Voice AI Personalized for Each Banking Customer

Jim Marous (0:00)

A private banker for everyone. That's what Isaiah Granet, co-founder and CEO of Bland, says Voice AI can deliver. At the time of our conversation, his AI was already taking more than three million phone calls a week. At JPMorgan Chase, a great customer gets a private wealth banker. Granet pictures everyone else with a contact in their phone that can answer calls day or night by name.

Most would say Voice AI is a call center cost story.

Granet estimates call centers cost companies more than one trillion dollars a year worldwide. But he says that spending is already about as lean as it can get.

The bigger opportunity, he argues, is what a customer is worth when somebody always picks up. This is Flashback Friday on Banking Transformed, where we revisit one of our most popular conversations on Banking Transformed. Isaiah and I get into what it takes to do AI Voice in a regulated bank or credit union. He explains why Bland won't build on a big frontier AI model. He also describes the worn transfer when one AI stays with the caller while a second AI briefs the call center agent. That way, nobody has to repeat themselves. And he cautions that one bad experience may be the last time a customer works with your institution. Enjoy this look back at the future of Voice AI and Banking. So welcome to the show, Isaiah. Can you share a little bit about your background and the founding of Bland?

Isaiah Granet (1:34)

Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

A little bit on myself. I started Bland three years ago, but back then we weren't called Bland. We were actually doing health tech, so something entirely unrelated.

We ended up going through an accelerator called Y Combinator. And during that period, we decided that Voice AI was the most exciting thing to be building. So we pivoted to become a company called Bland.

A lot of people ask about the name. Maybe we'll have time to talk about that further in the podcast. But for now, I'll leave it at that.

Really over the last two years, what we've been building at Bland is for the biggest enterprises on earth, the most secure, dealing with complex, in-depth, hard to handle interactions. How do we deliver Voice AI? And this isn't a phone tree. This is actually a fully conversational AI that cannot just talk to you, but remember your first name, handle really complicated issues. And we're doing this today at scale with over 3 million phone calls a week and some names that I think everybody in America would know.

Jim Marous (2:33)

So, you know, these are high-stake conversations. You know, people still prefer calling over email or web chat. This has been found in many research studies. But no one wants to navigate the shit that stands between the question a customer wants to deal with and the answer they really want.

What makes Voice AI different?

Isaiah Granet (2:56)

Voice has basically become like the ultimate showdown between businesses and customers for the past two decades. Every business is trying to figure out, how do I make this as painful as possible for my customers to talk to my people to save their time? And every customer is figuring out, how do I get to a person to get my issue resolved? And the thing is, is businesses want to serve their customers. They just don't have the capability to scale. And so when you think about what's happening right now, businesses are going through this period of time where they're realizing that with AI., they can actually deliver really good experiences to their customers.

Not just phone trees, not just roundabouts, but really handle all their issues. And to do this, it's not easy. It requires a lot of time and investment. But this is like the first piece of daylight that we can see where customer experiences will get better and people prefer voice. Voice is trusted. Voice is powerful. It's what we've all evolved to actually communicate with. It's just that we've been trained that when you pick up the phone, it's because something's gone really wrong and you better be prepared to wait on hold and re-explain yourself 10 times.

Jim Marous (4:01)

As I mentioned in the beginning, financial institutions are using AI pretty much in back office operational improvements to get cost savings as opposed to really improving the customer experience. We're all talking about what the potential of AI can be. And we've talked about in this podcast, especially when it is regarding business banking, where a calling officer could actually dig into what's going on in the institution he's about to call on and almost know more than the business owner is going to know about their business or competition, what they can do. But what you're really talking about here is AI developing a voice that's going to be able to answer these questions. I know in my situation as a small business owner, I get frustrated that whoever I call within my bank really doesn't understand what I do, how I do it, or even what I'm doing with them. And what you're talking about, it sounds to me, is bringing these all together, where you're going to be able to do it in a humanized way, that's asking to improve my trust. Can you walk me through an example, where an AI agent delivered meaningful ROI, not just theoretical, but in a way that a CFO could consider actually defended in a board meeting?