The Rise of AI Assistants: The undeniable upside and the ugly downside

This is the Everyday AI show, the everyday podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business and everyday life. I'm not gonna lie. At this very minute on one of my other computers, I have a couple AI assistants doing work for me. And at some point I'm going to go in and check back in on them and maybe give them some new directives. And you can understand the benefit of that. I'm one person. I can't do these things 24 7. But there's also a downside because as these AI assistants and agentic AI become more available, more powerful and more robust, there's also maybe an ugly downside on what people can be using these AI assistants for. And not only that, but what about your company? What if now, all of a sudden, maybe you were limited in your customer experience journey, customer support, you know, providing that support at a certain time, but now it might be 24 7. And happy customers maybe aren't going to reach out to you as much as maybe disgruntled ones. And now they have new means with AI assistance. So today we're going to be talking about a fun topic, I think to prepare for 20, 26 and beyond. Just the rise of AI assistance and the undeniable upside and the sometimes ugly downside. I'm excited for today's conversation. I hope you are, too. Welcome to Everyday AI. My name is Jordan Wilson. If you're new here, this is your daily live stream podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday business leaders like you and me make sense of the AI noise. Because it's changing every day. This show helps you make sense of it, to grow your company and your career. So if that's what you're trying to do, it starts here with the unedited, unscripted live stream podcast. But to take it to the next level, make sure you go to our website at your everyday AI dot com. We're going to be recapping the highlights from today's show as well as keeping you up to date with all of the other AI news that you need to know. All right, you don't got to listen to me anymore. We have a great guest for you today. I'm excited for today's conversation. It's going to be a fun one. So live stream audience, if you could please help me, welcome to the show Chris Caldwell, the president and CEO of Concentrics. Chris, thank you so much for joining the show.

Thank you very much, Jordan. I'm excited to be here all right.

This is going to be a fun one talking about kind of this duality of AI agents and AI assistants. But before we get started, I'm sure many people in our audience have heard of Concentrics, but maybe for those that haven't, Chris, tell. Tell everyone what it is that you all do and maybe even specifically on the AI side because you have a lot going on there as well.

Absolutely, Jordan. I'd actually be surprised if too many people know of us, but most people have interacted with us. We're sort of the brand behind the brand. We support customer experiences around 2000 clients around the world. We handle literally billions of transactions, whether it be calls, emails, chats for some of the world's best brands across multiple different verticals. And so customer experience is what we think about each and every day. And as you can imagine, AI is changing this world dramatically for us. More people want things automated in a fashion. More people want everything being digital. People think that it'll drive down volumes. People think it'll drive better customer engagement. And so we're in the middle of all that and investing heavily in everything from fully automated AI, multimodal bots, to sort of AI that helps a human be much better prepared and much more efficient when they're interacting with another human. So it's a very exciting time for us.

So, you know, smarter bots, right? Like if someone has, you know, customer service on their website, that's not new, right? That's. That was pre gen AI. But you know, I'm curious, you know, not just asking you how the customer journey experience has changed with large language models, but maybe specifically agentic AI. How has that changed? Not just what's possible for maybe brands to provide on the customer journey, customer experience side, but also the flip side, right, the ugly. Talk to us a little bit about how agentic AI has really impacted the customer journey.

Well, it's interesting on the client side if you think about it. Agentic AI has been used to really target tech deficit where, you know, if you think about RPA or you think about some of the things like that, of like, hey, I need to go to this system, this system, this system to pull all the information together to deliver a better customer experience. You can now do that with the gentic AI. So it's solving a lot of more complex problems and is driving better resolutions for customers a lot faster. Very, very cool. Now what's exciting is that on the consumer side, it's really empowering consumers to have a lot more power than ever before for just like you mentioned, you've got some bot, you know, agentic AI bots running on your, on your system and doing work that you're not even interacting with. Now think about that, of how you want to interact with brands, how you want to do your shopping, how you want to complain. All of a sudden, instead of there being one Jordan, there can be a hundred Jordans all having that interaction. And brands need to think about this and think about how to interact with consumers differently because they're going to have so much more power because of the gentic AI.

What are maybe some of the kind of use cases that pop out? Right. Like I'm, I'm thinking of them. Right. And, and maybe our audience is as well. But what would you say. And maybe let's, let's start on the positive side and you kind of alluded to it there, but with AI assistance in general.

Right, right.

