In a nutshell businesses around the world make a huge mistakes in decision-makings and they don't even know about it, but causal AI can solve that. In a wide ranging conversation Frank Buckler, CEO of CX-AI tells us about the role of artificial intelligence his company provides to Microsoft, Deutsche Telecom amongst others, but importantly how he got his first customers by giving software to Professors. So great learnings for every entrepreneur both about casual analytics and sales from this Cologne, Germany, based founder who first fell in love with AI at University when discovering it could predict the stock market!
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In a nutshell businesses around the world make a huge mistakes in decision-makings and they don't even know about it, but causal AI can solve that. In a wide ranging conversation Frank Buckler, CEO of CX-AI tells us about the role of artificial intelligence his company provides to Microsoft, Deutsche Telecom amongst others, but importantly how he got his first customers by giving software to Professors. So great learnings for every entrepreneur both about casual analytics and sales from this Cologne, Germany, based founder who first fell in love with AI at University when discovering it could predict the stock market!
Am I adding value to you?
If so - I'd like to ask you to support the show.
In return, I will continue to bring massive value with two weekly shows, up to 3 hours per month of brilliant conversations and insights.
Monthly subscriptions start at $3 per month. At $1 per hour, that's much less than the minimum wage, but we'll take what we can at this stage of the business.
Of course, this is still free, but as an entrepreneur, the actual test of anything is if people are willing to pay for it.
If I'm adding value to you, please support me by clicking the link now.
Go ahead, make my day :)
Support the show here.
Hello. Welcome to this episode of the UnNoticed show, or should I say guten tag, I'm delighted to have Dr. Frank Butler joining me all the way from cologne in Germany. Frank, welcome to the show.
Frank_Buckler:thanks for having me.
Jim_James:It's my pleasure, because you're going to tell us two things. What is all about causal, AI, artificial intelligence, but also as an entrepreneur, you're going to wonderfully share with us how you've been getting this innovative technology for customer service noticed. So thank you for sharing in advance. What you're gonna share with us today.
Frank_Buckler:I'm excited to do this.
Jim_James:causal AI. Take us through why that's important for business owners to start thinking about using artificial intelligence for customer experience.
Frank_Buckler:So actually causal is a term which is basically used just in academia, but it ties back to something very fundamental. Every business needs and every business does every day. It tries to find what should they do to be successful? Is this a cause effect relationship? What should I do? To achieve a certain outcome. and you might say, why do I need to AI work for that. I just look at my experiences and see it, but this is actually not how it works in business. It works in normal life. Yeah. If someone comes to you and smashes it in your face, you're pretty sure that this guy is a cause for your pain. But in business, this is different. Basically 10 times, 10 guys smashes you in the face at the same time. And the pain comes maybe minutes or in business actually months or years later. So it is basically impossible to look at your data and look at your experience to really find out who caused you the pain, especially when some guys hit you on the nose and the other. Somewhere else. it interact with some other topics. So in a nutshell businesses around the world make a huge mistakes in decision-makings and they don't even know about it.
Jim_James:And is that because they're looking at today's data and making decisions for tomorrow and therefore there's a legacy in terms of their decision making there, Frank.
Frank_Buckler:it's basically the The wrong belief. That fact means true fact, it's just a single thing. But what you are looking for is the consistent relationship between actions and outcomes. This is invisible. It is not in the data and you need to extract it from the data. Therefore you need the machine learning technology. There are simpler statistical techniques decades ago, which are trying to do that, but have strong limitations you need to put in lots of assumptions. And this is what machine learning now frees us from. It frees us from making unrealistic assumptions, which we don't have and basically gain insights. What drives business outcomes from data and that's the new era from artificial intelligence. I actually I started this journey not last year, but 28 years ago. This was when the first AI wave started. I was just a student and I saw in the newspaper artificial intelligence now can predict a stock markets. This is where I was caught up and I started to program their networks and made every way since then,
Jim_James:And so now you're the founder of a company called CX-AI.com frank, what sort of clients are using your causal AI tools then to understand who's going to hit them next. And what's the best way to prepare for that.
Frank_Buckler:Yeah. So the causal AI tech is basically applied for many different applications, in marketing and sales and CX-AI is focusing one specific problem is basically to gain better insights from customer feedback. Yeah. It's starts getting customer feedback. Typically NPS service also. categorizing what people are saying. And, but then you need to qualify. What's important because that's another mystery that you just need to act on what they say. Typically, you need to interpret what they really mean, and you need AI for that. So we have this solution. It takes this data runs as a causal AI, and basically gives a dashboard where you can simulate even fiscal outcomes by taking the different actions you can take. So we work for typically companies, enterprises that are, have a lot of customers that could be B to B or B2C. So one of the largest customer, for instance, Microsoft, they apply in worldwide. so quite reputable customers.
