What's New In Data

Customer Royalty, the Revolution of Unified Profiles, and AI-driven Engagement with Alex Levin

• Striim • Season 4 • Episode 1

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Get ready to revolutionize your approach to customer engagement with the insights from Alex Levin, the visionary CEO behind Regal.io. In our latest episode, we break down the transformative power of treating every customer like royalty, the secret sauce that's reshaping business strategy in a digital-first marketplace. As Alex takes us from his unexpected tech pilgrimage to the founding of Regal.io, you'll discover the game-changing potential of unified customer profiles that tailor experiences across the board—from retail therapy to the nurturing of patient relationships in healthcare.

Imagine a world where your business could predict and fulfill every customer's desire before they even click 'send' on that service inquiry. That's the crux of our discussion with Alex, where we dissect the intricacies of customer service at scale, the revolution in email marketing, and the marvels of journey builders that are setting new standards for brand engagement. 

Finally, join us as we navigate the digital marketing terrain that's swiftly moving away from costly, ephemeral channels to forging direct, lasting relationships with customers. As Alex shares his expertise, we look at the pivotal role of AI and large language models in gleaning context from data—ushering in an era of customer interaction that's both incredibly personalized and meticulously overseen by the human touch. This isn't just a conversation; it's a masterclass in staying indispensable in the SaaS consolidation wave and becoming the data steward your company needs to succeed in the ever-competitive marketplace.

What's New In Data is a data thought leadership series hosted by John Kutay who leads data and products at Striim. What's New In Data hosts industry practitioners to discuss latest trends, common patterns for real world data patterns, and analytics success stories.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for tuning in to today's episode of What's New in Data. I'm super excited about our guest today. We have Alex Levin, CEO and founder at Regal.Io. Alex, how are you doing today? Good. Thank you for having me. Alex, tell the listeners a bit about yourself. Sure. So I don't know how far back you want me to go, but I, you know, I grew up on the East coast in New York. I went to liberal arts for undergrad. So, you know, really learned a lot of practical things. And, you know, luckily I think I read, an article right as I was graduating, it's become famous now called software you know, is eating the world and understood, I think pretty quickly that, you know, there would be no business that wasn't a software business and, you know, went to work in tech and, you know, got addicted to that type of business and really have worked for startups ever since. My co founder Rebecca and I started Regal three years ago now. So this is the first time where we've really been the founders of the company. And Regal is very focused on serving organizations that are selling to consumers. So, you know, imagine in life insurance or healthcare or education, you know, you know, you may go online and look for a new program, you know, this unadmissioned person that's actually working with you to make sure that you're getting the right program. So we provide the software to those admissions teams to make sure they're able to. Get in touch with you and, you know, use the right script when they're talking with you and then, you know, give you the right information. So we focus on helping them, you know, treat billions of customers like one in a million. What inspired you to start Regal? What, what was the story behind making the company? Yeah. So for years you know, we work for consumer businesses and the last one we worked for is in the home services industry called Angie now, which owns Angie's List and Home Advisor. And we thought our job was to digitize all of the, you know, buying home services. So the idea was don't go to main street anymore and go talk to somebody, you know, go on the internet and find a fence installation or, you know, whatever it is you're looking for. Very quickly. We realized that we could attract huge numbers of people and that wasn't the problem, but our conversion flow was actually much worse than offline. So, you know, if you came to us and you came to a. Main street vendor, if you will you were more likely to buy from the main street vendor and we thought we were fancy technology people, you know, like, and, you know, it was embarrassing that, you know, despite many, many efforts to like improve the digital conversion funnels, we couldn't get it as good as offline. And eventually we realized that, you know, when we happen to have a conversation with the customer, for some reason, through customer support, the conversion rates went right back up. So we started building out teams that intentionally would talk to people. So, you know, never cold calling, like these are people coming in saying, I need a home remodel. And we go, Hey, you have a house you need to remodel. Like, tell us more, you know, to build trust, you know, and allow them to ask questions, you know, allow them to understand what they were going to buy. And so. We ended up building a teams of thousands of people that would do that. The challenge was that none of the technology was built for that, right? Most contact center technology is built for the opposite. We've all experienced this. It's built for deflect customer inbound. Never talk, you know, don't touch your customer with a 10 foot pole, but they don't want to talk to you