AI Agent & Copilot Podcast: Solgari's Ed Grant on Transforming Customer Engagement with AI

**John Siefert** (0:07)
Hey, everybody, welcome back to another one of the AI Agent & Copilot podcasts from Cloud Wars. Hey, in these podcasts, we always get to sit down with some really interesting people in the market, talk about three primary things. What are the opportunities that we're starting to recognize within the AI category? What is the impact that those things can have inside our organizations and what are the outcomes that we can start to expect from those as we put them to work?
Today, I'm excited because I'm sitting down with somebody I just met recently. His name is Ed Grant. Ed is the CFO of Solgari, also a co-founder that has been around since 2014, doing some really interesting things within this Dynamics environment that we all work in here from Azure to Power Platform, to the Dynamics ERP platforms, and CRM platforms, and so much more. Ed, welcome to the program.

**Ed Grant** (0:58)
Thanks a lot, John. Please be with you today.

**John Siefert** (1:01)
Yeah, it's great to see you. Gang, we're going to dive into the deep end of the pool here with Ed, because as we were talking, Ed was filling me in on some of the really interesting things that Solgari is doing within the context of the AI world as it relates to things like CRM, and Teams, and the new work IQ solutions, and that stuff coming from Microsoft. Ed, fill us in a little bit.
What are the big innovations that Solgari is leading with?

**Ed Grant** (1:31)
Yeah, John, thanks, Seb. So what we're focused on obviously, in terms of an ISV is we're focused on our customer outcomes. So our application is a customer engagement application. It sits on, it's built in Azure, extends Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365 to full-blown customer engagement across any channel and across any persona as well. So that could be customer service, it could be sales, it could be mid-office, it could be subject matter experts, it's inbound and outbound. And it also, the application then also captures all the conversations and stores them in the customer's system of record or database, which in the Microsoft ecosystem is Dataverse. Equally, it could be other CRMs. So for example, if they're using our Teams app, it might be storing the conversations into, let's say Salesforce or ServiceNow or HubSpot.
And the key things that we're seeing at the moment, John, is that customers are landing on, they're looking to land on a particular customer engagement requirement. So I'll be able to give you some examples, but they've got a particular customer engagement or citizen engagement or fan engagement requirement that they want to address. And typically, they want to address it rapidly. So they don't want a project. They want to, they've typically invested in, in our case, in the Microsoft Cloud, they've invested in applications, let's say Teams and our Dynamics. They're looking now to meet a particular requirement, extend what they've done, do it rapidly, get to market, start producing results in ROI.
And now they're also looking at how they can use the conversations captured within customer engagement to apply to their AI strategy. So we're seeing this sort of horizon build, John. Horizon one is meet a particular use case, issue, idea, expansion, sales opportunity, customer service problem, extending then into data capture, into expansion, and then moving into the AI layer. How can they start using AI tools on top of this data to produce some really pragmatic, useful outcomes and get ROI on it? So we're seeing this across the board starting to happen with our sweet spot customers.

**John Siefert** (3:54)
Well, one of the things that I was so intrigued by, and one of the reasons why I wanted to get together with Ed, everybody, is because when you think about how many conversations we're having on Teams, and those could be internal conversations, it could be customer conversations, it could be partner conversations, whatever they might be.
There is so much intelligence in those conversations that oftentimes gets lost, right? Or it's just kind of forgotten about, even if you've got your transcripts and you're this type of thing. But with that voice capture of each one of those discussions, boy, you find incredible nuggets of intelligence, right Ed, that then can be used to propel those customer objectives that you have.

**Ed Grant** (4:36)
Yeah, John, 100%. And it's not just voice.
It could be SMS. It could be other digital channels. It could be email. It could also, John, be the conversations. If you're actually moved into using, for example, AI voice agents, right, which are becoming available. It's also the conversations in there. So the conversations are not just staff-based, human-based conversations. It's also the conversations happening within AI agents as well.