UnNoticed - Frank Buckler (Full)

Hello, welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Show, or should I say Guten Tag. I'm delighted to have Dr. Frank Buckler joining me all the way from Cologne in Germany. Frank, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Jim.

It's my pleasure because you're going to tell us 2 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 going to share with us today.

I'm excited to do so.

Causal AI, take us through why that's important for business owners to start thinking about using artificial intelligence for customer experience.

So actually, causal is, 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 it do to be successful. This is a cause-effect relationship. What should I do to achieve a certain outcome? And you might think, why do I need AI 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. If someone comes to you and smashes in your face, you're pretty sure that this guy is a cause for your pain. But in business, this is different. Basically, 10 guys smash 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 interacts with some other topics. So in a nutshell, businesses around the world make huge mistakes in decision-making and they don't even know about it.

And is that because they're looking at today's data, making decisions for tomorrow? And therefore there's a legacy in terms of their decision-making then, Frank?

It's basically the, the wrong belief that fact means truth. Fact is just a singular 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 a 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. 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 stock markets. This is where I was caught up and I started to program neural networks and made every wave since then.

And so now you're the founder of a company called CX. 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?

Yeah. So the causal AI tech is basically applied for many different applications in marketing and sales. And CX AI is focusing on one specific problem, is basically to gain better insights from customer feedback. Yeah, it starts getting customer feedback, typically NPS surveys or so, 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, takes this data, runs the 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 or enterprises that are— have a lot of customers that could be B2B and B2C. So one of the largest customers, for instance, is Microsoft. They apply it worldwide. So quite reputed customers.

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?

Yeah, so this is really a journey since, I don't know, a decade. And we are still on our way. What we— what didn't work at the start is, I wrote a book, for instance, tried a lot of direct sales, direct calling, direct marketing, LinkedIn automation, mailing. There are some outcomes, but actually we couldn't figure out for us how to scale the business with this tool 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, right? 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. And that's how, for instance, I started a first project with Deutsche Telekom. They were fascinated by what, what Causal AI can do. They did a referral to T-Mobile USA, and they were even more amazed because actually we found their insight actually sixfold their market evaluation today by causal AI. And they refer to Facebook, to Intel, then and so forth. This works basically by why? Because having people who trust you and who believe you, that works. But this is hard to scale. Yeah. So what worked too is speaking, because then you have some audience where interested people, like-minded people can find you. Also what worked is 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, this were my learning that you can do lots of stuff, but actually what's really effective, what's, yeah, what the core is you need to gain the trust of people, and then you can sell even things which are— they may need, but quite hard to understand in the first place.

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? 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?

First, there is, if you start with friends, they are, they're giving good word, but we had a scientific publication out there, which was some, uh, get some quotes from professors. Yeah. We took this as an indication, but then also we worked basically 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 a lead into their company because they were— these were people who wrote their thesis but at the same time working in the company. And this led to the first, yeah, names also on our sheet, right? Big company names. And so you muddle through slowly, yeah, and your, your logo on this becomes bigger.

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 master's and PhD or MBA students that were working at the kind of companies that would then be your potential customers?

I had a friend in Deutsche Telekom, and he basically knew in his— around his colleagues, 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 an external student. So it starts with relation. You need to start build relationship with people, give them benefits, and step by step go up the ladder.

Okay, that's wonderful. What sort of timeframe, Frank, did that take? Was that over 1 or 2 seasons, for example?

Do you mean the referrals?

Yeah. So once you started this idea of getting into the university's courses to get into the students who are in the MNCs, when did you start to see some fruit from that?

I think it took maybe 2, 3 years. Yeah.

So, 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?

No. 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 in a not so famous house, but pay a PR agent to make the marketing. And this actually didn't work out. So probably good PR agents are rare. 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 are so many other ways to gain.

As somebody who's just working on getting my first book out there, Frank, I'm gonna take your words 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 it 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?

So what we figured out and what we are trying to push now is basically content marketing. So we want that the audience we are targeting at is 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 bi-weekly 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 a course, a 5-hour online course with interactive sessions. So basically I recorded everything I know. It's probably not everything, but this was the intention because 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 the time to digest and to do it yourself. And we also do that now, webinars, basically as a funnel, lead funnel. For this exercise. And what we're planning to do is actually a summit, a virtual summit, hopefully also in real world meeting people again, because you cannot build trust better than in real world. 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 a related tech to marketing and to especially customer insights people actually are invited to contact me. We are happy to, to take them on the speaking list. And actually the other idea behind that is to even generate revenue together. Yeah, so this summit would have a summit offering, yeah, which is discounted, where you put a lot of different stuff, but basically you offer a product. And if the people who are speaking at the event, if they promote the event themselves, yeah, 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.

Okay, so that's taking initiative that 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?

So first off, the payoff 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 them in the funnel. So it's good to have really an offer. So this summit is not just, not only an education event, it must have a funnel built in to capture the interest which is there. And the other thing I think, which is Key here is we all, every small unnoticed tech vendor, we all have our little group of people who trust us. 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.

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 plan?

It's a key component in any business, basically, and it becomes more and more important because information is everywhere. And the ability to reach out to a prospect costs no money anymore. People are in the enterprise world, they are spammed with information, free content, whatever. So for them, actually, they don't even consume it anymore. They reach out to their other peers or they reach out to people they trust. And that's— it becomes more and more important, the matter of trust. For— it's, it's less important for big players because they have a brand which is trusted and they can tell enterprise employees, can tell their colleagues, I'm working for IBM. There is this whole thing, you cannot get fired by hiring IBM. Everyone trusts IBM. 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?

Yeah, basically go to our website cx-ai.com. I'm on social, so LinkedIn, you can find me there, connect with me. Would love to interact, of course.

Frank Buckler calling all the way from Cologne. I can say thank you very much for— I should say Dankeschön Shouldn't I? And alfabetize.

You're welcome.

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Unnoticed Show with Frank Buckler, who's the founder and CEO of CX.AI. 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.