online. And, you know, in customer service, maybe there's a place for that. But in these businesses that are selling, I'd say more considered products, or, you know, think of, you know, opening a bank account, think of like, you know, the, the medicine you need to get think of, you know I don't know what car you're going to buy. Like in that, in those industries it actually is helpful to talk to somebody. And so it's a very different playbook than the old school retail companies that are trying to deflect your inbound. And we ended up starting Regal on the premise that, you know, people should treat customers like royalty. People should you know, have the technology and the tools to find the right customer and reach them with the right message and the right channel. You know, and so take SoFi as an example as a customer who does student loan refinance and things like that, where you may go online on your cell phone and go to SoFi. com and try to do it, but it's kind of hard on a little screen to do it now. So, you know, instead, you know, if you're abandoning, you'll get a call. We can do cool things like on your cell phone, we can have a show up as SoFi instead of a random number. We can also text you from the same number. You can choose which channel you want to engage in. We can make sure we know everything about what you're trying to do and say, you know, Hi, John, I see you're stuck in this specific thing. Let me help you. And make sure that that's a good experience for the customer. That's excellent. And, you know, I think especially with all these digital touch points, having a closer relationship with the customer, you can just talk to them and have a 360 view of them is more important than ever. And I love the, the, the SoFi story that you mentioned specifically, because ultimately you have to tie this back into the customer experience. Speaking of customer experience, tell us about a bit about the unified customer profile and why that's important for businesses to build. Yeah. So, you know, take that like kind of big step back and say like broadly organizations understand the data is important. Like that like message they've gotten. Most organizations are focused on using data for analytics, for reporting, for things like that. But as, you know, as organizations. Particularly on the consumer side of more and more data about their customers, a first party data about their customers, not when we're about not third party data, but you know, I'm SoFi, I know more and more about, you have a bank account with us, you own a home, you have a personal loan, and now we're dealing with your student loans. So they have all this information, the opportunities to start using that information to enhance the experience for the customer. So sometimes the, the place I started to say, imagine a. You know, two by two framework on one side is like, how big is your business? And on the other side is how, how like personalized are you being so, you know, a very small successful mom and pop shop in a little town, you know, what are they doing? Well, they know everything about you. They know your pets, your kids, your hat, like, you know, and you walk in and they say, Oh, Hey John, I, you know, I saw your kids the other day and your dog was eating my bushes and you know, so on and so forth. And here's exactly the life insurance product you need. And so they're able to make it feel like it's highly personalized at that smaller scale. The problem is that as people get to that bigger scale, even though they in theory have all this data about you, probably somewhere, they don't use it for one reason or another. And so they, they are handling many more customers, but they're treating them like they're all the same instead of treating them like one in a million. And so the importance to your question of having that unified customer profiles to be able to actually take. Everything you know about the customer, put it somewhere that can be used operationally to drive customization, drive personalization across the channels you're using to engage the customer. So just to use like a specific example, a very simple one, you know, if you're going to have to go call the thousand people that came in and spoke with you, which one do you call first? Right. You know, is it, is it, you know, is it something where you just dial every number in the order they came in? Well, that's probably what a lot of companies do today, but that's, there's no way that's the right answer. Maybe one person has an urgent problem. Maybe somebody else works during the day and can't answer a call during the day. You know, maybe somebody else you know, actually like. You know, there's the husband and the wife are both customers and you should know they're related and know that, you know, you should always call one of them about certain issues. So those are things that you need to start knowing. And when it was something at a, you know, very small scale business, people were able to do that and these big companies aren't able to do it yet. So that's really the, the Holy grail is how do you start treating those customers? As if you knew everything about them. And how are you solving that problem with a Regal.io? Sure. So start with the customer profile. So in email marketing was where we first started seeing the idea of a unified customer profile. So particularly in retail and a little bit in media. Right. You put in your email address and they'd start knowing which websites you visited, what behaviors you took, you know, what you did on the app. And they started personalizing emails to you. And we saw very quickly increased open rates in email, you know, higher engagement rate from customers by using that personalization. Okay. Everyone