Jim_James:but you've now got this business, Frank, but as an entrepreneur, it wasn't always this way. Was it in terms of getting clients like Microsoft? Fascinating to hear how you go from a, young lad looking at the future of stock market predictions on AI to having really blue chip clients globally. Can you just tell us what has worked for you in terms of getting noticed as an entrepreneur and also what hasn't worked.
Frank_Buckler:Yeah. So this is really a journey since I don't know, indicate, and we are still on our way we, what didn't work to start is I wrote a book for instance, tried a lot of direct sales, started calling direct marketing, LinkedIn automation, mailing. there are some, some outcomes, but actually we couldn't figure out for us. how to scale as a business with this tools because in the enterprise world it's very hard to get the right people on your phone and to speak to them, make them interested because everyone wants to sell them. And it's you talk about big tickets here? What what worked for us and how we started even selling to big enterprises right at the beginning. We started by referrals from friends, basically people who trust us already. that's how, for instance, I started to first project with Deutsche Telecom. they were fascinated by what causal the AI can do. They did to referral to a T-Mobile user USA. And they were even more amazed because they actually found they are insights actually six fold the relations today by causal, AI. And they refer to Facebook to Intel then and so forth. this works basically you can buy why, because having people who trust you and to believe you, that works, but this is hard to scale. And so what would work too is speaking because then you have some audience where interested people like minded people can find you also what worked reseller because a reseller, basically an agency. Already has this trust, trusted relationships, For them it's quite easy to sell our service because yeah. People listen to them. So this is for my, my, my learning that we can do lots of stuff, but actually what's really effective. What's yeah, what's the core you need to gain the trust of people and then you can sell even things which are, they are, they may need. But quite hard to understand that the first place.
Jim_James:let's just dive into that a little bit because. You've gone into referrals, but actually there's a step up from that. Isn't there a, how you got in to get the first referrals. Do you want to just talk us through that? Because getting the first customer is often the hardest part for any startup, especially if you're offering a new technology that people aren't even aware of and certainly not aware that they need yet. So can you just tell us, Frank, how did you then get those first referrals?
Frank_Buckler:first there is if you start with friends say are they're giving a good word, but we had a scientific publication out there which were some. And get some quotes from professors. Yeah. We took this as a indication, but then also we worked basically we support with our software people who wrote their master thesis and their PhD thesis. So we helped them for free. And in return, they should give us an a in a lead into their company, because they work this work people who wrote their thesis, but at the same time, working in the company and this led to the first. yeah, names also on the audit sheet, right? Big company names. And so you can muddle through slowly and, local in this book, it becomes bigger.
Jim_James:But I love that idea that actually your customer already resides in a, in an organization and maybe that individual needs the solution. And that becomes a test case for the organization. How did you find these masters and PhD or MBA students that were working at the kind of companies that would then be your potential customers?
Frank_Buckler:I had a friend Deutsche Telecom and he basically knew in his, around his colleague this guy may need it. The other road was basically I made a relationship with a professor who loved the software. So I gave the software for free for the professor and said, you know what? I'm happy to support your PhD students with that. If they are basically uh, an external. So it's, it starts with relation. You need to start to build relationship with people give them benefits and step-by-step go up the ladder
Jim_James:Okay. That's wonderful. Frank did that take, was that over one or two seasons, for example?
Frank_Buckler:do you mean the referral?
Jim_James:Yeah. So once you started this idea of getting into the universities courses to get into the students who are in the MNCs, when did you start to see some fruit from that?
Frank_Buckler:I think it took him maybe two to three years. Yeah.
Jim_James:And in the meantime you wrote this book. Now, most people in the sort of PR world say, write a book, we'll make you famous. And then you can write your own checks. What was your experience on being an author? Did it make you the authority that was good for your business?
Frank_Buckler:No. the, of course there are different ways to write a book, so I was not going to a big publishing house. Because this again takes typically some money. Yeah. You need to pay an agent. Typically, if you are not very, not have so much contacts and instead I choose to take this money and said, you know what? I write the book, publish it, and then not so famous house, but pay the PR agent to make marketing
Jim_James:Okay. okay.
Frank_Buckler:It just actually, it didn't work out hat, so probably good PR agents are rare. Yeah. And if they really have the connections to the big newspapers, they probably, you probably don't get a deal with them. just didn't work out. So maybe I did a mistake. I'm not saying that this is the wrong tactic, but more and more. I'm not a believer in books because in the digital world, there's so many other, ways to gain.
