do you where do you want to go in the near term? I think uh riding hype cycles is really interesting because it's you're trying to identify where you are in a hype cycle. Like the I think the real hype with AI was like a year ago or whatever, where people are like really excited about it. And then you have this like trough of disillusionment that like people talk about as being this area of frustration, of pulling back, of not knowing what to do with a tool. And I think that's a great place to invest. And that's I think where we're at right now, where is companies saw an initial spike and were excited about something, and that's where everybody gets excited and starts building, and then you get to this like disillusionment space where it's like, okay, I it didn't do everything I wanted. It didn't, you know, do and and that's what I think we saw with the initial launch of like AI into businesses, where people were like, okay, I can get basic value out of it, but not really in depth. Right. And so I think the the time of like figuring it that out is that like trough of disillusionment that I think we're sort of in right now, which is like there's companies that are reevaluating and rethinking about it. And it's not just move as fast as you can, it's like plan and and come up with a solution. And so that's that's sort of why I chose this time to really invest. Because I think the growth is is I think the market is expanding in this area. And you know, there are so many point solutions that frustrate IT buyers, that frustrate sales buyers, you know, like what you said, which is basically most sales tools today solve like one little problem. You can put a chat agent on your website, you can go and you can download a bunch of leads, you can, you know, and uh the sales forces aside, like you know, obviously that's a big solution and it's a bigger product tool that does everything that you could possibly imagine. But there's also all these like little solutions. And so I thought to myself, like for a mid-market company uh who might not have the budget for a Salesforce, but needs more than stitching a bunch of tools together, you know, what could we build? And that was the initial idea, which is to say, okay, let's build an end-to-end solution that does all of this for you, that automates a lot of it with AI. But then now that's what we're building is the integrations with other systems that people are using. We want to be the tool you can use in whatever interface you're already using, right? Like if you're already using Claud, cool, we have an MCP. If you're already using ChatGPT, that's great, we'll have a Chat GPT app. If you're already on Salesforce, great, we'll have an Agent Force app. And we'll be able to, you know, have the app drive that workflow. Because the important things that are happening are the things that are happening without a UI. You know, it's the research that's just I uploaded a thousand leads and I went on a bike ride and I came back and all thousand were already researched, you know. That's wild. Yeah, that's the next thing I do after this call. So I'm gonna put our database in here because I hadn't gotten that far yet. Uh, because that takes so much time. And I mean, uh your pricing's on your website here, so I just have it over. I mean, uh, 15 bucks a month for a hundred leads researched for an individual user account. I mean, if you're a you know, an IT in a box with five people, you can afford that. I mean, it this it's we're not talking Salesforce dollars here, like you mentioned. So I think that's a pretty low cost to entry, especially if you're chatting and saying, hey, I want 50% off. I mean, there's really no reason not to at least kick the tires with it. And yeah, I mean, everybody's already got some tool they're doing, right? No one's sitting on their hands. So the fact that you you want to meet them where you're at and not completely reinvent the wheel and make them start over, um, I think that will will go far. Um uh with the time we have left, Tom, I always try to give back a little bit to the younger entrepreneurs that might be still in that you know startup phase, kind of like what you are, trying to figure it out. Um, what's one piece of advice you would give them and meeting them where they're at that maybe you've learned in the last six to twelve months on your own journey? I think, you know, one piece of advice I've always had, and one thing I've really believed in my career is just persistence. Um, and I think that the people that are the most successful are the ones that just continue to persist. The best sellers I know are the ones that send, you know, people will send easily, hey, one email and then say, oh, they weren't interested. They send another email and oh, they weren't interested. The best sellers I know are the ones that did that for nine months and eventually won the deal, you know. And it's like, and and and um, and that is true in so many industries and so many roles and so many businesses where um people might lose interest, people might move on, and you know, you can you can really see a lot of success by just being the one that's still trying, you know. Um so I think persistence is a really good value to have. Um that's suited me well throughout an enterprise career, and I hopefully it's suiting me well now. Uh yeah, I could totally see that. I I heard it said once that uh you can correlate a person's success by how many uncomfortable conversations they're willing to have, right? Like there's almost a one-to-one uh relationship there. So I I completely uh agree. The squeaky wheel tends to get the oil. Um, Tom, I think you might have mentioned it earlier, but if people want to reach out to you, um I'll definitely put all the links here in the show notes uh to your website and everything. But what's the best way to get in touch? Yeah, thanks so much. I'm easy to find if you go to ux.ai, that's y-o-u-e-x.ai, ask the chat agent. You can set up a meeting with me pretty easily. You can also just email me at tom at ux.ai. And um also, like I said, ask the chat agent for a discount. It'll give you a discount. You can set up a free trial. And if you'd like a demo, I'm more than happy to do that as well. Awesome. Well, it's been great talking to you. Thanks for uh sharing your story. And um, yeah, if you're listening out here, check it out. Um U E X, Y O U E X.ai. And Tom, it's been a pleasure, man. Thanks for being on. Yeah, same, same here, Jimmy. Thanks so much for having me. All right.