Could AI be the ultimate wingman for life's most emotional decisions?
In this episode, Deep Dhillon chats with co-founder of Budy, Samay Kohli, about revolutionizing one of America's most relationship-driven industries: senior living sales. Samay explains how Budy, his AI sales assistant, helps communities navigate the complex, often heartbreaking process of moving seniors into care facilities, a journey that can span three years and involve families wrestling with tough emotions like denial, guilt, and fear. The conversation explores how AI can remember that for example someone's vacation was postponed due to a health scare, enabling salespeople to show genuine care at scale. Deep and Samay tackle the ethical implications of AI-enhanced empathy and whether there's a difference between authentic care and algorithmically-optimized compassion.
Learn more about Samay here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ksamay/
and Budy here: https://budybot.ai/
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[Automated Transcript]
Samay: You could have up to a hundred phone calls, I mean, when you look at the activity that's happened, it's not just time.
It's like 104 calls, four tours. Like if you look at the stacks of the activities that went in, it's massive, it's like two years. And you had asked me one question early on, like, do they always work with the same salesperson? They do. Like, the process is one salesperson, but obviously salespeople move communities, right?
So it's like you do have a transition of like, Hey, welcome to your new, new job deep. Here you go. 300 new people that you, you've been talking to for two years, right? Like, here's the leads, right? best of luck. So you have a lot of that. So like a lot of like, just quick context, bringing them up to speed, right?
So the agent is like, Hey, this is what I think is going on. These are the big risks, right? In this person moving in. This is how you can help. Next step.
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Deep: Hello, I'm Deep Dhillon, your host, and today on your AI injection. We're joined by Samay Kohli founder and CEO of Buddy. Samay holds a [00:01:00] BE in mechanical engineering and an MSC in economics from BITS Palani. At Buddy, he's building an AI powered sales agent that learns from top sales reps to shorten cycles in the sales process and accelerate move-ins for senior living communities.
Samay, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Samay: Thanks, Deep. A pleasure to be here.
Deep: Awesome. So maybe get us started. Tell us what did people do without Buddy, without your solution and what's different with Buddy? Maybe walk us through a typical scenario.
Samay: Sure. So deep, uh, just to get into context, right, like, I mean, we focus hyper focus on senior living.
So in senior living, as industry is categorized as the industry where it's essentially, age restricted, living, for seniors, uh, it can start as low as 55 years plus, which is called active adults. But usually 65 above is where independent living, assisted living, memory care, right? So you have all these, apartment buildings, condos, or communities that are built for seniors.
We essentially help, sell faster, more efficiently, make it easier, both sides, for the salesperson to sell and as well as a senior to have a better experience. While that happened. So that's kind of high level context.
Xyonix customers:
Deep: the, the scenario like is somebody's considering, either putting themselves or one of their parents, into a facility and they're shopping around and, uh, you're trying to find them, identify them, and then, reach out to them on behalf of particular facilities, something like that?
Samay: Industry, yes. but not at all on the front end. we are a B2B business, so we sell to the operators. Who actually are selling. So a senior would reach out to operator who actually operate the communities. Mm-hmm. They have the salespeople under them. buddy essentially is a AI agent, which works along with them in their CRM to help them, do their process, better.
And, and let me give a little context on the process because without that, I think we'll not go anywhere. So I think from a process point of view, it is a B2C [00:03:00] industry, right? So, these salespeople are selling to consumers, individuals, as we get into it, you'll realize that my background's all been B2B so far.
So the reason I'm here, and we love this industry, is, uh, we are looking at it very much from a B2B industry, and we think it's a B2B industry. Because if you think about, a sales cycle is typically 18 months to three years long, in senior living, As well as it's a multi-stakeholder. Decision making, right?
So it's like, as you give the example, somebody's asking for themselves, their spouse, or is also asking for, you know, their parents. but they're more likely than not, people are asking for their grandparents. So the research is actually being done by the grand daughter in most cases. Right.
There is then all the siblings involved, and then there's obviously the senior themselves. So you've got all of these people all involved for, take it as a two year process. Right. And on the flip side, the number of leads that a salesperson manages. Is like consumer. So they're managing over 300, 300 is kind [00:04:00] of the minimum number of active leads that they're managing, right?
That's where it's this intersection of, B2B, B2C, healthcare real estate, right? So it's this amalgamation, which makes the sales process very complex, uh, which is why, you know, we are helping and assisting in that
Deep: complex maybe from what angles? Like one is that seems like a long time horizon. And so that's Hey, you know, my parent just fell, or my grandparent just fell and now I'm starting to think about this process.
then maybe they go and tour some places to, okay, now we really have to put them in. So, so there's like the temporal aspect, but then complex from an information aspect too, because I imagine like quite a bit of questions depending on the type of living facility. If it's a sifted living, then there's a lot more deeper healthcare questions may be being asked if it's, senior living, maybe less so and more on the community side.
So are those the sort of two primary angles of complexity that you're looking at? or is there something else too that you're thinking of?
Samay: Yeah, I mean. I'm trying to [00:05:00] put it in words, I mean, firstly it's just such an emotional decision, deep if you, Mm-hmm. You know, as I've looked at the industry, right?
So it's not like you don't go out to buy, right? you start to explore, it's usually because events happen I would say in most sales processes, there is discovery, right? Like what do you wanna buy? And all of that stuff. But a lot of the sales process, I would say, I would guesstimate that 70% of the sale process is actually figuring out, what do I want to buy?
