The Future is Now: Exploring AI Innovations with Ryan Johnson of CallRail

Ryan Johnson, Chief Product Officer at CallRail 

Are phone calls still a thing per marketing activities? What roles do AI solutions play in conversions?Where (exactly) are we going with the rapid rise of new AI models?These are pertinent questions people ask when any issues surrounding AI and marketing are raised. That said, the same way the internet upended the post office and voice communications could also occur with relevant technologies we take for granted today. 

On the flip side, Ai could just find its place and stay there. Maybe AI technologies are just hyped up.Maybe they are a passing fad. One thing is for sure. AI tech has come to stay and our lives have been changed forever because of their emergence.

HappyFutureAI:

CallRail uses AI to improve the conversion rate for its clients. How does AI fit into the company’s products?

“AI has become a critical piece of intelligence that helps our customers market with confidence and turn more leads into better customers. Currently, our AI-powered features in our Conversation Intelligence products are focused on analyzing what happens during phone conversations. Was it a good call or bad call?

A succinct summary giving you an easy way to review calls at scale. More advanced types of intelligence including call coaching and lead optimization through automated follow up and content generation. AI will continue to be integrated throughout CallRail, but we also want to ensure it’s introduced where it provides true value to our customers. “ 

HappyFutureAI:

Are you currently working on any new AI features for CallRail? What are they?

“We’re always fostering AI innovation through a program called CallRail Labs, which is the first of its kind in the call analytics space. The program invites customers to influence the company’s use of voice AI via early access to new product capabilities and opportunities to provide direct feedback to product and engineering leaders.

The goal with CallRail Labs is to ensure we remain laser-focused both moving quickly amid the market explosion of AI-driven capabilities, but also purposefully to solve real business challenges and unlock new ways for businesses to more deeply engage their customers.”

HappyFutureAI:

How does your company’s Premium Conversation Intelligence AI service work?

“Premium Conversation Intelligence is easy to set up, starting with call recording and transcription. Once you have these turned on, everything else will start to automatically work including Call Summaries (3-5 sentence summary of the call), Sentiment Analysis, and reporting of the 2 via reports, APIs/Webhooks, and downloads. You also get access to all of the features that have been introduced through CallRail Labs including Follow Up Email, Call Coaching, and Self-Reported Attribution.”

HappyFutureAI:

How do you see the interaction between humans and AI in the near future?

“If done right, I really believe that AI will help better connect humans in the near future. For example, we’ve all had the experience of making a call, being routed to a different agent, and then having to explain your story from the first call all over again. I hate doing that. It’s magical when AI can tell that new agent you are speaking to about the previous interactions and have context of your call so you don’t have to waste time explaining things all over again!”

HappyFutureAI:

You reportedly wanted to become an orthodontist growing up. The switch to economics and management, and subsequently AI, is interesting; what exactly inspired you to pursue a career in tech?

“Yes, I wanted to become an orthodontist because mine did wonders for me in high school (I even got the best smile in the yearbook!). I figured out very quickly in my first year of college that I was not great at biology or chemistry. Since I was struggling with even the basic classes, I knew I needed to change majors to focus on something that made more sense to me, but I also wanted to enjoy it. 

I decided to transfer colleges and I majored in Economics & Management with focuses in accounting and finance. I truly enjoyed these classes more, but since I went to a liberal arts college I got exposure to other areas such as computer science. I only took one computer science class, but it was the foundation for a career in technology just a few years later. I started helping a friend with his start-up focused on digital marketing for law firms. That cascaded me into other tech-related career opportunities that eventually evolved into AI. In the product space, my journey is pretty typical as there were no such things as product management degrees, so many of us went through different journeys that got us to where we are today.”

HappyFutureAI:

You’ve been showing interest in AI before the recent explosive growth of ChatGPT. Have you always known it would be the next big thing, and how?

“I was previously working for a pre-revenue company focused on AI almost 10 years ago. We were early adopters of using AWS and GPUs which was not commonplace at that time. I knew AI would have its moment, but didn’t predict the explosion with OpenAI. I’m extremely happy this has happened because there were many people on the fence about AI. It was a great forcing function for people to be curious and test, making them feel more comfortable about AI technology.”

HappyFutureAI:

Have you used AI in any of your engagements before joining CallRail? What did you use it for?

“I was at an AI-focused company before joining CallRail. I was immersed in computer vision, NLP, and speech-to-text recognition almost 10 years ago! We were using data sources like weather, social media, and traffic cameras to detect when an event happened (i.e. fire, car accident, etc.)”

