Thomas Ryan, CEO and founder of Bigly Sales, is a visionary leader transforming business communications through innovative AI solutions. With a background in staffing and executive experience at Workbeast LLC, Thomas identified the need for more efficient communication processes and founded Bigly Sales in 2020. Under his leadership, Bigly Sales is revolutionizing the industry by replacing traditional call centers with advanced AI technology that offers 24/7 multilingual support in English and Spanish. This approach significantly reduces operational costs by up to 90% and boosts conversion rates, all while ensuring compliance with TCPA and HIPAA standards for data protection. Thomas's dedication to efficiency and client satisfaction positions Bigly Sales as a trailblazer in the tech industry, committed to enhancing business communications through the power of artificial intelligence.
“I see AI as hyper-persuasive—far better than any sales rep. It will know everything about you, have access to all your social media, and even be aware of everything you've ever read. AI will understand you and millions of others like you, knowing exactly what your levers are—how to speak to you, what accent to use, and what persona to adopt to truly move you. I see it using all the collective information available on the internet to be more persuasive than any human salesperson.”
- Thomas Ryan
Hello and welcome everybody to this episode of The Insight Interviews. This is your host, Jason Abell, and I will tell you right now as we record this in 2024, the topic of AI, to say that it's everywhere is an understatement, and I know from different family members of mine that want me to invest in different AI ventures, to all the things that I'm seeing online, to our guest that we have today. So, today's guest has been in AI, not just now that it's a fad, but he actually founded an AI company back in 2020 when all of us were in lockdown and were trying to figure out how to navigate Zoom, this guy was creating an AI organization. So, my guest today is none other than Tom Ryan. Tom is the founder and CEO of Bigly sales, and here's what Bigly does: they help organizations replace traditional call centers with AI technology and a whole lot more with texting and emailing and all kinds of stuff around leads, and then, Tom, you and I just talked about a few new projects that you're getting into, but we'll get to all of that. Without further ado, Tom, welcome to the show.
Jason, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
Tom, pre-recording, we talked about different topics that we could cover, and we ask our very first question every single guest is the same. All the rest of the questions are going to be different, but this one question is going to be the same, which is, who or what as you and I engage one another this morning, who or what are you grateful for?
I mean, I'm grateful for so many things in life. I'm grateful for the opportunities that have been afforded to me. I'm grateful for my family. I'm grateful for my parents and how I was raised, you know? So, I think you have to look at all the positives in your life. It's not going to be sunshine and roses all the time and when there's good things happening, you know, you should be grateful for all that, not look at the negatives.
Speaking of the opportunities that you mentioned in your answer there, I'd love to, for people in our audience that might not have heard of Bigly sales, or might not have heard of you yet give us a little bit of background. How does one get to the point where in 2020 he's starting an AI organization. What is your background?
So, I actually grew up in a sales environment. I worked in the staffing industry. It was a very competitive sales environment. I worked for a company that ended up getting bought out by On Assignment, which was the second largest specialty staffing company in the United States, and you know, that was my background. I launched my own company back in 2008 and it was initially going to be an online platform, and it ended up being just a very technology heavy staffing firm where we built a lot of our tools internally. We built out our own CRM system internally, and the initial idea for Bigly, before I pivoted, was to have a CRM system that kept track of all your emails, all your phone calls, all your text messages, all in one place. So, we'd already built a platform that would, you know, see every call, see every text message, see every email being sent from the system, have them saved in one place already, had automations built out, had the ability to do drip campaigns. This was all built out and live when AI started coming on the scene, and we'd been watching people use our platform, and we saw a lot of kind of consistent struggles people had, most of which were around speed to lead, follow up, and then because a lot of folks were using overseas people to handle this sort of thing, around the quality of the English that was being put out there, that just, you would see people sending emails and text messages with broken English. Sometimes people wouldn't get back to leads for days or weeks and we got a very granular view of all of these things from the inside, and it was like, how do we improve these processes? And the initial idea was to automate, hey, we'll automate a message every month. We'll automate a message every week. We'll automate the follow up that people should be doing with their clients, that they almost never do because it's just overwhelming.