Is this the best comparing blah, blah, blah. I'm generalizing right? In this process, I'll say 70 to 80% of that two year cycle, to a large degree, is denial. you, you are exploring what you don't want to buy, right? Like it's like, Hey, I'm looking at this right? But I'm just exploring, you know, like, I know this
Deep: moment is coming, you know, my mom or dad or somebody fell and we can manage for now, but let's go look.
Let's, let's, yeah. And
Samay: some people will say, let's go look, but I think I'll need it in 10 to 20 years. Or, people will be like, Hey. I still [00:06:00] drive, right? Like, it's like, okay, like, you know, like most of the people in the communities drive, right?
But they're like, they've mentally put it as like, oh, if I can drive, I don't need to move into those places, right? There's all, there's a whole emotional cycle, right? There's the spouse angle. So by the way, I will say. You know, like a lot of times the spouse is already, facing extreme dementia.
The husband's in denial. Both of them are exploring. The salesperson They can see it. It is an extremely human side of like the process.
So 70, 80% of the cycle. The actual work of I call it the T's and C's of like, what's the apartment gonna be? What's the facility? You versus you versus pricing. All the compa, all the stuff we take normally in a sale process that happens. happens in months. Yeah.
Deep: A lot of it is just like, help me deal with this stage in life that I'm in. Yeah. 'cause you see it all the time. Yeah. I mean it sounds similar to real estate in some ways where. It's not about the house exactly. It's about, I've never bought anything so big before. that person is [00:07:00] there to like, walk you through this and then you're imagining your life there and all that.
okay. So, so in the current mode without your product, what does the layout look like? So one of these facilities might have a handful of sales reps working on behalf of a specific facility, or are they working for like a larger corporation? they're not actually physically connected to the place at all.
How, how do they get their leads today? How do they talk to them? If you reach out to a facility, are you talking to the same sales rep, you know, for six months, a year, 2, 3, 4, 5 years? Like, how, how, walk us through what happens without your product and then, then we'll walk through with it.
Samay: So regular right now for c, the every facility has, what I'll say is minimum one sales person, two to three people, ideally, right?
Uh, you're looking at facilities anywhere like a hundred to 200, you know, like doors or communities apartments, cottages, whatever is the format of that. So you'll usually have one to three salespeople
you have the natural organic lead sourcing, which is like, you know, [00:08:00] Google searches, ads, somebody lined on your page, referrals from existing residents. That's one part, right? There are aggregators, one of the biggest aggregators is a place for mom, right?
Which is like you search for place for mom, they'll do lead sourcing, and then there are intermediaries go to this website, they'll have a shadow sales person, but that person is independent. They'll do, but I'll say this is a in-person tour. Many time check out the facility sale. So the actual sale is done by the person in the community.
Right. Mm-hmm.
Deep: So ultimately, like the person that you think of as the seller is gonna physically meet these people and physically walk them through the billing. Absolutely. So very much like a real estate agent or something.
It's not anonymous. Yeah.
Samay: Yeah. That's why it's, it's real estate plus healthcare, right? Like that's the mm-hmm. Two intersections of this space.
Deep: Got it. and that person is typically comped on, commission or something.
Samay: It varies a lot. But I would say what I've seen compared to what I know on B2B or [00:09:00] enterprise right, it's a very less percentage of their comp is, there.
Because, you know, in some sense, they don't want them to be that salesy. Right? Like you want to be Yeah. You are gonna build relationships with current residents. you are physically present in the facility. Right? Oh,
Deep: so why are they building relationships with current residents so that they can gain referrals over time or something.
Yeah.
Samay: Ambassador program, right? You continue the relationship. when you move in, most of these committees, it's a month to month. It's not like an annual contract log. There are some models called CRC where you actually buy but most of this is rental month to month, not even an annual contract.
Right? Yeah. So the relationship kind of continues, right? Like you sold me, so you are gonna see me around. You are gonna say hi over dinner, lunch. So the they are absolutely, it's not sale and done,
Deep: what's their context for talking to the person after they've moved in?
Is it just like, Hey, we know each other from before, or do they have some kind of other role in the facility?
Samay: they don't have a other role, but in any of this, [00:10:00] like, Let's say a hundred community, motion, you have, three to four people or apartments moving in, moving out every month.
Mm-hmm. it is a flow, right? Unfortunately, most of the move outs happen because of deaths or Yeah. Or needs to be hospitalized or, you know, like you don't have the level of care, right? But it's a constant in and out motion. So in some sense people do know, Hey, this came in. I thank you so much for that referral.
Hey, what's going on in your life? and I would say one of the biggest sales piece of the entire puzzle is what's called a tour. Right? Mm-hmm. So when you tour the, the incoming prospect, right, while, and you're doing two to three tours a day, right? At some times, right? So in some sense you are meeting these people on the corridors, this you're interacting, you are making sure the prospect sees how well you are connected in the community, what I've learned is they genuinely care.
Like everybody from the, like people in this, everybody from the salesperson to the chef, to the community manager. Everybody's not in this industry to, you [00:11:00] know, make a quick buck or like start their careers, right? Like they're somehow connected to, saying, Hey, they want to be around. And it's an amazing environment to be around seniors.
Deep: So where do these sellers, get stuck and where is AI helping out? And so I imagine there's. Contributions on the AI side for like, sourcing leads. There's probably, a lot of contributions on the question answering side.