who shops online now wants to do the rest of their life online. And, you know, things like healthcare, a bit more complicated than like buying a pair of jeans from the internet. So, you know, there's slightly different information that's involved. So our unified customer profiles are a bit more sophisticated than those that existed in retail. And they allow us to know not just what websites you visited, but what happened in the conversations you have with the brand what happened in your health interactions, right? So that we can go back and make sure we're making the right engagement. As a common example in healthcare, when there's a negative diagnosis of some kind only half the time does the patient actually go and take the next action, which is terrible for everybody. It's bad for the patient because you're going to like, you know, let's say they found a fracture. You're going to still have that fracture. It's bad for the doctor because they're not making money from it. It's bad for the health system because they'd much rather you take care of it now in a preventative way than that you get infected. And now there's a bigger thing that the health system has to pay for. So if we know everything you know, in one place and can make sure we're engaging you in the right way. To get you to come back in and get that fracture fixed. The result that the actual health outcome is much better for the patient. So, you know, what do we, what do we do with the data? We actually give people a journey builder that will allow them to do cross channel orchestration, you know, texts, calls, emails actually use web hooks to engage other channels like direct mail. And then we've actually built contact center software that allows, you know, that company's nurses or agents actually sit in regal and have those conversations. So ballpark typical answer rates on a phone call in the United States are 10 percent on Regal on average across our whole platform or over 30 percent answer it. So. Much, much higher engagement rate. And we also have SMS, we also have email. And, you know, we do that with a lot of sort of new capabilities that didn't exist, you know, five years ago. And what do you attribute the increase in answer rates to specifically with your, with your product? Yeah, three things primarily. So one is, you know, we use consistency and branding across all these channels. So everything comes from the same phone number. We can, like I said, have a deal with the carriers to make sure it's showing up as the You know, the name of your health provider so that you know who it is. And you're not forgetting that that random number that called you is actually something important. So two is, you know, we can make sure that we have the aggregated unified customer profile so that you can do this personalization. And then for sure, the third piece is the orchestration. You can do a lot. You can now test and iterate and try figuring out what is the right set of right sequence of outreach. Depending on the situation to drive the best outcome, and it can be very different, you know, by industry by, by sort of use case, you know, is this an acquisition use case or retention use case, cross sell, there may be different ways that you need to engage people, but, you know, net, net, you know, we're trying to create a situation where you know, both parties, the customer and the business have a better outcome. So we, you know, if you remember, you sometimes put your phone number in a site and they call you 18 times. That's terrible for everybody. It's a waste of time for the business. And you have a shitty experience with that business. So AAA is a customer of ours. You know, they have a roadside assistance team. Like you've told them something is wrong and they're trying to engage with you. They don't want to call you 18 times. They want to find the right way to engage you so that in that moment. They can help you with a problem you're having yeah. And like I said earlier, there's so many digital touch points with customers and so many digital distractions for them. So, you know, the fact that Regal.Io has, you know, better answer rates. Is so critical because having the ear or the attention of a consumer is like gold right now There's just so much so many forces competing to grab their grab their attention And like you said one of the key things is you know that unified customer profile which allows you to personalize but then the other one you mentioned is the the, the fact that the brand appears in the outreach, right? So it's not some unknown number, some random area code calling you. But you know, yeah, it's your, you know, it's your insurance company. It's your, it's your healthcare provider. It's your bank, right? Like that kind of stuff. Like if I looked at my phone and saw someone was calling me, I get so many, everyone gets so many spam calls. But if I, someone that I already know that I work with and someone that I'm already a customer for. You know, I'm much more likely to, to answer the phone. And it sounds like, you know, the, the, these outreaches that your, your users are doing are, are also in the critical line of business. Yeah, look, once upon a time, everybody went and visited a school in person. Now a lot of schools are digital or you can't go visit in person for one reason or another. So when you want to learn about it, like, you know, what are you going to do? Are you just going to go to the website and look at pictures? Well, sure, that's a start. But like, if it's really going to be a decision that you make at some point, you're going to want to engage in real conversation. So I think people's first inclination is to say, Oh, no, I don't want a conversation. But the second is something important, whether it's banking or health or education. People immediately actually want to engage with that brand and want to make sure that they're, asking the questions that they have and, you know figuring out, is this the right solution for them? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, like we touched on a bit, you know, there's there's quite a bit of ways you can reach the consumer now whether it's through social media. Through, you know, direct phone calls, you know, we're used to this remote first landscape, you know, there's, there's telehealth, even to, to talk meet with your health care providers. So, you know, what would you say, what's your advice to, you know digital marketers or, or, or go to market folks on the best ways to reach customers without interrupting them? Yeah. You know, I was a marketer for many years. So, you know, a couple thoughts come to mind. So first is, you know, if you only try to reach somebody once and you and when they don't sort of engage with you, you give up with that, you're not going to be a very good marketer, you know, when it's top of the funnel, you know, a lot of studies have shown you need to reach somebody six, seven, eight times across different channels before they go, Oh, you know, I really do want a Tesla. Like, you know, It's not like the first time you hear about it, you're going to do it. You know, but if your friend tells you about it, you see an ad and you see it in the store and you see it on, you know, now all of a sudden you are going to go and do so, so that's one two is I think for a long time it's been so easy to put dollars into digital channels and just click spend that that has become the default for most marketers is, Oh yeah. I'm just going to put a hundred grand in Google and put 200 grand in Facebook. I'm going to click and send an email. But just because it's easy, doesn't mean it's the only way to engage a customer. I think a lot of marketers have forgotten about channels that are perhaps harder to execute, but really important to moving somebody through the funnel. So obviously we've worked with a lot of teams that use a conversation to move somebody through the funnel. So that's an important one, but it could be direct mail. It could be local meetings. It could be door to door. I think as a marketer, don't overlook a channel just because it's operationally complex, perhaps because it's operation complex, fewer people are doing it and it's actually a better channel. And don't believe that because it's operationally complex, it's going to be a higher cost channel. So, you know, a lot of people forget that, you know, Google is getting very expensive and in the marginal costs of acquiring more customers on a channel like Google is really quite high. So compared to, you know, starting a new channel, like going door to door. Google actually is often more expensive than human interaction, not less expensive. So I think when people sort of approach these, they seem to take a first principles approach and make sure they're looking at it from fresh eyes and not assuming that digital channels are the only way to go. The last one I'd say is, you know, every channel has gone through this transition from. batch and send, meaning treating everybody the same to more personalization, you know, emails made that transition direct mail out of home is even going through this and like figuring out how to personalize messages for each user, you know, and same thing is now coming into, you know, this sort of phone channel. And of course, that's going to lead to better outcomes. So. You know, when we talk with organizations that think they're very sophisticated, but are still treating everybody the same, they're very, you may, they may be sophisticated from an efficiency standpoint, but that's not the way they make the most from that customer base. It's not the way to get the customer, you know, what they need. I think, you know, you really have to rethink your data strategy, rethink your technology strategy to empower you as a business, to customize across every channel, what you're doing. And without that, you're going to get left behind because ultimately it's an arms race, right? You know, if you're in the, you know what are we going to say? The hair care industry and your competitor starts doing something better than you do. If you don't catch up, you're going to be out of business very soon because your competitor is going to win the majority of customers. I love that one point that you brought up, which is, you know, cost per click is becoming more expensive than ever on these digital channels. And it's in a lot of digital marketing teams are assuming that, you know, you just go to Google, you go to Facebook, you go to Instagram, you go to Twitter ads, Snapchat ads, whatever. And you know, that's your marketing strategy. You just pay someone for access to their audience. And, you know, maybe that's just a a side effect after the, you know, the COVID era where everything was just digital outreach, but you mentioned door to door as a tactic that, you know, people are probably overlooking right now and sort of boots on the ground marketing, are you saying that more marketing teams should consider? You know, just having, you know, going in person and trying to reach the consumer, you know in more of a in person fashion. Yeah, broadly, the distinction I would make at the highest level is between rented channels and owned channels. When you go on Twitter or LinkedIn or something else and you get a follower, you don't own that relationship. You know, LinkedIn does. LinkedIn decides whether or not they're going to show your post to that person. LinkedIn decides how many people to show it