Sure.
If you have a database of 1000 people, and you need to talk to each of those 1000 people or have a touch point with them every week, you know, you're talking 52,000 touch points a year.
Sure, yep.
That's a lot of time.
Yep.
Right? So that was the initial idea, hey, we can make this more automated, where it still feels natural and human and then when the AI started coming on the scene, and we were able to get access via an API to start having really natural language for text and then for calls, you know, it was a game changer.
I think I'm a good stand in for just the casual observer on what AI is, and I want to get to exactly what Bigly does, but if we go to a 10,000 foot view, for the casual observer, who's like, okay, I understand, I've been seeing in the news all the different things that the AI can do and the benefits of it, and then the potential dangers of it and all that, and I don't know that this conversation is about any of that, but just from a 10,000 foot view, Tom, how would you describe AI to somebody like, if you were to take me by the hand as a as a fifth grader and go, hey, this is what AI is. How would you describe that?
So, computers are very good with structured data. They've always been very good with structured data, but most of your data isn't structured, right? So, if I give you the newspaper and you know, two years ago, you were tell going to tell a computer to read it, but it can do a keyword search, but it's not going to understand the content at all. And there's finally been enough computer power to be able to take these language models and have it, you know, for all intents and purposes, understand the context of what is written, and now you can do all sorts of amazing things with this that go above and beyond keyword searching. They can match by inference, they can see things, they are using these things called vector databases now, where they figure out things that are alike and can now search for topics that are alike and find topics that are alike. So, I mean, that's the big change with the AI. That’s the the major stuff. It's really all about language and patterns. And I think everything is language if you break it down, you know, mathematics is language, vibrations, you can make anything language.
Sure.
So, you know, the AI really has the ability to understand things that computers couldn't understand two years ago, is the big thing. So, yeah, now, what can you do with that in an organization? Number one, any task that's being done on a computer, the AI can either do it today or will be able to do it in the next year or so better than a human. Anything that is data that is being taken from one source and moved to another, the AI can absolutely do that better, faster and cheaper, with fewer errors than a human being right now.
Yeah.
So there's a lot of use cases that support ticket is coming in, right? Let me just run through a couple of different ones
Please, yes.
The support tickets coming in? Well, I can have a human get back to that, but I can also put my entire support database of all my internal material, and put it into, you know, I can basically take the 100,000 pages of data I have, or the million pages of data, or the 1000 pages of data, it doesn't really matter how much, and have it all be searchable by the AI, and have it be able to answer every question more accurately than one of your customer service reps is going to be able to within a minute or two.
Yeah.
So you know, that's the first thing that it can do. For any type of support, type function, I'm frankly shocked more companies aren't using it for that today. It should be able to replace level one support entirely already. Number two, if there's any sort of order flow coming in, it can go and it can take that order, understand what is being written, and move that over to another computer system. So, there was a company, a trucking company I was talking to the other day, and they have a dispatch come in, where to ship a good, right? And it would take about 15 or 20 minutes for a person to take that order and put it in. If they have a flood of orders and get a backlog, and they'd be working through this stuff all day.
Sure.
"Well, the AI would do it in in a few seconds. It would do the exact same amount of work that would take this person 15 or 20 minutes to do, except, instead of taking 15 or 20 minutes, now it takes two seconds."
Big difference.
And, yeah, it’s automated, and it's a couple of pennies, right? So now it's work that they were paying, I don't know, $10 to do, and it's costing two or three cents to do, and being done with higher accuracy in two seconds instead of 20 minutes. That's a big difference, right? So, anything that in an organization where it's a manual process, the people are reviewing documentation, the AI will be able to do it better, faster and cheaper and light years better, faster and cheaper. I mean, there's so much better, faster and cheaper that it's crazy. What are some of the other thing’s organizations are using this for? Anything graphic design, right? So, you can have the AI put together a design right now for you in again, a couple of seconds, any image you can think of. You know, there's all these great tools out there. I like Mid Journey. I like, you know, the new GPT 4.0 has a really good image generator in there. You know, there's a couple of other ones. Stable Diffusion would be another one, but these all work very well.