What are the, the new use cases or the new benefits that companies need to be focusing on?

I'll give you a great use case that has, has positives for both sides. So think of your bank, think about your marketing mortgages. Traditionally you have to market very heavily to get people to, to, to kind of apply for a mortgage with you. And generally they're consumers of your bank. Now with consumers who have agentic AI, they also have historically maybe only applied for one or two companies or banks for a mortgage because it takes a long time. There's a lot of paperwork to fill out and everything like that. Can you imagine, Jordan, if now with your identity I bought, you can say, I want to apply to 100 banks and I want them to bid against each other and I'm going to give them all the information, I'm going to answer all their questions about me and then I'm just going to have an answer about which bank I can do it. First of all, there's a lot more volume of transactions for banks to now bid on. That's great for them, but for the consumer now gives them the power that they could never possibly do to kind of see all the different rates that are out there and pick the mortgage. They want to deal with quite a different type of buying demographic, sorry, not buying, buying environment than what you've ever seen, really being driven by people who can use these agentic AI files.

And you know, Chris, I can't like help but to think of the downside as well. Right. Not just, you know, hey, a company now might, you know, if they have a disgruntled customer employee, you know, that person may be Using agentic AI to, you know, hit them up for support on more channels. But I mean, even thinking about things like deep fakes, right? Voice cloning, which anyone can do for anyone, right. In five seconds, anyone can go out there and clone my voice. Clone your voice, and now all of a sudden have us calling anyone, right. Can you talk a little bit about maybe some of the downsides of this technology and also the capabilities?

Yeah, you're absolutely seeing that. So what we're seeing in specifically cybersecurity is where some of these bots that, to your point, deepfake, can call in and say, hey, I've lost my password. I'm Jordan, here's my credentials, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And someone who might know you might go, okay, that's great, thank you very much. I recognize your voice. Here's your new credentials. And so we're starting to see a rise of sort of some of those unsavory areas around using these bots and using Agentix to kind of drive that. Also, if you think about just kind of logging into your websites of people who haven't secured their personal digital assistance and someone taking over it and it's you. And so it's almost like a puppet now, someone has taken over you and can now get to anywhere that you could have gotten to with your credentials and your security to do that. So we're seeing some of that that's happening. We're also seeing to your point where a consumer who, you know, might have bought something, it might be worth $8, something relatively de minimis and it didn't work and they kind of go, I don't have time to call. The company's hours are 9 to 5. They want to wait for an hour online. I'm just going to give up now with your personal digital assistant, can you imagine, you can say, call this company every 15 minutes until I get through to someone. And by the way, I'm not only going to call it once, I'm going to have 10 of my bots calling them. And if I can't get through, I'm going to go on the web and I'm going to find out all the executives of this company and then I'm going to email them asking for my $8. That's challenging to say the least. Right? So you suddenly get all these new kind of, of volumes of going through and more power on the consumer. And then lastly, what we're starting to see already in the healthcare field is that if someone was working with their HMO and saying, hey, I think I should get this surgery or this procedure. Oftentimes they might get a no. And you'd send a complaint letter saying, I believe I should get this. Now what we're seeing is consumers who can use some of the research bots, can use some of the agentic bots sending in these complaint letters or citing, you know, multiple different cases of where surgery has been done, where it's been working, you know, what the procedure should be, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Far more educated, because they can get access to all of this and deliver it. And companies have to respond to this. They simply can't respond. And the higher level of question requires a higher level of answer.

You know, I. I know from personal experience, right? I'm getting way more just, you know, AI slop, right? AI slop of all kinds. You know, hitting, hitting my inbox, my text messages, everything. Has this become, you know, a big enough problem for companies yet where they have to like, oh, okay, we can't do our same customer service strategy, our same customer, you know, experience that we've been doing for years, because now we're getting personalized, you know, complaints from all these different channels. Is it that big of a problem yet?

It's not that big of a problem yet, but it's starting. We're starting to see it in a lot of the areas where it's starting to grow. And if you think about how many consumers are really using personal digital assistants as well as they possibly can, it's still relatively small, right? It's not driving a lot of volume. But as we see with most things with AI, once the adoption curve, like, really starts to ramp up, we. We expect it to go huge volumes very, very dramatically increase. And the analysts are sort of saying mid-2026, early 2027, this is really where the power of these digital personal assistants are going to kick in. And if you look at the new models that are coming out, you can see them just getting better and better and easier and easier to use to drive it. And so we do expect it to come. What it is starting to get these. These kind of clients thinking about is, okay, how do we deal with this? And by the way, this is not a big company problem. This can also be a small SMB problem. The reality is, if you've got a barber shop and you're used to kind of, you know, having one or two calls a day while you're cutting hair, all of a sudden you're now dealing with a lot more because More people have the ability to contact you and interact with you than you've ever had before. And how are you going to manage that and how are you going to do that and how are you going to check your appointments and etc. So it really has quite a profound impact. No matter where you are in size of business.