Basically like, how do you think about it? do you think about success as, hey, one of these sales reps without the bot can handle a hundred apartments, you know, and with the bot can handle a thousand. what's the macro?
KPI, if you will.
Samay: So for us, the macro KPI is conversion rate, right? Like so at the end of the day, right, like if they're doing three move-ins, can they do four? And that's uhhuh at the core of it we don't like per month
Deep: or whatever.
Samay: Yeah. So it's like conversion rates on existing. So true increase in velocity, usually that's kinda what it comes out to, right?
So [00:12:00] that's kind of the macro level, right? Yeah. Like the little one level deeper than that is, uh, because of the number of people, right? Like you have 300 leads, you need to be moving in three to four in the current month, you end up focusing on the, the hot 10, right? Or the hot 15 at the maximum, right?
Which is like stuff where people are showing signals that they would actually move in in the next three to five months. Those are what come to the top of your mind. I feel like in some sense the, we help the least for those. the top of mind salespeople are on top of them. I think they, they'll do this, you know, like, uh, I call it as both parties are ready, right?
Like the senior wants to be sold and the salesperson wants to sell. Be,
Deep: and that's, that's important because a lot of times the salesperson doesn't want to sell because there's no availability. Is that, no,
Samay: they don't want to sell because they, These are very empathetic people.
Like, they're like, I'm, I'm like, Hey. I'm not even thinking about it. I've told you I'm absolutely all right. Why the hell are you even following up with me? [00:13:00] Right. Like, I just, oh, I see. So
Deep: you, It's always the case that they always have capacity to move somebody new in
Samay: most likely.
I mean, even you could do deposits, you could do resume. actually deep. Think of it this way. You are gonna have three or four availabilities every month, right? Mm-hmm. Like that's a, that's a given. that way. It's not at all like real estate or apartment building where, you know, like, I'm sorry.
I'm at capacity. They are, they operate good buildings. We work with, operate in the 85, 90 5% occupancy rate at any time. Mm-hmm. But it's just keeping, you can have three bad months and that thing can drop down so you are constantly, you have to keep moving in. But to your question it's like in, in enterprise sale I'll always say is like, Hey, hard qualify them. If they don't want to buy, don't talk to them. Right? But if you don't talk to them, they're not gonna move through the funnel. You have to talk to them.
So here,
Deep: here's a, there's a long nurture, um, long nurture aspect to the campaign. Yes. So, okay. So let's, shift gears a little bit. Let's talk about the role of ai. let me guess. This is always fun for me [00:14:00] and see how far off I am, but I'm gonna just guess what I think you're doing based on what we talked about.
So, let's talk about leads first. So you have leads that are coming in. So you have these aggregators you might have. forms being filled out. You might be running ad campaigns and stuff. So I imagine your, maybe your first point of contact with the AI system is you get raw, unqualified leads and maybe you have a conversational element.
So you've got a backend, LLM, open ai, Gemini, whatever. you know, maybe some basic information about the person in the bot can kind of talk back and forth across maybe a few different media, maybe email, maybe chat, maybe text, maybe something else. and the point there is to like kind of build a profile on the customer to understand, how relevant they are.
You start building a database of these folks. and you don't yet have to have a human, interact with them until you get some kind of threshold or something. so maybe then there's an, an analysis component of past message histories. So something is going through and analyzing the results of [00:15:00] these conversations, of bots going to this person, maybe scoring them on different axes or propensity to buy stage in the funnel.
Something like that. You're human. Then, you know, in between like wandering around the facility and chitchatting with folks, they somehow, they log in, they have some kind of portal or something. they check in, they get, and they have some kind of stack ranked, view of candidates, if you will.
And maybe at some point the bot hands over the conversation to them. whether the bot pretends to be them or pretends to be bought, I'm gonna just assume it's maybe a bot at first because people are comfortable with it and it's kind of weird to like, you know, masquerade, and then at some point they take over the conversation. they can always ask questions, so there's probably a huge question answering components. You have a corpus about the facility, maybe about general stuff. like how do I actually deal with this stage in life and all these challenges. So that's in your, maybe rag system.
and then you have stuff about the facility, particularly program specifically. Maybe you have a bunch of information [00:16:00] about, I don't know, like insurances and, you know, all that kind of stuff. and then maybe there's even a question answering component for the seller so the seller can come in and talk to the system to like understand more.
All right, that's my guess. So am my lip totally off?
Samay: but I was really enjoying. Okay, good, good. Awesome. But, and, and I didn't wanna, I mean, like, everything you said are genuinely, good ideas and good space that I think people should come up with. Right. And they are coming up in the industry.
We have a very different view at it. Yeah. But I think your view on the thought of like, you know, handling the initial conversation, I would say just one thing, I will add this context in. It's completely not a digital sale, right? Like, so in some sense, if you think about it, you do not, you, you know, you said earlier like, people just like talking to a chat bot and ask stuff.
They absolutely don't like, it's like, think of it as like you have Zillow, Yeah. You wanna browse through the picture? Actually, it's worse because in Zillow at least you, you know, [00:17:00] every second house is a little different. And you want to look at the pictures in this.
It's one community with a sample, bedroom, and you are gonna set up your own place. You are basically getting empty space and facility. So there's very limited digital research. Digital research is done probably by the, you know, the grandchild or the. the child over some weekend, right?