Yeah, and to your point, it's not this is what the future will be. This is happening literally right now, these things that you just mentioned.
Yeah, so, I'll give you an example. My daughter is in fourth grade, or she's going on fifth grade this year. Her whole class did a project where they were doing little books. They would use chat GPT to illustrate the page, and then they would write the content, right? So, her entire fourth grade class was able to use this to download images, right? So, it's not like we had one, you know, luminary genius in the class. It was every single kid in the class.
Sure.
It is not hard to do. If you can write, you can use most of these tools, because they use natural language. Natural Language is a fancy word for English, right? So you write something in English, and it spits out an image for you. I'll give you another example. We're using this for our SEO. So we'll use a tool like Ahrefs or SEM rush to gather the keywords that we want. You know, all the viable keywords. Those are two very popular SEO tools.
Sure.
SEO being search engine optimization.
Yeah.
So, your stuff can get found on Google and Bing and, you know, other places. Anyway, we'll find the keywords that we want, and we'll write an article based on common searches that we're seeing out there, of the things that we know people are searching for, write an article with those keywords in it, and you know, we've gone from in the last year, two or three page views a month organically on Google, to 3000 last month.
So, it's working. It's working well for you.
Yeah, we're up about 1,000x in the last, you know, eight months, and I think we're going to be up another, I think we'll be at 30,000 or 100,000 in the next six months again, because it's just trending in that direction. And we have all these articles right now that are on the second page of Google, that are about to move to the first page Google. So, you talk to an SEO agency, and they would tell you, hey, we can get you six to eight highly targeted articles a month, right? And we'll charge you $3,000 a month. And what we're doing is we use the AI to write it, we then have a human proofread it and edit it, but instead of doing six to eight articles a month, they can do that per day.
Yeah.
And the output is far and above what we're doing. So again, we're going to be able to use that to grow much faster for less cost than would have ever been able to in the past. So, these are, I mean, that's just something we're doing. Data scrape is another example, you know, there's all these tools, Phantom Buster stuff like that. You can scrape 10s of 1000s of rows of data from unstructured sources and again, a few minutes. I mean, there's so many things like that out there that are tools. 11 labs are my favorites for voice. We can clone any voice in a couple of seconds using 11 labs. There's a guy I know who did an ad with Joel Osteen to clone Joe's voice, and the company he did it for is like, you can't use this, right? We're gonna get sued by Joel, right? There's no way we can use it. But it sounded amazing. I mean, just absolutely amazing.
Yeah.
It sounded just like the guy.
So interesting. So okay, thank you.
I mean, I can go on, I can give you about 50 other examples.
No, my eyes are wide open because I asked you to take me like a, you know, I forget what I said, a fifth grader, and then you were like, well, actually, my fifth grader, this, this and that. And so that's very, very interesting, that it's the AI is already being used in that way to help. It's, you know, it's not a hindrance, it's a help.
Yeah, descriptions at scale, pricing at scale. I mean, you know, I was talking to a guy yesterday who said, we have 5000 things, and we want to do variable pricing based on what our competitors are doing, and we want to update them daily, you know, but it's just impossible for us to do this by hand. Just impossible. But we could give it to the AI and set some rules, and it can do this for us to update our pricing based on what our competitors are doing real time. We can change descriptions on things, you know, basically real time. We can put up 5000 different descriptions on different products in a day.
My goodness.
And I was talking to one of the other guys who's doing this, who said, Yeah, we did this for a company. We added the descriptions, right? We just improved their descriptions. A lot of these items would have no description. Their sales went up 30% overnight.
Makes sense. Makes sense that it would. So at Bigly, give us the typical scenario where an organization is doing this over here, kind of the old way, then they engage you, and now they're doing this over here, you know, the revolutionary way, like, give us a story, a use case of just white paper, just something to explain that to us. I want my audience who, you know, a lot of them are running their own organizations, a lot of them have their own call centers, their customer service, support, sales, and I just want their brain moving as you're taking us through these scenarios.