Is there an answer for, you know, what, what happens when. Right, so, yeah, what, what does happen when, you know, whether that's mid-2026 or early 2027 or. Chris, if, if we're having the same conversation at this time next year, what should companies be looking at maybe to handle on the, the ugly side of. Yeah, maybe a disgruntled, you know, if someone's in health care and, you know, yeah, their surgery gets denied, but now all of a sudden their entire board is getting phone calls, you know, AI powered, you know, messages and DMs on LinkedIn. What should companies be doing now to prepare for when this does happen?

It's about having the right strategy, Jordan. It's about really understanding, okay, how are they going to engage the customers. It's about understanding where they can support the channels and the volume and putting the technology in place. So it's kind of like this arms race. They have to equip themselves with the AI, they have to equip themselves with the agentics, make sure that they've got the right LLM model training and tuning that can handle this volume that is coming in and that it is accurate. We've already seen companies go out there producing some pretty wild answers that get picked up on the news and that's the last thing that you want, right? And so by making sure that you're getting the right information, right tuning, you're going to get rid of that. The second thing is turning it into really a way of selling more services if you're doing a better job, if you can connect with these personal digital assistants and push information that's relevant back to you. So, Jordan, you're complaining about something, it's calling, you know, the company, it realizes. The company realizes you've got a personal digital assistant, says, that's great, Jordan, I'll take care of that. But by the way, I also noticed that these three things you're also interested in, maybe you'd like to exchange for that, maybe you'd like to buy something like that. And so really kind of driving these digital relationships, I think are going to be very, very key. And companies who master it will be incredibly successful.

One thing that I'm always kind of thinking about Is this intersection of human agency transfer with transformational AI technology that we don't even understand. Right. I think that people are just now getting comfortable with giving agents true agency right. And true decision making ability. Right. But whereas before it was all about, oh, I'm talking to a chat bot, it comes back, it gives me the answer and then I make a decision. Well, now these front end LLMs can go and make decisions. They can go complete tasks, they have access to our data. Right. You can connect them to, you know, marketing platforms like Zapier and then they can go do anything. What is, is, is it a problem?

Right?

Like is it almost maybe too much power too quickly for us humans? And yeah, maybe. I think it's, it might be a bad thing if I go have a hundred Jordans, like, like you said earlier Chris, give a hundred Jordans access to go do anything. It might turn out poorly. Are, are, are we ready for it?

Well, you know, that's a great question. And, and there's a couple of research papers out about this around companion AI or delegated AI. And what's super interesting is that in Asia where we spend a lot of time, a lot of businesses actually in China, not that long ago, they love companion AI. They love that where it just goes off and makes decisions and drives it. And, and it's telling you, hey, I've done this versus what we see in North America and Europe is people want delegated AI is to say go and do this task, come back to me and then I'll make the decision about do I want you to complete that task. And that is a very, very big difference, probably more culturally than anything else that we're seeing out there in that, in that space. And depending on how companies react to that, we'll change it. I do think to your point, having 100 Jordans nor feds probably not the best thing, right? You're going to spend more time trying to manage your hundred Jordans than actually getting the productivity benefit. But we do think people are going to have two or three. You might have one that deals with your E commerce shopping because it knows what you like, it knows your style, it knows your, your, your, your places you like to go. And it looks and is looking for sales that you have set up to say, hey, I really want to get these new shoes, but I don't want to pay anything over, over this price. Those we see as kind of being much more useful. Maybe something that interacts with your banking accounts, maybe something interacts with your social media accounts that brings all that information together curates it and says, okay, now Jordan, what would you like to do? Those we think are going to be very, very powerful and going. We also see the exact same thing that you're talking about where consumers are getting more comfortable using these tools and giving more information to these tools to be more powerful that we see speeding up. If you think about age demographics is very clear, you know, 18, 19, 20, up to sort of 25, 28, much more comfortable giving much more delegated authority, much more information. If you're 50, much like myself, maybe a little more cautious. And so as the population's coming into this, you know, AI boom, you're going to see these changes change pretty, pretty dramatically and again, very, very quickly. Yeah.