Okay. Of the senior, you do talk to the person, right? That's kind of firstly just kind of industry, context. the reason why we are probably not doing what you're saying, which all makes sense, right? Yeah. Is that I am coming from a way of I ran a very large company.
We bought a lot of sales and soft marketing software. We kept adding more and more and I was always promised this like, buy this app and this is gonna make the sales process go better and then go put this on your website. That'll make better. And that, I came with a very strong view, me and my co-founder that, hey, we don't wanna build another sales and marketing app, we actually want to be the layer, the connecting glue. If you may, [00:18:00] between all of these. And I would say, I don't like using like, AI jargons, like AI agent because they could mean a thousand things, but mm-hmm. But generally think of it as like a. a small, teammate or somebody you hire who's not like another app, like genuinely adds in the process and say, Hey, if you had to coach my salespeople, how would you coach them if I, if you had to pick which leads should they focus more on?
Or I have a marketing automation software, it leads campaigns, we've got campaigns set up. who should we pick out of the current ones and add them to one campaign? Or you know, let's say the campaign is expensive campaign, right? Like it's gonna cost me $200 to get them to go have lunch at this place or dinner at this place.
Who should I pick to go assign, So it's one layer of abstraction above, right? But I'll go and explain. Probably in the same way you laid it out, right? So, by the way, for us, the idea is you could have a chat bot, you could have a AI enabled chat bot, you could have a traditional NL one. You could have a very dumb chat bot.
[00:19:00] Doesn't matter you if you have a chat, bott you, you being the seller. the company, the operator might have operator. Okay. An existing app. You could adopt another app, right? If you like, look at it, you should have a CRM, right? Like where we can read, you should have a marketing automation.
So you have those inance in whichever flavor, We use AI for two sides of this business, right? One is deep that we actually use LLMs to do the integrations in. So we don't write, we don't have connectors with these one, we actually feed it. Here's the API documentation. This is what you need to extract from here.
Why don't you write a connector? Right? So connected to what
Deep: though? Connected
Samay: to whatever it could be. Your CRM could be your chat bot, could be your, uh, for
Deep: the facility. So the, this is the,
Samay: uh, the operator. So it's like first level is like, I can, I'll ask you as a operator, I'd be like, I literally, the bar discovery calls are, I'll ask you as a, as a VP of sales saying, Hey, tell me if you had to add a sales coach.
Insight, help your seller sell more. Accelerate, right? [00:20:00] What would you do? They'll be like, oh, I just do this, right? And we'll be like, okay, sounds good. We will tell the agent to do this. Now tell is like fancy way to say it, but it's kind of two parts. One, we will, say it prompted to say, Hey, this is kind of the intent of the plan.
I need, want to go access these systems. Here's their website documentation. Can you write the code? Right? So we'll write the workflow code, of how you pull in all the information, right? That's one thing. Information
Deep: about the facility and the apartment, facility,
Samay: apartment prospects, whatever, All the digital information you need access to as a agent, right? That's one. And the second part of it is now where we actually interact with the seller is inside the CRM, So it's like you logged in a call. The minute you logged in the call, the agent would like basically get triggered. A workflow will get triggered.
It'll analyze, it'll be like, okay, sounds good. This is what I think the next best step should be. Or for example, you haven't reached out to this person in two weeks, right? Like, hey, as per, I mean, I won't say as [00:21:00] per the corporate guidelines, but like, whatever, we'll have some guidelines that corporate said, Hey, leads in this stage should be at least have some activity followed up, blah, blah, blah.
It'll just ping in the front end, inside the CRM it, add another activity note saying, Hey, uh, it's been two weeks since we, pinged deep. do you wanna give him a call or do you wanna drop a message? Why don't you do that?
Deep: it's like a sales coach for the seller.
Samay: Yeah.
Deep: That's
Samay: one way to, so there
Deep: and, and so, but there's no contact with the, buyer?
Samay: No.
Deep: Uhhuh.
Samay: So it's a different side of it. It's more the B two P side of it than the Yeah. Consumer side of it.
Deep: Yeah. So you're really trying to help that seller in all the contexts of the, of the sale be a better seller.
Yep. And figure out who to talk to now. and that way it's still a people first kind of interaction between the seller and the buyer, and there's no digital mediation there.
Samay: No, think of it as like, our pitch or our tagline is make all your sellers your best sellers, right?
Like mm-hmm. We [00:22:00] basically pick the best practices that your good sellers do, And then we'll just make all your sellers look super human, they'll remember exactly, who your son is, what your dog's name is, when was the last time where you vacation.
They'll be like, you know, that's what really works in this industry, right? Like, do you genuinely care about that senior's life, And what happens deep is that I, if you go back to original context, sellers do really well, good or bad. I mean, if you have a job, you're doing well in the top 10 or 15 leads, right?
Like, you're closing them, you're on top of them. Mm-hmm. Right? It's the, the part where you can get the best return on investment is after the top 15, right? Like, so the people who are not gonna buy in the next four, five months, what can you do? To accelerate them faster. you know, so that your top 15 list becomes top 30, top 40, because these are people who want to move in the next three to six months.
Deep: Yeah. Or what can you do to get into their top of their mind? 'cause maybe they're looking at 10 facilities.
Samay: Yeah,
Deep: that's right. And so, and, and they're gonna think of [00:23:00] you because, you know, you remembered all kinds of details about their situation. And whenever they talk to you, they just feel better or something like that.