So, what we've done, and just to kind of run you through how our platform works, is we have connected our platform to all the major tools that are out there. So if you're doing ads on Google or if you're doing ads on Tiktok or on Facebook or on Instagram or on X, or really anywhere else, we can have that lead come real time, as soon as it comes in, go into the Bigly platform. We'll start by sending out a text message to that person to let them know, hey, I got your lead form in from Facebook, I'm going to be your sales rep, I'm going to give you a call here in a second, please pick up the phone, right? And we do that because you know you'll increase your answer rate, 20, 30, 40% immediately, just by telling them, hey, this isn't a random spam call that you're getting, you're getting a call from the lead that you just filled out.
Yep.
And then we'll have the AI call that person, and then we can run them through whatever process we want. We'll typically do something like, you know, hi, I'm looking for, you know, could I please speak to Jason? And I'll say something like that, and you'll say, yeah, this is Jason and we’ll say hi, Jason, I am Sandy from XYZ company, and I was wondering if you had any questions about our product, or any questions I could answer for you. And you know, if you say no, you know, great, let's go into whatever the sequence is. Or if you say yes, I was wondering about this, I was wondering about that, we have all the data plugged in. I would answer any question that you may have based on all of your company information, all of your frequently asked questions, any other documentation that, you give us, and then it'll do whatever we want. So, we can do a qualification question, right? We can, you know, for example, if it's something for home services, are you the homeowner, right? Are you the decision maker in this process? We can do any sort of intake questions. So, a lot of these companies, you know, for doing something for like healthcare, they might have 30 questions they want to get answered, right? Think about, if you're getting health insurance information, think about how long that process takes.
Sure.
Rather than have a human agent do that, if the AI can do the half hour intake process.
Yeah, all the upfront stuff that's really just data entry type of things-
The data entry stuff, that's exactly right. And then it gets passed to a licensed agent at the end of that, you know, the AI can do that lift for them and do it at 90, 95% cheaper than what they're going to be paying the reps to do, and the reps can do the high value work. Same thing with customer support. If there's a bunch of calls that come in that are kind of pretty standard support type calls that are taking their salespeople off the phone for high value type things, the AI can field all of those calls for them and allow their salespeople to do the more high value type work. And then it'll run through the process. At the end of it, we can have it send a contract, we can have it send a stripe link for payments, we can have it schedule a meeting, we can have it live transfer to the agent, right? So, we can have a solicited donation.
"Whatever they're trying to do, we can make the AI do whatever that function may be. And I think that's what really sets us apart, that multimodal between texts and calls, and then being able to actually have, you know, this modular approach, where you can have the AI really do anything for you, but have it built out of the box to work for your business."
Tom, what percent of the companies that could be doing that right now, using technology like what Bigly does, versus the ones that aren't, what's the adoption rate on or on AI organizations like yours? Is it 1% ?10%? Half the people? Like, what do you see?
It's about zero right now. This is really, this is brand new. People just started having the ability to do this. Now, the thing about it is the adoption curve, as this is outperforming human agents, so there's a lot of these right now. Here's the thing. If this is 10% worse than the humans, all the cost savings go out the window, right? So, it has to be as good as that level. So, if people try it and they have a 20% drop off in conversions, they've lost any benefit that they would get from it. As soon as they have an organization where it's outperforming people at all or at the same level as those people, the adoption just spikes up.
So, it might be flat for a while, but then when it does spike, it'll really spike, because at the point that the technology or the organization is experiencing the technology as good as a human and there's a 90% cost savings? Well, now it's silly not to do it.
Now it's a no brainer. And here's the other thing about it. If you're running a sales organization, ay you got 100 guys in your sales organization, and you want to go to 1000 people, how long is that going to take you to do?
Yeah.
I mean, its years, you know?
Sure.
