#124 - Ricardo Garcia-Amaya, CEO of VOIQ - On making frequent customer conversations finally affordable

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation around voice automation that has the power to connect with your customers in seconds. My guest is Ricardo Garcia-Amaya, Co-founder and CEO of VOIQ.

Ricardo is a YCombinator alumnus and was recently recognized as a Silicon Valley Top Diverse Tech 40 Under 40. He has an MBA from NYU Stern School of Business, and an undergraduate degree in Politics from NYU. Ricardo is an Aspen Institute Innovator Fellow as well as an NYU Stern Berkley Center for Innovation Fellow.

In 2017, he founded VOIQ. VOIQ empowers companies to use human-like AI VoiceBots for highly personalized conversations with their customers and prospects over the phone.

This triggered me, and hence I invited Ricardo to my podcast. We explore the power of actually speaking with people, but how cost and scale challenges hold us back from maximizing its use. We then dive into how to overcome this challenge, what use cases are ideally suited, and what needs to be done differently to execute in a remarkable way.

Here are some of his quotes:

I helped a friend run for mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, the capital of the state of Rhode Island. And I helped them set up the technology specifically for his campaign in terms of virtual call centres. So how to get people out to vote, how to on the fundraising side as well, in that, looking at that technology at that time, I realized that nothing has changed in 10 years. So I said, you know, this is really this technology needs a big shift.

The origination part of the idea was just how difficult it is. Triggered by the fact that in a political campaign you need volunteers, you need to source volunteers to make calls on behalf of the candidate.

Why is it so human capital intensive to carry out these simple calls?

So, how can we create these small conversations and gather answer specific questions through the phone? That's what sparked the process of creating VOIQ.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

1. How you can transform a service that’s not been changed in decades by combining ideas from different industries.
2. How can you keep increasing scale and quality by creating an automated loop of listening, learning and optimizing.
3. How to stay relevant in a world where the half-time of your product is months, not years.