Why AI Will Transform Customer Experience: Cresta CEO Ping Wu and Sequoia’s Doug Leone

**Ping Wu** (0:00)
Today, if you think about the business, they feel like multiple personality to the customer. So in the sales phase, they core you very, very aggressively. And once you sign up and become a customer, you're dealing with entirely different personality, right? And you're dealing with service departments. Feel like these are really disconnected, right? And I do feel like AI agents can make this entire experience a continuous, a long-going conversation throughout the entire customer journey. And LLM is a perfect tool to do that. And that will really bring the level of personalization, the level of customer experience that wasn't possible before.

**Sonya Huang** (0:55)
Hi, and welcome to Training Data. Today, we're joined by Cresta CEO, Ping Wu, and Sequoia's Doug Leone, who sits on the Cresta board. Today's episode dives into the gnarly world of the Contact Center, a giant legacy industry filled with slow moving incumbents that is responsible for driving the vast majority of company customer conversations. Ping understands this world deeply, having first built Google's Contact Center business before becoming product leader and then CEO of Cresta. Ping joins us to talk about the different waves of technology that have hit the Call Center, how he sees the future of customer experience evolving with LLMs towards an abundance future, and why his playbook is to meet customers where they are, blending human agent assist with autonomous digital agents. Doug Leone also shares his perspectives from several decades of investing in company building and his hot takes on whether we're in an AI bubble. He also shares where he believes the value will accrue in AI. Hint, it's in the application layer in this gnarly last mile. Enjoy the show.
Ping, welcome to the show. And thank you for bringing along our special guest, Doug Leone, as well, on your board.

**Doug Leone** (2:01)
My pleasure. Thank you.

**Sonya Huang** (2:03)
Thank you both for joining. Ping, I want to start by asking, a big part of the AI thesis is that AI is going to replace labor globally and that the TAM is in the tens of trillions of dollars. Obviously, the contact center, the call center, is a big pool of labor that, you know, is just begging to be automated. If you had to guess how much of call center labor spend will actually be automated fully by AI.

**Ping Wu** (2:25)
Yeah, so we, internally, we have spent a lot of time debating about this. The reality is, I don't think anyone knows for sure. And if you ask, it depends on really what they're selling. And you ask different people and they give you different answers. And some people will say that 100% human will be gone in contact center. And some Gartner's research actually shows that none of the Fortune 500 over the next five years will have contact center gone entirely humanless. So it's also probably falling to somewhere in the middle. And in fact, we got this, asked this question two years ago when GPT-4 first came out. And a lot of people will say that maybe in two or three years, there will no longer be humans in the contact center.
So at that time, our belief is that probably the transformation, especially for existing Fortune 500 companies, will probably take way longer, do a lot of people think.

**Sonya Huang** (3:22)
Doug, what do you think? What's your bet?

**Doug Leone** (3:24)
At the limit, it's a hundred percent. But I'm mindful that there are still IBM mainframes and Cobalt being used in America in the banking system. So to me, it's not really what percent. To me, it's the speed of which this is going to happen. Is it going to happen within 10, 20, 25 years, 30 years? Because whether the answer is 30 percent or 60 percent, if it happens in 50 years, that means one thing for companies like Cresta. If it happens in three years, it means something else. So the end number is not the relevant metric for me. To me, it's the speed of adoption.

**Sonya Huang** (4:04)
Great distinction. Ping, you've been working in the Contact Center AI space for well over a decade. Prior to becoming CEO at Cresta, you ran the equivalent function over at Google. And so maybe for those of us in the audience that don't know the Contact Center market, can you tell us a little bit about what it is, how big it is, and how technology has served it so far?

**Ping Wu** (4:27)
Yeah. When first talk about Contact Center, a lot of people will naturally think about call centers. A lot of humans sitting there listening, answering calls, right? But Contact Center really is a broader category, including the Omi channel interactions, from emails to digital chats, and on websites and in apps, and also including calls, of course. And the overall market is quite big, and there are, historically, there are around 17 to 20 million agents, human agents, actually work in the Contact Center.