And that's why a lot of people outsource this stuff, and then they have quality issues, and they're dealing with people broken English, and they have training issues, but you just can't get butts in seats fast enough. I mean, you just can't get them in the door fast enough.
So that problem goes away with what you're talking about.
You can scale up from 100 to the equivalent of 40-48 hours. I mean, maybe even faster than that, you know, if the servers, if we have enough servers, you just turn the dial. You can basically go from okay, we're going to handle 100 calls to we're going to handle a million calls in a few weeks, which, for all intents and purposes, before this technology was absolutely impossible.
In that in that time frame, yeah, for sure.
In any time frame.
That's right, that's right. So, you've taken us from, you know, how you got here at least, to starting Bigly in 2020, to where we are now. Just tease us a little bit, Tom with the future. Like, what is five years from now? 10 years from now? Which isn't that long. What does this look like?
I have no idea. I mean, I can tell you today, as soon as someone calls in, we can have identity management on there, where we'll know, from their phone number, or even from them just clicking on our website, we'll know their name, we'll know their address, we'll know their net worth, we'll know their credit score, we'll know how many kids they have, we'll know their religion, we'll know their political affiliation, we’ll know their interests and about 100 other data points there, down in the car they drive.
Right.
From them clicking on our website, we can get that. If they're actually calling in, that jumps up to 90- 95% that we're able to get with that phone number.
Yeah.
So we have all that data that we're already gathering, and the AI is already approximately as good as people. In some cases, it will outperform the call center. If it's a very complex sale with US based people that are getting paid 50, 60, 70,000, a year, it's probably slightly below it right now in most of the cases, but most of that is training, where as we iterate over three or four months, we can get above that level.
Sure.
We can scale it up above that level. It's not from day one, but generally, after three or four months of working with it, we can get it 5,10, 20% above that level for folks in these organizations, and do it 24/7, 365, Christmas, at midnight, right? It's going to be there working do it in other languages. So, in the US, Spanish is a big one, being able to handle it anything in English and in Spanish, right? Especially for dealing with consumers, or, you know that in other languages as well, for doing stuff for Europe, right? Really anything. So that's today, and I don't think it's going to take five years. I see this being hyper persuasive over the next couple of years. How fast it's moved already? You know, you take a look at this, the context window has gone up about 2500 times in the last two years that we had a about a 4000 token context window, basically 4000 words, and it's gone to a million or so, and they're already talking about releasing a 10 million token window, right? So now you can do whole coding projects in there. You know, you can build entire apps. I mean, it's really close. I was at a thing last night with Crew AI, and they're having multiple agents do different things, so they'll have groups of agents training the other agents, testing the different models, testing the different prompts, right? Coming up with hundreds of different variations, and testing it, and working on the back end of this, right? So, it's going to be agents training other agents, testing other agents, using this data to remember everything that's happened, which is kind of a big issue with the AI right now. It doesn't really remember anything. You have to store it. You can make it remember, but there's some engineering that goes into it.
Yep.
Right? So that's coming. I mean, I can't see five years out, because it's moving too fast.
Too fast.
But I see it being hyper persuasive. I see it being far better than any human sales rep that will be able to know everything about you, have read everything on your social media, have read basically anything you've ever written, and know based on you and a million other people that kind of look like you, what your levers are, how to speak to you, the accent, right? What voice to use, what persona to use, to be able to know what moves you. So, I see it being able to use the collective information that's out there on the internet to be more persuasive than any other human salesperson, which goes into the danger of this, that you won't be able to have customized messages going out. I mean, Facebook already does this, right? If you play around in Instagram and Facebook, your feed is different than everyone else's feed, and your feed is going to put you in your own little echo chamber. Well, they'll be able to start crafting messages to you in a way that makes sense for you, to be really hyper persuasive on all sorts of different things.
Yeah, very interesting. It is 100% a brave new world. And we could have a whole other discussion, Tom on the dangers and what to do about it with that. I don't know that this is that discussion today. I do want to end with this, though, with an organization like yours, you know, you've got some forethought with even four years ago, you're thinking about AI, kind of before AI was cool, so to speak. What's, uh, what's on the horizon for you? Like, what types of projects are you excited about now? Like, what's happening that you're that kind of gets you going these days?