HappyFutureAI:

Most AI coverage focuses on text-generation models like ChatGPT or its video-generating counterpart, Sora. Do you think that’s likely to change anytime soon?

“I think the focus will be on LLMs for some time with amazing new strides that get unlocked like Sora. Artificial general intelligence may come into the narrative more over time, but the media’s coverage is much more focused on the next advancements to ChatGPT, Claude, and other consumer-facing generative AI applications.”

HappyFutureAI:

What’s the most underrated and underreported AI implementation or model?

“There’s none that specifically comes to mind, but there are many smaller AI companies doing big things in the market. Right now the focus is on OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft though. We partner with AssemblyAI and they have the most advanced commercially available Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model as an example.“

HappyFutureAI:

What’s your favorite implementation of AI or an AI-augmented feature outside CallRail?

“Personally, I use OpenAI for a bunch of different reasons outside of work. I love the ability to generate images from DALL-E and love trying out the GPTs that others have created. It is like a big sandbox to play in and test out different theories and ideas.”

HappyFutureAI:

Harmful bias in AI algorithms is a growing problem with the increasing popularity of generative AI models like Google’s Gemini. How do you suggest the industry can solve this problem?

“Unfortunately, I don’t think there will be a silver bullet to solve this problem. In general, the more open and transparent the industry can be regarding how models are trained (i.e. data sources) and if they uncover issues is really important.”

HappyFutureAI:

Stakeholders in the AI sphere are decrying misguided regulation of AI innovation. What do you think about AI’s regulatory landscape; do you think we need more or less regulation?

“I think we need to do our best to make sure the AI that we are using provides true value to society, while also doing no harm. It’s a tough question to answer as regulation will be important, but you don’t want to stifle innovation either.”

HappyFutureAI:

What is the single most significant problem facing artificial intelligence today in your opinion? What’s your recommendation for solving it?

“In my world, it is “product-izing” this amazing AI technology. The technology works and the hard part is making it into products that provide true value and not vanity. I think a ton of companies are trying to figure this out and we are still in the early days.”

HappyFutureAI:

Before CallRail, you worked on Banjo, another AI project. What is it exactly, and how does it work?

“Now called MiiM, Banjo was an AI-focused company developing technology to detect events across the world as they happen. We did this with a mix of computer vision, NLP, ASR, and other AI technologies feeding it data from social media, weather, traffic cameras, and more. The goal was to alert our customers to events that were important to them. For example in news media we would want to alert them to breaking news stories such as a fire, shooting, weather event, and more. We wanted them to have an advantage to breaking news quicker. Corporate security was another use case as big organizations and brands wanted to know what events could be impacting their company or employees.”

HappyFutureAI:

You also worked on Vitrue at one point in time. Is Virtue an AI augmented product too?

“Vitrue was a social media marketing platform that was created in the early days of convincing big enterprise brands that they needed to advertise on social media. We help them create, edit, publish, and track content across social media channels.”

HappyFutureAI:

Elon Musk described AI as humans’ biggest existential threat. Do you think his fears are legitimate, or he’s just exaggerating?

“Deep down I hope he is exaggerating. I don’t think any of us want to see AI as a threat to humans. However, at the same time, I think some of his points are legitimate and we need to make sure we evaluate regulation regularly.”

HappyFutureAI:

As a Chief Product Officer, do you have any specific tools you use in your day-to-day workflow? What is it and how does it work?

“I don’t have specific tools in my workflow specific to being a CPO. I will say I read a lot of publications on technology and product, while also using ChatGPT to test theories out and help with content generation at times.”

HappyFutureAI:

Do you worry that AI will eventually take most jobs from humans,

“I’m not sure it will take most jobs from humans anytime soon. I think it may change the jobs and careers humans have in a dramatic fashion. Things that we do today that are repetitive, time intensive, and maybe boring should be solved by AI. I think humans will evolve to work with AI to make the best outcomes.”

HappyFutureAI:

How long do you think before AI can reasonably replace product managers?

“I think replacing product managers with AI is going to be extremely difficult. Most product managers have domain knowledge and understand how to get work done in their specific environment. I do think AI will help augment the work that PMs do such as research, testing, and prototyping allowing them to move more efficiently.”

HappyFutureAI:

What’s your idea of peak AI? How far out are we from it or have we achieved it yet?

“I think peak AI is where the technology is really helping all of us out in our daily lives. Taking the mundane tasks out of our hands and focusing on the more exciting things in life. I think we are pretty far away at the moment from achieving this at scale, but hope to experience it in my lifetime. “