to. LinkedIn decides that they're going to kick you off the platform or kick your customer off the platform. You know, they may raise the price for the thing that you're doing. You really have very little control. And so. A lot of the best businesses have learned this and have moved to models where it's own channels, whether it's an SMS relationship with a customer or a phone relationship or door to door, you know, take back control over what you're doing. And so, yes, I think one way of looking at it is directly what is the like cac of each of these channels. And it is true that actually a lot of these operational channels are cheaper. On a CAC basis that people believe. But I think another one is take back control over your destiny. You know, Google SCM is not getting better year over year, like it's getting worse. Meaning the prices are going up, competition is going up, you know, you are not in control. So as an example, in the home services industry, Google all of a sudden realized that flights was a very good business. Guess what they did. They make Google flights. So now if you're Travelocity, not only are you paying Google for ads, you're competing with Google, you know, for that same customer, and they've done the same thing in home services. They've done the same thing in other industries as well. So you are not in control of your own destiny. If all you're relying on are channels that you're renting, at some point you need to take ownership over that customer relationship. Absolutely. And yeah, you see that in so many industries where. You know and this is very common in the data industry to, you know, Snowflake is AWS's number one customer. At the same time, they compete with one of their large product portfolios, which is, you know, redshift and their data lake offerings. And, you know, I'm very used to seeing this in the data industry. And, you know, just the, the, the What's New in Data episode that came out just recently was you know Microsoft Fabric versus Databricks where, you know, Microsoft has been selling Databricks for years. And now they suddenly came up with a product that has quite a, they, they don't call it a competitor, but quite a bit of overlap. So, and whether you're you know, a cloud platform or, you know, a marketer at a B2C company, you really have to think outside the box and see how do I, you know, own my relationships. And I have given myself more leverage in these, in these scenarios. Yeah. The other thing that's happening, a lot of organizations now is they're thinking through, you know, what to do about the explosion of SaaS and tied of their organization. So like for five years, 10 years, kind of, you let employees get every vertical SaaS software that existed, even if it overlapped with three other products internally. And now CIOs or procurement departments are saying, well, no, even if it's not perfect for every. Solution. We want one provider for these things. And so I think, you know, as a B2B provider, we think about how to make sure that we survive in that role. And, you know as when we talk with our customers, we try to show them like where there's opportunities to consolidate software using us, so they don't need four different products. They can use just us and where, you know they should use us instead of other softwares that exist. Absolutely. And Regal.io itself. There's a data abstraction to it as well. There's concept of, you know, data going in, data going out. You have integrations with, you know, SAS products like HubSpot and Salesforce and even ones like segments, which will bring data from multiple types of. Endpoints into Regal. How, what is your strategy around enabling your users with data? Yeah, we are, we try to just be a very good data steward at this point. So we make it easy for people to send data from whatever source. We have people sending us UPS delivery data, so they can call when a box arrives and do like an opening call together. You know, we have people sending us, you know, like you say, data from the native integrations. And we have people who send us data for API because they want to. You know, use that as a way of prioritizing, you know, who they're engaging with and how. The other thing we do quite well today is beyond having our own reporting. We allow any data that we are creating to be pumped back out into their own, you know, our customers data infrastructure. So it could be a snowflake data share. It could be the data going back into an S3 bucket for them to use. But, you know, we don't lock them into using our reporting. And we don't lock the thing, the data that we create inside of Regal. So as an example, whenever there are conversations, we extract a lot of information about what was said, how high intent it was, what the sentiment was, what next best actions should be. So we don't lock that in, right? We allow people to take that out. And I think it's one of the more fascinating pieces of data that people are not using today. Is like that rich conversational data. Historically, what happened is like a salesperson would take like one or two sentence notes to remind themselves, like this person loves cats and they want to talk next week. That was quasi useless, even to the salesperson, definitely useless to another salesperson. Cause it didn't say anything. Interesting and marketing or other data teams couldn't go and use that to personalize other channels because it wasn't structured in a valuable way. So one of the more interesting things we do is to structure what happens in the conversations into data such that it can be reused downstream. You know, somebody's telling you they want an SUV. You know, not a truck when they go back on the website, you should be showing them an SUV, not