Yeah.
Samay: Yeah. You, you listen, you, it's called, in the industry, it's called a trust breakthrough, right? Mm-hmm. So you've had a trust breakthrough, And that's essentially what the agent helps you do. And the way we've been going about deep is like, literally think of it as, as a seller. you know, you join one of these communities, I'll give you the corporate guidelines of like, Hey, do this, this, this, this, this.
it's a hundred things I'll tell you to do. Frankly, 20% of that stuff, you'll do it hands down. You love it. It, you know, like, because you do it, you see reaction. A lot of the 80% is like, Hey, make sure you follow up once a week or twice. Don't let them go cold, that's stuff where, you know, like you don't like doing it.
There's a emotional, I mean, there's a bandwidth. There's also like, yeah, it feel
Deep: weird when, I mean, anyone who's sold, uh, myself included, you just. You feel like you're, you're intruding. Yeah. You're like, it's the equivalent of like, I'm opening the door and looking in their apartment and being like, hi, do you wanna hear about what you know?
Samay: Yeah. So, and it's for, that is where the [00:24:00] procrastination gets removed, right? Like that's what mm-hmm. You kind of like, help the agent, like helps you saying, Hey, don't, you don't need to be intrusive. You just need to be somebody nice, because the worst follow up is, Hey, I'm just following up, right? Like, that's like the worst follow up, How did that add value? Right? So it's, that's essentially the place where I was
Deep: just thinking about you and this question you asked a couple months ago, and here's some information.
Samay: imagine the smallest of things. I mean, you know, like you and I have experienced ai, we can use chat, GBD, LLMs, we know how to, so for a lot of this stuff, it's, it's like, yeah, this is straightforward, but it's a lot about like a, how do you make it robust and intelligent enough to be helpful, not hallucinate.
That's one side of the mm-hmm. Tech challenge. But most of the stuff is like, how do you meet them in the moment, at the right time, right? Like somebody just said, Hey, I'm, I'm going to nice, on a vacation with my family, can you do the follow up in four weeks? Where you ask about like, Hey, how was, hey, you remember, how was the trip and how, and actually say, Hey, did you end up going to [00:25:00] that monument?
Like, you know, like, you just say that so that the person's like, oh, you know, like, you'll remember, I, you know, I'll give you, this is by the stuff we've learned that some of the best sellers do. Real example, this lady was on the phone and She was like talking to this person, but on the side she's like, Hey, I'm sorry Martha was a sales lady's name.
She's like, Martha, I'm really sorry. I'm talking to this dealer. And he just doesn't understand. Like, he's like, got my car there for two weeks. some things going on with her car, right? And, you know, in chatting, Martha just picks up and she's like, okay. So, you know, like, what's the problem?
What's happening? Which one is this? The dealership around the corner. What, what are you doing? Right? Like very little stuff. Keeps the phone down, calls the dealership up. Oh, wow. And says, Hey, tell me what's going on. Right? Like, it's, I know she's an old lady. She might not be understanding. Explain, I mean, I'm, I'm a friend of hers.
Like, just tell me what's going on. And you know, like the person breaks it up as like, this is what the real problem is. Right. Yeah. Martha calls up and says, Hey, by the way, I just happened to be, I called the [00:26:00] dealer up. I think this is blah, blah, blah. And you know, like, I think this is what's going on. You should be able to do this.
Right. So that one call, like what do you think happened to that? that lady moved into Martha's community, right? Like it's, yeah.
Deep: Because they also know that this, seller is wandering the halls and hanging out with her or whatever. So lemme ask you this. So is, it sounds like the bot is on the phone call, and has access to the call transcripts.
Samay: Posts,
Deep: transcripts, yeah. And then can incorporate that into a set of, action items, that, the seller has as options and maybe stack ranks them. Something like that. Yeah.
Samay: Ideas for, these are three possible ideas you could do. Mm-hmm. Follow this up.
Deep: And then also from those transcripts, the bot can provide feedback to the seller on things they can improve on.
Samay: Yeah, that's another different workflow, but yes. Yeah, and also I'll just add in the, people, like I didn't personally appreciate this side A, a average deal, like something which is close to closing. You could have up to a hundred phone calls, I mean, when you look at the activity [00:27:00] that's happened, it's not just time.
It's like 104 calls, four tours. Like if you look at the stacks of the activities that went in, it's massive, it's like two years. And you had asked me one question early on, like, do they always work with the same salesperson? They do. Like, the process is one salesperson, but obviously salespeople move communities, right?
So it's like you do have a transition of like, Hey, welcome to your new, new job deep. Here you go. 300 new people that you, you've been talking to for two years, right? Like, here's the leads, right? best of luck. So you have a lot of that. So like a lot of like, just quick context, bringing them up to speed, right?
So the agent is like, Hey, this is what I think is going on. These are the big risks, right? In this person moving in. This is how you can help Next step.
Deep: And then they introduce them or something like that too. And
Samay: yeah, I mean that the sales person would do themselves, right? Mm-hmm. Oh yeah. Right. The leads, right.
But the agent would basically get them to, I mean, people right now do it without the agent. [00:28:00] You are spending about an hour skimming through all the transcripts, all the calls, message. Oh, that happened. Oh, I, I generally have idea what's going on. Okay. Let me give up. So,
Deep: so like, when we started the conversation, you sort of mentioned that there was like all of these questions that a, a buyer might have here, um, you know, about putting their loved one or themselves into a facility.