And when I think about the maybe ugly downside of AI assistants and how they can be used, you know, not just, yeah, chasing down that, that $8, but for bad reasons and for bad purposes. Right. I think in the position of a, of a small business owner or you know, CEO of a, of a large company like yourself. Right. I think we always sometimes think about high tech. Right. Fighting AI with AI. Are there also maybe low tech solutions? Like, I don't know, should, you know, so many companies put up, oh, here's our executive team and their LinkedIn and their Twitter and their email. Right. Like, should we also be like saying, okay, maybe we disconnect in some areas, like what's, what's the solve?

No, you're, you're, you're 100% on the money. The reality is there's sometimes low tech solutions to high tech problems and, and like, for instance, you know, scams. There's a lot of companies now who have gone to a voice validation of dialbacks where they have, you know, phone numbers that they know that are secure phone numbers, secure cell phones, and if you call in asking for anything, they hang up and they dial the secure number and then talk to you and say, okay, are you really the person that you, you have, you've got much more code words that, that, that we're seeing more and more in banking and treasury circles where it's not, you know, mother, maiden name, it's not where you met your partner or whatever the case may be. It's something much more complex class. And so we're seeing more and more of this kind of identity management solved by some of the low tech problems or sorry, low tech solutions for some of these high tech problems that are coming out there and hopefully that goes away. We expect at some point there will be a digital identification. I Know that Sam Altman has kind of started that thought concept about how do I know who you are on the web. I think Dallas starts to come more and more, but that technology is in its infancy and I suspect you'll see more of that over the next years. 12. Well up to 24 wows.

Are you still running in circles trying to figure out how to actually grow your business with AI? Maybe your company has been tinkering with large language models for a year or more, but can't really get traction to find ROI on Genai. Hey, this is Jordan Wilson, host of this very podcast. Companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Nvidia have partnered with us because they trust our expertise in educating the masses around generative AI to get ahead. And some of the most innovative companies in the country hire us to help with their AI strategy and to train hundreds of their employees on how to use Gen AI. So whether you're looking for ChatGPT training for thousands or just need help building your front end AI strategy, you can partner with us too. Just like some of the biggest companies in the world do. Go to your everydayai.com partner to get in contact with our team or you can, you can just click on the partner section of our website. We'll help you stop running in those AI circles and help get your team ahead and build a straight path to ROI on gen. Yeah, and I'm curious, even for yourself, right, you're, you're the CEO of a very large multi billion dollar revenue company, you know, one of the biggest in the world. In your space, are you out there, right, using AI assistants and if so, how are you using them? And what maybe guardrails go through your mind maybe when you're having them go do tasks for you?

Well, that's a great question. First of all, there's probably a thousand of me pinning staff around the world all the time saying, can I get this, can I get this, can I get this? And the staff go, okay, this isn't Chris. For various reasons, they know because we've educated people so heavily on really understanding who's reaching out, why they're reaching out and how to, how to validate that. On the AI bot side, I use it fairly heavily. Like I use a significant amount for research and I've learned that, you know, better prompting skills, better understanding of what you're getting at, and really having sort of some thought put into how you use it, you get significantly better results. So I'm using that significantly. I use it for time management, I'm using it for you Know, making sure that things are getting booked and timed and done. I'm using it for call outs for things that I don't have time for versus using an assistant for that. I can have it call a business and say, hey, set up this reservation, et cetera, et cetera, if they're not on the platforms for booking. And I'm finding some really good uses. What I'm actually not finding good uses for is things that I think a lot of people think about, like summarizing emails, like writing emails. You know, two years ago, maybe not even then because it was just annoying, but, but now not at all. It's really about driving actions that I get the most value. And I'm pretty excited about seeing more and more stuff now. If I could find one or program one that would actually go to all the inboxes that every application has, bring it all together, that's a gold mine. So if any of your listeners have that or have a golden idea for that, totally in the market.