So I can tell you one thing that we're going live with, in the next couple of days, is our landing page builder with identity management, where you can find a template for you know, we're going to have templates for basically every industry in there over the next few months, and you'll be able to find a template for your industry of a landing page that is a high converting landing page, and be able to set it up with a click, and then put in a little bit of your own data. Maybe it takes you five minutes to build the entire thing. You'll know everyone, and now you can hook it up to any ad campaigns that you're doing. Anyone who comes to that page, you're going to know who they are, you're going to have all that data I was talking about, those 100 data points, including cell phone, email address, physical address, income, credit score, etc., amount of debt. I mean, so many different attributes that you can have, and then all the information for your marketing team to be able to do better advertisements, because everything is getting pushed to the internet for ads.
Sure.
That's the short version. The cold calling kind of world is dying, and especially business to consumer type business is all going to advertising.
Yeah.
So the more effective you can target these guys, the cheaper you can get them in the door, the more successful you're going to be. So, we'll have that landing page builder. Everything will flow into Bigly. You can have the call center sitting on the back of it. You can have the drip campaigns sitting on the back of it. You'll have a trusted form certification tied to any lead that comes in, so you know you have permission to call those guys with the appropriate legal language on there. Everything is done for you. It's already optimized for SEO. So that's a fun little project that we're doing today. Something I see happening very soon, which I want to start working on, we just don't have the bandwidth yet, is to actually have this start doing product demos for tech companies. To have an AI voice do an entire demo, maybe with an avatar. The Avatar technology I don't think is quite there yet, but I think we're a year or so away, maybe less from having it be that you can't tell it's not a human, and you'll have an avatar doing a demo, doing the screen, walking you through an entire project, and at the end of that, to be able to send out a contract. Anyone who wants to buy, to be able to send out a payment link to anyone who wants to buy. Be able to actually be able to sell anything via a webinar or be it a product demo using entirely AI, including answering questions, you know, being able to go back and forth, folks. I mean, that's kind of something I want to get done.
One thing at a time, but I can tell your excitement around that, right? Your tonality and you are excited about what is to come, which is exciting to me. I mean, it is a brave new world, and it's one that I'm wide eyed and very curious about and you have given us some understanding where there might not have been some understanding before. I am just grateful for people like you that are in the space and working on it, and working in a way that is improving our lives, lowering costs, getting things done more efficiently. Those are all very, very good things. I have a feeling people are going to want to reach out to you. Tom, what's the best way to find you these days?
Go to BiglySales.com, that's probably the best way to find me. If you go to BiglySales.com, just fill out one of our forms or call the phone number there, and you will be able to get a hold of me.
Yeah, that's perfect. Well, Tom, Bigly Sales, AI, we appreciate you breaking things down for us in a way that is bite sized and understandable, and man, we wish you the best with Bigly, with AI, and thanks for doing what you're doing.
And if you want to carry out the landing page builder, go to BiglyPage.com
BiglyPage.com, perfect. Tom, thanks for your help today. Thanks for your input and thanks for being on the show.
Hey, thank you so much, Jason. I really appreciate it.
So many insights from Tom Ryan and the AI world. Just this idea of how beneficial AI can be for us in the way of what he's doing at Bigly sales, of just making a lot of things automated that are now manual, therefore saving money for organizations, for consumers, and the speed at which things are happening. I do think, overall, at least in the realm that we were talking about today, this will be an enhancement for us. And so, the insight that I'm having is really, I just want to learn more about AI now and how that will be enhancing our lives. And I get it, there may be some unintended consequences. There are some dangers of all that I'm not, I'm just, I'm not ignoring all of that, but I do want to educate myself a little bit more on the topic and what kind of benefits that it can bring for me, my loved ones, and potentially even organizationally in business. So, but as we say at the end of every episode of The Insight Interviews, it doesn't much matter what my insights are as the host, but for you listeners, what were your insights?
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