How are they asking those questions? Is it always like, human to human? I mean, that seems like there's a role for like the digital follow up. Like, hey, if you have any questions, you can start here, but if you, if you, if you ever get stuck, just talk to me. Or is it always human to human?
Samay: No, no, there's a lot of digital stuff.
it's a follow up digital format, but it's not, like, you know, you're not gonna do your research through that. That's what I meant. Right? So, so for example, we just talked right earlier, what would happen is, uh, the human would pick, go in the system and say, Hey, I think I should send these two questionnaires to them, or I should send them this resource to look, go through, They'll be automated like, Hey, thank you. It was nice chatting to [00:29:00] you. Or you know, like there'll be, video is starting to become big in the industry video message, So you have prerecorded. So obviously the senior doesn't know that these are repeated. Like you use the same video for 10 people, right?
It's a video from the sales person right after that saying, Hey, post our call. I was just thinking I should tell you a little bit about, I didn't do a good job explaining the different modes of al. Blah, blah, blah, blah. That exists. That's there, where the agent comes into ways, like it can actually pick one of the, what is the best resource to send it send forward, right?
Like, hey, or this person is in discovery stage. Uh, I found on our website, because the website communities have their own special websites, right? Yeah. And a community's website keeps updating. So like, what resources are available or not. Literally, salespeople go in and check their website before sending a link of like, Hey, this thing still exists on our website.
And the central marketing team didn't update our website and remove that resource from there. So the agent just literally browses the community's website and is like, Hey, you should send these two links [00:30:00] to them to research later. It'll help them get meta. So they don't get me wrong, there is digital, but it's a, it's a human driven sales process.
It's not digital research. So,
Deep: your platform and tool is. you're thinking of it as a senior living selling, facilitator, or are you thinking like, I am gonna start out first with senior living and then later on I might move into other, another domain or two or three where there is this natural bias towards us, uh, a human heavy centered selling process.
Samay: I like putting it as like, you know, you need to be three digit plus million before you do another industry, so there's time to go. I spent the last, 13 years in my last company being one industry in supply chain. So the plan's the same here. Stay super focused. It's a nice, industry.
Will I, you know, like never say, never like, will I go add another industry down the road? Sure. But it's like, it's not like we're not trying to build a horizontal play uhhuh, right. We are trying to go deeper and deeper into the application and [00:31:00] make sure that, you know, like the sellers are helped, there's lots of tech advantages to, you know, like you can start training small models. You can start building the acronyms. You can start, there's a lot of application knowledge that helps be special in the industry. So our plans to be more specialized in the industry than a horizontal player.
Deep: Yeah. Why don't we talk a little bit about, so I think I, I get the sales assist, mechanisms that you're sort of describing, like what's the next action to do, you know, and at what point in time analysis of the conversation between the buyer and the seller, maybe coaching suggestions, et cetera.
But it seems like there's an opportunity to build maybe, either one or some helpful tooling that the seller can like, put in front of the buyer. You know, like answering questions about x, y, or Z topic as opposed to the, the seller as a human always fronting that conversation. that makes sense.
And like, are you thinking about that? if so, like, Is it question answering? Is it something else,
Samay: Yeah, uh, [00:32:00] deep. The one thing, so I'll answer your question, but I'll give a caveat out in it, right? So firstly, I absolutely think there's opportunities to, digitize more stuff and as long as the buyer, the real buyer, the senior or their families are accepting adoption, like, you know, you should do all of that stuff, and I think we'll continue to. basically accelerate adoption of digital tools in the industry. We might not necessarily make them ourselves, right? Like that's kind of how we look at it, because, for example, one of the biggest things we, we've started focusing on as our next thing on adding is, so, you know, like in senior living is very normal some discussion happened on the weekend, and you just thought about calling the community. So you left a missed call. You call the community, the seller got like, got the lead first thing in the morning, tried calling you back, No answer because you are, you know, you are at a job. Maybe you are the, you're the child, right? It follows up four or five times, no response, right?
Marks the lead lost. Now it is lost because you tried calling back and it's genuinely why you lost it, [00:33:00] right? But there's no harm in a. AI was voice bot just calling. Like, I mean, you know, you can call 12 times pre-designated 20 times, right? To try to get the senior on the call and say, Hey, deep from the community was trying to get in touch with you.
Can I get something on your calendar? What time's good to talk? Right? So reengage leads digitally, right? I'm very AI hype, averse. So I'm like, we're literally going through tests on like, okay, what are the, ai, what's the hang up rate?
And like, yeah, what's hang up rate? Does it harm the relationship? How do you not hallucination is one thing. No, no. How can you get them shortly done on? Because the job, for like the application we are looking at is you have just one job. Either get a call booked, right? Or hang up. Right? Do not talk, do not sell the product, right?
Don't answer questions, Because that's not what the communities want. They're like, Hey, we don't want the risk right now. Anybody else mis-selling our product? I don't know if that answers your question, but I think those are like things that we will keep, like we will go find the best technology and we'll be like, Hey guys, I think this is great.
do you [00:34:00] wanna like integrate this in? And you know, buddy, the AI bot will like, give, feed it all the information, it'll integrate, it can, you know, it'll be seamless for you. You can simply, uh, add Is
Deep: that, is that where the bias is? Like, is that why I got the methodology so wrong is because the bias is heavily towards, retaining the relationship with the human, by these institutions and like reinforcing the relationship with the human as opposed to, having the bot front the relationship and then handed over when it's ready.