No, yeah, yeah. I'll have to talk to you after this one, Chris. Yeah, that's, that's, that's kind of what I do. But you know, one other thing that I think about when it comes to this duality of, of AI agents, right? And I think we're already seeing this. And, and when I talk about this, you know, sometimes people look at me funny and I'm like, no, it's, it's already happening. I know it's happening, right, but kind of like, hey, I'll have my assistant talk to your assistant, right? Is, is that a thing? Are you seeing it and you know, is, is that maybe a good thing or a bad thing for companies, right? Yeah. If, if they have now all of a sudden, you know, a company, let's just say Nike, right? I used to do a lot of work with Nike. They have, they have hundreds of millions of customers, right? And now if someone's upset about their shoes and they send all these AI agents to, you know, go find these people online and say, hey, you know, my, this, this shoe was a rip off, right? Like, should there just be agents talking to agents? Is that a bad idea for, for brands to look at?

That's the reality of what's going to happen. It's not completely baked there yet, but from strategic sessions that we have with clients, they really think about when there's an agent to agent conversation. At some point it needs to almost become like a microservice where these two things aren't even speaking a language. They're Sending bits and bytes back and forth and solving the problem. And then it's about making sure that on the client side, on the company side, brand side, that what it's doing and how it's transacting is getting the results it needs. And similarly on the consumer side, it's doing the same thing. We expect absolutely that will happen for a lot of the transactions, you know, in coming years. That all being said, we still see a massive amount of work that a human is going to have to do. And that's around empathy, that's around, you know, there's some conversations that you just want to have with the human, believe it or not. And that's not only an age demographic issue, it's just a humanity humanitarian issue. And the reality is that AI will be in the background supporting those conversations or supporting those interactions. But absolutely, transactional stuff will be kind of these agents talking to agents.

Yeah. And one of my thoughts for the future is this will probably be on my 2026 AI prediction show. Coming up here is companies marketing as human only. Right. Because I think that there's going to be a certain point, whether that's in, you know, six months or six years, that we as humans get annoyed talking to AI or we don't want to have, you know, my AI assistant go talk to Chris's assistant. I was actually blown away the other day. I called up, I think it was like jet lubrications and like a human answered instantly. And I was like, this is crazy, right? So how can big enterprises balance, right? The need to. Well, now we're getting, you know, you know, all these requests thrown at us. So we need to use a lot of AI because we can't keep up, but still have that human touch that really makes the customer experience the customer journey special and memorable.

You know that that's a great question. What we think it comes down to is your brand promise. So there are some brands based on how they interact, how they work with the market, that that brand promise will need to be delivered by a human. But this notion that people will pay more for humans or want to work with humans, we don't think is really the case. What we think is that, you know, if something can be done frictionless with technology, people want to do that. If they want to interact with a human, they want to do that. There are some conversations that they want to interact with a human. And we absolutely believe that companies that understand this and appreciate this will do very, very well. And. But it's not one size fits all. We expect Almost every brand to have this kind of digital channel of communication, plus a human channel of communication and the right conversations, going to the right place and the brands that really get that kind of thought out and done well, we'll frankly do well and take share. People can't go to the lowest common denominator. Your brand has to stand for something, how it works, how it engages, how it thinks about its customers, how it markets to those customers. And again, the ones that really understand that get that well will do well. If you're just trying to put in AI to, you know, be lowest cost, everything done a digital channel, we just don't think you're going to be that successful in standing from the crowd at all when we look at customer sets.

All right, so, Chris, it's been a fun conversation today, kind of talking about this duality of the AI assistant. But, you know, as we wrap up, what's your one most important takeaway? Right, because I know that this technology is coming faster than many business owners or decision makers may want it to. And it's here. It's not going anywhere. And there are huge upsides and kind of dark, ugly downsides. What's your one most important takeaway for people to be prepared to do this the right way for their customers?

You know, the one takeaway we continue to tell the executives is use the technology. We're surprised still at how many people making decisions around this don't actually use the technology and don't understand the power of what it can do. And that's what we encourage all the time for people to do. Play around with it, use it, get subscriptions to it, get multiple subscriptions to different platforms, see what's good, what's bad, get those wow moments for yourself. And then when you get the wow moments for yourself, it's much easier to translate that for your customers.

All right, great piece of advice, Chris. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to join the Everyday AI show. We really appreciate it.

Thank you so very much. I appreciate it. All right.

And if you miss anything, it's going to be in our newsletter. So if you haven't already, please go to your everydayai.com we're going to be recapping all of the great insights that Chris just shared. So thank you for tuning in. Hope to see you back tomorrow and every day for more Everyday AI. Thanks, y'.

All.

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