a truck, right? When you send the next email, you should be showing the right thing. So make sure what's happening in the conversation is actually driving the right next action. Customers expect that when they talk with your brand or interact with your brand in any way. That you should know that. And they're disappointed when they find out that they told your, you know, agent something, and actually you have no idea that they did it. So as customer expectations go up for what brands should be able to do, brands have to have the technology to keep up with it. Absolutely. And I see with Regal.Io, you do a great job piping data out into those, you know, operational systems of engagement, those operational sales. And marketing engines like Salesforce and HubSpot, but you also, like you mentioned, you support Snowflake, DataShare, you support Amazon S3, things are just more like infrastructure in terms of storing the data long term, what would you say has had the most traction and value from a data perspective? Yeah. Today, I'd say the majority of companies think more about how to get data into Regal and like they are starting to use the data that we create. I'd say it's only the more sophisticated organization, the organizations that have invested more in their own reporting infrastructure that want to make sure our data goes into their infrastructure. So I'd say that's, it depends on the sophistication of the customer does six, one half dozen of the other, which will, you know, we're happy either way, whether they use our reporting or their own. I do think over time though, like I said, the, the rich conversational information is what will be so valuable, you know, today, if you went to brand X, that doesn't work with us. They might know what sites you visit, what pages within their site you visited, but if you went and talked to their customer support team or sales team, that would be lost for all intents and purposes. And that's a waste. You know, people talk faster than they write. People are more open when they're talking. So. There's so much rich information about the customer that you're missing by not capturing that information, not for nefarious purposes for the opposite, you know, imagine a hundred years ago, you'd walk into a club and they might say, Oh, John, it's wonderful to see you. Here's your favorite table. And I, you know, we'll put on your favorite music and here's the drink you like, you know, a private club, not like a nightclub, let's say, you know, they did that because they paid attention to you. They watched you not in a way that was bad in a way that made your life easier. So, you know, we, we should expect the same from brands that we work with. The way I sometimes frame this is to say a lot of brands came online believing that their technology would differentiate it, but take a financial services, it turns out most of these big. You know, financial services companies online use the same backend literally the exact same backend so they go. Okay. It's not technology It's brand, you know, we're Vera like we're our brand is different. Let me tell you what like that is not enough of a differentiator in banking You know what? The differentiator is ultimately and has always been surface So at some point if you're vera if you're chime, you need to invest in service as a way of differentiating between you and another company Because if the customer feels a connection to somebody at your company even if you make a mistake, they'll stay. But if not, if it's just a digital product, they're going to move their money to the next online bank, the second that they feel like it. Absolutely. And that's why, I mean, I'm going to, I'm. I'm one of those, maybe you can call it an outlier, but I like personalization. I and my wife is the same, you know, she'll, she'll often buy products from ads that are, you know, very hyper personalized because it makes your life easier. It's just, it knows your tendencies, your, your, your, your affinities, your interests. And, you know, you're essentially fed stuff that's relevant to you, right? And like you said it, it, you can use data to enrich the lives of, of your customers for sure. And, you know, we're seeing this across the board where, you know, whether it's you know, storing your data in Snowflake or BigQuery, some sort of warehouse, ultimately the goal with that data is, you know, not just to store it, but to Operationalize it and productize it for, for your own customers. So what you're describing very much fits what many companies are, are, are trying to accomplish internally. And certainly sounds like an accelerator to value with the consumers. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, there's so much exciting stuff going on in the, in the, in the market and, you know, technology, innovation, marketing, growth. What are some of the things that you're most excited about coming up? So my co friend, I do invest in, in startups and you know, I think obviously the obvious thing to say is there's a lot of exciting advancements within AI to be able to. You know, AI assistants and AI recommendations. And even perhaps AI that either replaces some of the jobs that, you know, people used to do and don't need to do anymore. So certainly we watch that very closely. From a customer engagement side, obviously, like, I believe that You know, these sort of conversations are very important future channel in certain industries. It's status quo. So like an insurance, every company has a sales team in other industries. It doesn't exist today. So a lot of retail brands believe customer service is a call center. And having to invest in it. Well, let me tell you what it is not a cost center. Like it is very important revenue