Jim_James:as someone who's just working on getting my first book out there, Frank I'm going to, take your words with as a note of caution, I won't get my hopes up too high about what it might do for me. so what are your plans now? You've talked about. Trust, and especially in a new industry where you're introducing new technologies that trust in you and in the product. And I guess in the theory is so important. How do you then find scale? Because you've mentioned that those early tactics were not scalable. What are you finding at CX-AI is a scalable strategy for you.
Frank_Buckler:So what we figured out and what we are trying to push them out is basically content marketing. So we want that the audience we are targeting at following us is seeing us as an authority in the fields we are focusing on. And this builds trust over time though. that's what we try. And this is scalable compared to referrals. so what we do is we do a yearly industry study. we do biweekly thought leadership articles. we opened a group where only client only people can join and we try to give their content in this group. Every basically every day, I published the course of five hour online course with interactive sessions. so basically I recorded everything. I know it's probably not everything but this was the intention. the whole philosophy around content marketing is really give everything for free, and people will hire you because at the end of the day you don't have to have time to digest and to do it yourself. we also do that now webinars basically it's a funnel lead funnel for this exercise. And what we're planning to do is actually a virtual summit. hopefully also in real world meeting people again, because you cannot build trust better than in real work, but for the time being, it will be virtual. And the idea we have is actually to have a summit. Eventually clients speak, not so much, we speak, but clients and other vendors who basically have great solutions for the target audience we are serving. So everyone who serves a tech or related tech to marketing and to especially customer insights, people actually are invited to contact me. we are happy to take them on the speaking list and actually the other idea behind that is to even generate revenue together. And so this summit would have the summit offering, which is discounted really. You put a lot of different stuff, but basically you offer a product. And, if the the people who are speaking at the event, If they promote the events themselves and they get a revenue share on this this offer sales. So they can even earn by speaking at our event. and if they do such an event too, I'm happy to do the same.
Jim_James:Okay. So that's taking initiative in the past a conference organizer would have done Frank. Is that because you don't think there are any conferences out there that are relevant or do you feel that it's an area that is important for the company like cx.ai to pioneer.
Frank_Buckler:So first off the pay off of conferences, because if you want to speak that in most cases, You need to pay and the payoff is not yeah, it's hard to justify. and this has several reasons. one reason is basically you may get audience, but it's quite hard to follow up and to get it in the funnel so it's good to have really an offer. so this summit is not just not only an educational event. It must have the funnel. built into to capture the interest, which is there and the other thing I think, which is key here is, we all, every small unnoticed the tech vendor, we all have our little group of people who trust us.
Jim_James:Okay.
Frank_Buckler:This group is not very big. Otherwise we would have been, we would have been big, but if 10 small unnoticed, brilliant tech vendors join forces, the amount of trust, people who trust us is 10 times followed and we all can benefit from this pool.
Jim_James:Okay. very interesting. So you've mentioned the word trust. throughout the conversation, really? Frank, do you think trust is a key component because you're a startup or because you are doing new technology or do you think trust is a key component in any business
Frank_Buckler:I think it's key component in any business. basically, and it becomes more and more important because. information is everywhere. Yeah. And the ability to reach out to a prospect is cost no money anymore. Yeah. The people are in the enterprise. They are spammed with information, free content, whatever. So for them, actually, they don't even consume it anymore. They reach out to the other peers or they reach out to people they trust and that's, it becomes more and more important. the matter of trust if for it's less important for big players, because they have a brand which is trusted, And they can tell that the price employees can tell their colleagues I'm working for IBM. there's this old thing you cannot get fired by hiring IBM that everyone trusts IBM.
Jim_James:yeah. So that's fascinating. So for startups building trust is probably one of the, if not the key component, and you've done that in a brilliant way. Frank, if people want to find out more about you and CX-AI.com but also about your summit, where can they find you?
Frank_Buckler:Yeah, basically go to a website six ai.com. I'm on, on social. so at LinkedIn, Could find me there connect me for work. I would love to interact. Of course.
Jim_James:Frank Butler calling all the way from Cologne. I can say thank you very much for, I should say danke schoen shouldn't Auf Wiedersehen
Frank_Buckler:you're welcome.
Jim_James:Thank you for listening to this episode of the unnoticed show with Frank buckler, who is the founder and CEO of CX-AI.com and of course I will put all of his details in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening. And in the meantime, until we meet again, I do hope that you and your business get noticed for what you do.