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How AI Phone Answering Saves Clinics Time, Money, And Patients · No Appointment Necessary

• 0:00
  Michael: Welcome to the latest episode of No Appointment Necessary.
• 0:02
  Michael: It's 8 a.m.
• 0:03
  Michael: because we have a bloody Australian on the show today who's who's made me get up early and I'm shattered.
• 0:08
  Michael: Welcome to Tamey from Lingo, um, who've got on today to talk all things AI phone answering, AI in general, and and and hopefully cover some of the topics that a lot of people are concerned about or curious about when it comes to AI phone answering.
• 0:23
  Michael: So welcome, Tamme.
• 0:24
  Michael: Do you want to give yourself a little give us a little introduction on yourself and also on Lingo and what you do?
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sure.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me, Marco, and thanks for waking up early.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm Tanme, one of the co-founders at Lingo 2023.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: We built the world's first AI phone answering system for healthcare clinics.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: We work very similar to a virtual assistant or a call center.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: We pick up the phone for clinics, we manage their bookings, we manage patient queries, and we also escalate any messages that are required so clinics can focus on what matters most instead of chasing phone calls.
• 0:57
  Michael: Okay, brilliant.
• 0:58
  Michael: I didn't realize you were the first people into healthcare for with AI answering, phone answering.
• 1:04
  Michael: What made you get into the space in the first place?
• 1:06
  Michael: What made you think this is an opportunity?
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: So we actually, it was interesting.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: We kind of stumbled into it.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: When we started, it was in the 2022, beginning of 23 in Jan.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: We had been trying to solve a challenge that New South Wales Health here in Australia had put out.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it was they had spent over$16 million in interpretation services in this small southwestern Sydney suburb alone.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so they go, holy shit, you know, we need technology that can assist with this because they used to have sort of patients coming in with dialects they couldn't even service.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: And they're like, what's the closest dialect we can get?
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, you know, not super compliant, but like that there was no workaround for very hard-to-get Vietnamese dialects, for example.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: So when we started, it was like, cool, this has been two months after ChatGPT had been launched in November 2022.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: And we go, cool, like, you know, these transformer models are coming out.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: We had worked in um sort of voice and translation space in the past.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: And we go, cool, here is how we can actually make this work.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: Brought together like some of our colleagues from older companies to like help us architect how sort of voice interaction should work in clinical settings.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: So, how can it be clinically accurate and not hallucinate like normal like Google Translate might do?
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: You may have seen those funny videos of people using Google Translates when they're traveling and people end up laughing at them because it translates into something rubbish.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like, so we we actually started there.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: But what happened is Australia had a government change and they pulled away the funding that was required to actually bring that to market.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: But even when we started building it, like most business owners, you can't rely on government funding to actually make your business operational.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: So Cam, my co-founder and I were actually sitting through clinics.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: We're figuring out like how do we sell this to private practices?
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: They weren't as incentivized to implement something like this because they're like, wait, this isn't a sort of like cost added to my service.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: The government covers it.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just gonna let them do it, even if it's not a great service at the moment.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: So when we were like sitting around, we've spent all day sort of chipping away at our laptops, working from these GP clinics and stuff.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: And one thing we noticed is I still have a memory of my GP back in New Zealand.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: So this is before I'd moved to Australia.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: She, their reception staff managed two phones at once.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: And during peak periods, they would still get 20 to 30 voicemails.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: And we were just like, that's shocking.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how can how can they keep up?
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so they were running around trying to check people in, trying to greet people out and all sorts of stuff, and they just could not get over the voicemails.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: And at the end of the day, I think I calculated even after all the callbacks she had done, there were still like 45 that she hadn't got around to.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this this may be a specifically busy GP clinic.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: So we're like, cool, actually, who knows about the space?
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: And we ended up validating this across, I don't know, maybe about a hundred different businesses.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: So we actually talked to like golf courses, hotels, hospos, like everyone.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like no one could just manage their phone calls.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when we went, cool, like this voice interaction engine that we're building and we've architected, we can actually implement this to handle phone calls.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: We don't need to go down the route that we were going with the government.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: We can do this much more real-world scenario that can help everyone from private clinics.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: And now that we're working with hospitals, you know, even public sort of organizations in healthcare.
• 4:42
  Michael: Okay, amazing.
• 4:44
  Michael: Let's get into some general AI stuff because I think everyone's interested in AI as a as a as a general topic, and we'll go through a few questions.
• 4:52
  Michael: But just uh before we started, we actually I mentioned that I did a chat GPT rapt and a bit like a Spotify rapt, and I posted it on LinkedIn.
• 5:00
  Michael: It was quite interesting.
• 5:00
  Michael: I I was really worried about what it was gonna tell everyone about it.