Samay: the bias, if I may, it's a good way to look at it.
The bias is to not force people to change their behaviors, which I mean by the operator, So, mm-hmm. Like the operator wants to use more digital touchpoints. Go for it. You want to use less digital touchpoints. They do it. The AI agent is agnostic. it's more orchestrating. We wanna make sure whatever process you're doing, how do you get the best bang out of buck for that,
But our bias is that we don't want to like tell the operators, A better way to sell. We wanna make them more efficient.
Deep: [00:35:00] Yeah, no, I, I was actually speaking more to the, to the operator's bias.
is there a,
Samay: There is, and yeah, I think in the industry there is, it's a very high
Deep: a per a high personal touch
Samay: business. Their experience probably all the way around , no, I don't
Deep: mean bias in a negative, way. I just mean like there's a natural sort of, relationship, social heavy touchpoint industry. Like, like it's, it's very different than, selling airline tickets. Like this is, you know, a completely like human relationship.
nobody buys a plane ticket to, Boston or wherever, based on how great of a conversation. Well, I mean, they did 25, 30 years ago. They did. Yeah. You know, but not now. , That era's gone. And I guess that's like, is that a concern for you that, that maybe you're pushing so heavy on this relationship assumption.
actually, let's, dig on that, that analogy. So, 35 years ago if I wanted to buy plane tickets, I went into a travel agent. I actually had a relationship with a travel agent. I had a great travel agent, and I didn't have to think about anything. I didn't waste all my time like I do now, trying to buy [00:36:00] tickets.
I talked to them, they figured it out. They gave me a call, like, three hours, four hours later they're like, Hey, I found you some great tickets with a transfer here and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, great, thanks. Boom. End of stuff. So I could imagine somebody in your position 30 years ago thinking like, Hey, this is a very relationship heavy business and all this stuff.
When in reality fast forward 30 years, that entire industry got decimated. with some minor exceptions, everything got, you know, usurped with this, very digitally centric buying process. I imagine, like, is there some element of generationality here, you know. Like millennials are sort of renowned for, for example, physician hopping.
Like they'll just jump onto the web and see my back hurts. I have this problem. the front door to the, healthcare industry, is no longer like a long-term relationship with a physician for that demographic. like, are you concerned about that at all or?
Samay: we're solving for today as, as the industry will move, we'll keep solving, that's where, by the way, for us, if you are in touch with your industry and listening to the customers, Any of [00:37:00] these motions as they change would be changed by the early adopters.
And the early adopters are gonna come frankly, with us only to say, Hey, this is how it's changing. Let's, I need a little more of
Deep: this functionality. Yeah, let's do that. I don't, I don't need my seller to talk at this stage in the selling cycle.
Cool. So let's switch gears a little bit. So we've talked about like what you're doing. I think we all have a good understanding of that. but Let's talk about the should.
and I don't mean this, in a, any kind of confrontational way, but I feel like as a generic critique of the tech industry, we tend to like, get into problems, and not think of the second order effects of, what happens if we're incredibly successful. Are there second order effects if you're like, wildly successful, you know, and this AI process is incredibly successful, that you think you should think about or somebody else, you know, in your industry should be thinking about.
Samay: the way I look at it is that, these things are co-created, how does a market react? How does co-creation work? What route to products take, right? you know, there are different kind of founders, there are founders I meet all the [00:38:00] time where it's like, hey, this is my strategy and this plan of how I will execute it, for me, the kind of founder I am at is like, it's more vision driven on like, Hey, this is the direction, general direction I want to head into, And then, take a breath and make sure that you're executing really well. you know, I think it's all of our responsibilities is my responsibility, to make sure that where I see things, which will spa behaviors.
Like for example, I'll give you a real example of in our line, what's the line between guiding a salesperson, Versus just telling them what to do, right? Mm-hmm. Because if you tell them what to do, they'll follow through and they'll execute it. Right? And I'm not even talking about the problems with hallucination or what if something's wrong?
But you stop the salesperson from thinking, what should happen in that deal? Because they're like, click send, click send, click, send. they're doing that, or frankly, the bots doing it on their behalf, We're very careful of that because I just feel the salesperson will become inefficient if we robotize the salesperson. The [00:39:00] person has to have context of what's going on in this person. They need to know the life of that person, So we have to keep them in the loop as we interact, right? But these are small micro decisions of like, Hey, this is what human tendencies are you doing?
the number one request that we have is that, Hey, why don't you build a chat interface with your AI agent, right? Like, why does it need to go update in the CRM or help you? Yeah, You know, we don't want to make it as like this is your 1-800-HELPLINE for the sales person, you have to do your job I like to think of it as a human being, but a digital entity. Which is there to do my job and help you along, but I'm not your, 1-800-HELPLINE. Because you have to think about what your opportunities are gonna be done and where it's gonna come.
So this is just choices you make.
Deep: I think this is a really good example that you're bringing up because it's not unique to your Yeah. Or AI problem, right? Like this is one of the problems is if you are successful, you'll become better than the humans at what they do.
and you will know what to do at any given [00:40:00] moment and your system will know what the right thing to do is. And your system will be able to say things in the right way with the right tone. all you have to do is maybe circumvent the part where the human actually meets them in real life.