driver. And so you can't cut your costs to success. At some point, these brands are going to have to invest in differentiated service. And so I do think like even in retail online, you'll see higher levels of service at some point as everything else becomes more commoditized. Trying to think what else I would say is happening in sort of this world, definitely like one of the more frustrating parts of this, I would say, is despite the promises of data, like CDPs to sort of have the models of data and like understand all your data and. You don't know what to do with it. The reality, you know, every company I've ever worked at and certainly a lot of companies I've seen is that data is labeled very badly. Every customer labels data differently. It's very hard to then do analysis. Even when you go work with the data team, there's eight different fields labeled conversion event. Well, which conversion event is it that we need to use? And then it becomes very difficult to extract learnings from it, certainly within your own company or across companies to, you know, sort of use machine learning to make higher order decisions based off of it because data labeling is so bad. So I am optimistic that over time there will be different types of solutions to that. But today it's a huge problem. And so like, I, I really, if there are people out there looking for a business to go into, like, Data labeling within these sort of infrastructures and like how you create, you know, sort of uniformity across types of, across companies within the same industry so that you can start doing benchmarking and comparison and machine learning will be very valuable. Yeah. And, you know, that's one of the amazing magical powers of, you know, LLMs is being able to contextualize a lot of that unstructured information and, you know, we're just starting to scrape the surface. We're going to see some great applications of that and, you know, like you mentioned you know, it's a, it's a, it's a big growth area and we'll see some major productivity gains and some, you know, product ties, consumer facing enhancements to customer experiences. So. It's, it's certainly an exciting time and, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll definitely see how, how it all evolves and we keep close track of it here on What's New in Data as well. You know, I, we've been having so many discussions on, on AI here. It's, it's coming up all the time, not just because, you know, we just want to talk about AI, but that's such a compelling area. And you know, I even had a LinkedIn post where it's like, I'm going to challenge myself to not talk about AI on the next podcast. And it's impossible because that's, it's, everyone's thinking about it and not, you know, and you've seen other industries where people, there was a lot of hype and a lot of talk, but not much happened. But I think AI is just already completely blown the lid off of, you know, amazing consumer experiences and value for, for, for customers. So, you know, it's just a matter of transition in the same way. The internet was a major transition. Computing was. You know smartphone, like for sure, it's a major transition that said, like, if you look back at each of those transitions, a large majority of those businesses that were built on them fail huge percentage fail. And the same thing will happen in AI, a huge percentage of the business will fail, and there will be fraud in the same way, you know, when all of a sudden, you know, Bitcoin became big, like there was massive fraud. It will happen again. People will lose a lot of money in AI, but yeah, net net long term. I agree with you. Like there is the kernel of a critical piece of infrastructure. And I'd say the other like piece that I'm optimistic about more than other people's, I think there've been all these stories about AI taking people's job. Never in any of these transitions. Has the new technology resulted in lower numbers of jobs, jobs change for sure, but net net, the efficiency that it's brought has actually created new opportunities, not taking away opportunities. So I'm very optimistic about AI as a deflationary force, which could be good for the world because it allows. us to lower costs on products, but net net, I still believe it'll create a lot of jobs. 100 percent in agreement. It's really about empowering the, the, the person and making them more productive. And I recently had a Patrick Miller who led enterprise AI at Google before. Now he leads a. Data and AI at new front and even at Google, I mean, it was all about having a human in the loop and empowering the human. And now that he's rolling out AI principles is more generic practice. Yeah. Having, it's really about making people more active. And also at the same time, there's a ton of risk with just letting AI do its thing and without any oversight. So I think there, I think we're. I, I really related to, you know, having a, a pilot in the cockpit, even if your aircraft's running on autopilot. Right. So, you know, so we'll, we'll definitely see that for, for, for, for a long time. Alex Levin, CEO and founder of Regal.Io. So great having you on What's New in Data. Where can people follow along with your work? Sure. So please go to regal. io or you can always email us at hello@regal.Io. You know, basically, you know, if calling customers or having conversations with their customers is critical to your business, you know, critical to your consumer business, please reach out, you know, we're fascinated by the topic and, you know, maybe we may even be able to help. Excellent. And those links will be down in the show notes for those who are of interest. Alex, thanks so much for joining and to everyone for tuning into today's episode. Thank you.