The Impact of AI on Customer Communications - with Craig Walker, Founder and CEO Dialpad

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of BenchMarket, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up Podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions.
Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measures Up Podcast. Today, I am joined by Craig Walker, the founder and CEO of Dialpad.
We'll be covering three main topic areas with Craig today. The impact of artificial intelligence in customer service, the impact of artificial intelligence on sales, and the evolution of customer communications to customer intelligence. So with that, Craig, would you take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest here in the Metrics that Measure Up Podcast?

**Craig Walker** (1:10)
For sure. So first of all, thank you for having me here. Yeah. So as you mentioned, I'm the CEO of Dialpad. I used to run Google Voice back in 2007 to 2010 We left Google in 2011 to start Dialpad because what we really wanted to do was to make a modern, excellent business communication platform where we found the existing business communication platforms to be severely lacking and not delightful, not useful, difficult to use if you were away from an office.
And we really wanted to make a modern software-based, kind of effectively a Google type version of a modern communication platform. Along the way, in 2018, we acquired a real-time AI company and built that into the core of our offering. So now we have this fully unified product stack that does everything from meetings to messaging to contact center to sales teams to just your internal team collaboration, all powered with real-time AI. And then, lo and behold, last year comes around and generative AI breaks onto the scene. And all of a sudden, this capability that we had been developing for the last five years just blows your perfect marriage of comparing that or tying that to a generative AI model and then taking all the things we had done and then bringing them to life in a generative model has really been the impetus of everything we're working on these days.
And I believe that's how I ended up on your podcast.

**Ray Rike** (2:49)
It is, but let's go back to the beginning. So here it is, 2010, and you wanted to basically transform the way business communications was being conducted.
Back then, can you define what was included in business communications? Was this phone? Was this email?

**Craig Walker** (3:05)
What was your... So coming from the Google voice side, I was a voice guy. Google had acquired my prior startup called Grand Central where we gave you a phone number and it ran you on all your devices and you could control how different callers were treated and things like that.
And so I was always from the communication side or always from trying to make sense of this, this effectively voice communication world. So as I was running Google voice, working for Google, I had, I don't know, I had like a Nortel desk phone sitting on my desk that I, one, I was pissed because it took up a lot of space on my desk. Number two, it never rang, I never used it. It had something like 25 buttons on it that I didn't know what meant what.
You know, one day I came back from lunch and one of the lights was flashing. I didn't know what that meant. And you realize how many, there was something like 400 million of those types of desk phones sitting on desks around the world.
And each one was as archaic, as clunky, as expensive and as, you know, limited useful as the one I had. And that was kind of like the, you know, the light bulb moment of like, we gotta, we gotta build a better version of this. It's such a massive market. It's so behind the times. It's a generation, like literally my dad would have felt comfortable sitting at that desk with that on there. And so that was, that was really the spark to say, we gotta do something better.

**Ray Rike** (4:38)
So in since then, I believe you have over six billion minutes of communications, customer communications. Is that correct?

**Craig Walker** (4:46)
We got a lot more than that. That's all we have. So we have, geez, I can't even tell you how many we have of customer communications. We have six billion minutes that have gone through our AI engine since 2018 So that's just the AI capabilities.