Maybe you do that online, maybe you circumvent it. Maybe it's not your company, maybe it's your competitor. maybe it's not your industry, maybe it's another industry. But I feel like one of the risks that you're rightly pointing out, and, I commend you on detecting it early and kind of optimizing towards it, is, I don't know if you've ever watched The Simpsons, but the, the Homer Simpson application of the nuclear power plant, you know, regulator, and I think this is a real risk for almost everything we do with ai, is that we think the safety valve is putting a human in the loop.
But if the human is so zonked out with boredom, that they're just sitting here executing stuff that they're no longer the human we think of today as actually being empowered and enabled. You know, like, I mean, to me that's actually a fundamental [00:41:00] risk. I already see it with young software engineers, but they don't know what the hell they're doing a lot of the times.
'cause they haven't been writing low level code. They've just been GP ting everything and co-piloting everything. I don't know what the right thing to do is, I know I started out in the other direction, but I do applaud your anchoring the, the human and feeding the human first and foremost.
'cause I don't think there's really a way around that if we wanna build a society where we're still relevant.
Samay: No, and I think deep our roles, it's not like in your or my hand, and not even in the hands of a few, our roles will evolve and they frankly evolve for the last 50 years.
They'll continue to evolve for the next 50, I mean, they did evolve much lesser, I think. I mean, What I'm blown away by is like how much our world's evolved in the last hundred versus the last thousand. I feel like it's evolved. Well, that
Deep: anyone from a thousand years ago would only think this is all like a magical Yeah. Sort of divine world that we're in. I mean, crazy. And even a hundred years
Samay: ago, if you think about a hundred years ago, like what was happening [00:42:00] to what we are, forget ai. I mean just like, I mean, oh, just communic transportation.
Like, you know, like you can go to another continent. Why? What are you talking like, like yeah. In a matter
Deep: of hours.
Samay: Yeah. Also, even like, people would like take, it's a year trip, right? Like they don't come back usually when they go to another, I mean, a hundred in 19, 19 25,
Deep: you know, you jumped on a steamer like a, in
Samay: a month.
Yeah. Three weeks
Deep: later you're in Europe or something, you know, it was a. It was like the timeframes. Yeah,
Samay: absolutely. So I mean, like, coming back to your, I think the change in is inevitable. I, I genuinely believe that, I think as tech people, what we can do, which is by this serves our purpose and serves the society's purposes, right?
Like, my last company, I did robots, I mean mm-hmm. It's like it has 25,000 robots deployed right now running live, right? Like physical. Yeah, yeah. Physical, actual robots running physically. when you have 25,000 robots, I actually did a LinkedIn post on this.
everybody would come to me and say like, okay, [00:43:00] where's the lights out version? Why are you even wasting time on making these robots at work along with human beings? I just want a dark warehouse. And I'll say, I got tempted in the young, entrepreneurs in the first couple of years. I got tempted by that and I was like, oh, that vision sounds good.
Like, here's my five year roadmap. Every year we will decree remove humans out of it, right? But when you go to the deeper, that's not what I mean. If from the practical sense of like this stuff technology doesn't exist even today to do what was supposed to be done. But even if you remove the tech side of it, you should not fight a market.
Mm-hmm. And that's why, you know, every time you said can I geek out about like, what would a world be, where a senior could buy on their own? Or, interact on there and look at the advantages of that I can Right. But I just feel like that's not how seniors want to buy today.
they wanna buy this way. It'll evolve slowly. I just want to be along the right, accelerating that evolution rather than trying to Yeah. Disrupt it in some sense.
Deep: Gotcha. Okay. Well this has [00:44:00] been, uh, you know, an awesome conversation. Thanks so much for coming on. I'm just gonna leave you with one final question that I ask everybody.
Let's say you're, you know, wildly successful five years, 10 years out, what's different in the world? What, is positive and, you know, and maybe like what's negative too, like how do things look in five or 10 years, assuming you're, you're wildly successful?
Samay: I think, it's a little ose than my industry, but I think it's gonna be true in ours, but at least in our industry, digital entities or digital employees.
would be a real thing, it's a person who, you know, has a personality and everybody else, like we will be having a conversation around, deep. So me and like right now we say, so I don't dunno if you use it, but I sometimes say, Hey, me and Chad G pt were having this conversation, which I do a lot of times.
The office, yeah. My wife
Deep: and I, we, we've just named him. I call him Chadwick, she calls her Claudio. But like, yeah. Yeah. So, so
Samay: I think that way, I think that in a corporate of saying, this is what this, this guy did, or this is what, like, us chatting about digital [00:45:00] entities and human entities in the same win, I think is gonna happen, right?
Like, I, I wanna make sure that I, I'm a big force behind this, but it's gonna happen with or without me. So I think that's the big, ose things of that happens. I think it'll be. For us, , that question discussion that we are having, which is like what's truth is going to become more Meier and Meier.
We think right now, you know, the social media is tough you know, we do fact checking. I feel like, best of luck to us because what I was amazed at, the amount of digital content entities, are creating digital entities, are creating AI agents, is like far, far greater rate at which than human beings are creating content.
it's Oh yeah. I mean, it's
Deep: actually a problem for the model builders for the LLM builders. It's like, you know, it's, it's become a thing to make sure that something's actually human authored.
Samay: I mean, that's what the whole all
Deep: of it is. So. Awesome. Well, I think, this was a great chat. Thanks so much.