My guest today is Jay Ruparel, co-founder and CEO of VOICEplug AI, a Voice-AI company empowering restaurants to leverage AI and automate food ordering using natural language voice ordering at drive-thrus, over the phone, websites, and mobile apps. VOICEplug's technology integrates with existing systems and apps, allowing customers to interact with the restaurant using natural voice commands, in multiple languages and be serviced seamlessly.
I wanted to sit down with Jay to unpack what he has learned about how conversations are structured (for computer-to-human interaction) that he brings into his CEO (human-to-human) conversations - crucial conversations, with his senior leadership team and his broader organization - does an AI-savvy conversation-aware CEO approach conversations and interactions with a different eye?
We also focused on a few questions of deep concern for our culture today: the responsible and ethical use of AI and how it might impact the future of work.
Through our conversation, it became clear that:
AI is great for:
Repetitive or highly similar and constrained tasks. Ordering fast food at a drive-in, VOICEplug’s use case, is a perfect context for AI. In these kinds of conversations, there are boundaries on the scope of the interaction and a clear set of intents and possible goals.
Jay also points out that his AI is trained on many, many different instances of people ordering food from other people. So,the voice-driven bot can get better and better at these kinds of conversations, all the time.
Humans are best for:
High-risk and high-complexity conversations with no clear comparables or no clear scope. For Jay’s conversations with key industry stakeholders, at company-all-hands, and with his leadership team, AI can give him ideas or first drafts, but ultimately, he needs to navigate nuance with his human conversational intelligence
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AI is great for:
Crunching lots of data (which is always from the past) and summarizing it.
Humans are best for:
Deciding what kind of future they want to create.
Jay points out in the opening quote that the Human mind can think, reflect, envision and CHOOSE an ideal future, creatively. AI can do a lot of that…but it can’t choose the future it wants. That is still a uniquely human strength - to dream and to choose to create that dream.
Jay dreams of a future where work is a deeper and deeper collaboration between humans and AI, where humans focus on higher-value activities while AI takes over repetitive tasks.
Jay goes on to suggest that curiosity and powerful questions are THE most critical of human skills.
When I asked Jay to share his favorite ways of designing conversations, he shared three tips:
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Take just a few minutes before a meeting to be very clear about your key one or two objectives for the conversation. In other words, start the end in mind. Another way of putting it is to take time to set an intention. You might enjoy my conversation with Leah Smart, the host of one of LinkedIn’s top podcasts, on just this idea.
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If Jay is meeting with folks he doesn’t know as well, from outside the company, like new clients or stakeholders, he’ll deliberately slow down the conversation and delay getting to the core objective. Instead, he’ll spend 20-30% of the meeting time getting to know them, talking about other things, all in service of trying to understand them as people, and their conversational style
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Jay consciously chooses some conversational areas to NOT be highly scalable or automated - he shares a story about being offered an AI tool that would send automated and personalized birthday emails to his employees. As he says “What is the point of me having to use that as the CEO (when)…that relationship, that wishing someone on their birthday as a personalized conversation means so much to me. That's the last thing I would want to ever automate.” Not all conversations, even ones that can seem small and inconsequential SHOULD be automated. It is possible that a real, human touch will be the ultimate in luxury in the future.
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Links
https://voiceplug.ai/
Jay on LinkedIn
The Conversation Factory