• 5:05
  Michael: So it was all right, it wasn't as bad as I thought.
• 5:09
  Michael: Yeah, it's really interesting what you can do now.
• 5:10
  Michael: And you'd mentioned something about a psychoanalysis version of that.
• 5:14
  Michael: Yeah.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'll shoot you the sort of prompt that I found that someone else had actually posted on LinkedIn as well.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I found it really interesting because I ran it through and it took me through, you know, we use Chat GPC every single day.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: We ask it questions, we ask it to help us with things.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: And you can basically get it to like psychoanalyze you and wrap that to see how your leadership qualities have changed across the year.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: What sort of questions did you start with at the beginning of the year is what was top of mind, what was the concerning parts and closing off the year, like where you've ended up and where that development's actually been.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then the interesting parts are um you can also see if it can help you flag any unconscious biases that you might have or any red flags around the way you make decisions, the way you approach certain problems.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, pulls through a lot of data again, depending on how you use it.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a daily ChatGPT user versus a weekly or a monthly, the data is going to be different.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, I found it super interesting because it it you probably subconsciously know it, but it it really just, you know, it doesn't hold back.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: You can tell it to go like, hey, no bullshit, give me the straightforward answer, I can handle it, and it won't hold back and it will just spit out things that may be a bit painful and may hurt the ego, but it it's super interesting.
• 6:29
  Michael: Yeah, I on my racks, I think it said most uh most used phrases, and one of them was zero bullshit please.
• 6:35
  Michael: I still could I still could say please to chat GPT.
• 6:38
  Michael: I don't know why.
• 6:40
  Michael: It's to be safe.
• 6:42
  Michael: Just stay safe just in case.
• 6:43
  Michael: It's absolutely just in case.
• 6:45
  Michael: It's it's an interesting uh topic though, because I think for for me, I don't use it for psychoanalysis, but I do use it for throwing in tons of data.
• 6:55
  Michael: And you know, it could be anything, anything in my life, uh, whether that's financial stuff or whether that's it really doesn't matter.
• 7:02
  Michael: It all goes into projects.
• 7:03
  Michael: I throw every file I've got at it, every um, yeah, on the financial side, every investment, everything about the market, and so on and so forth.
• 7:10
  Michael: I really go into the the kind of um the the the quality of the answers are just insane.
• 7:17
  Michael: Particularly, as you say, what you don't know, you don't know.
• 7:20
  Michael: Sometimes uh a real human being wouldn't actually um talk to you in that way.
• 7:27
  Michael: Um they'd be too embarrassed.
• 7:29
  Michael: But having AI in that sense uh just helps me tremendously.
• 7:32
  Michael: Same with the business, you put everything in and you ask it to find weak points.
• 7:36
  Michael: Where am I failing?
• 7:37
  Michael: What am I doing wrong?
• 7:38
  Michael: And and I found that to be use of AI.
• 7:41
  Michael: What I will say, I don't know if you've tried it yet, but Gemini 3 blows GPT out of the water in so many ways.
• 7:47
  Michael: And now the the way that you you can use Gemini 3 in the same way, because it doesn't have the same memory as GPT, which is why I really like GPT.
• 7:54
  Michael: You can put all your files into a Google Drive and get it to query that Google Drive.
• 7:59
  Michael: Um, you can do that, but GPT, I still I'm I I guess you grow up with an interface and you like that interface, and you know, you continue using it.
• 8:05
  Michael: But Gemini 3 for anyone using Gemini 3, it's insane.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, I have funny you mentioned uploading everything into your ChatGPT.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: Like, well, I have and I've done that, and that's that's why I love it, right?
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like it understands me better than any management consultant would.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, as it's great at is reading and recognizing patterns.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: So when I need harsh, brutal feedback, it's very good at giving that to caveat being, again, we shouldn't trust AI with everything it says, but like there are easy ways to double check everything.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: The issue has been recently it started context rotting, like it started forgetting things about, you know, who I am, what Lingo actually does, and kind of to go back and start reminding it about, hey, look, this is actually what we do.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: This is all the sort of information that we've talked about throughout the past.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that's that's what got me to go, like, cool, like, you know, if I'm putting in all this effort, um, now's the time to reassess the playing field and see what the best tools that there are out there.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: And um, Jim and I, Jim and I did surprise me.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I think Google's come a long way just from the beginning of the year till the end of the year.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's just it's just so much better now.
• 9:12
  Michael: Yeah, I saw uh a report about Sam Altman putting the code read out, like we're in trouble.
• 9:18
  Michael: Yeah, because Google is gonna move much faster than opening up.
• 9:22
  Michael: Well, they they've got the money.
• 9:23
  Michael: I read somewhere the other day they have uh 3.7 times more access to the internet than anybody else does.
• 9:31
  Michael: Yeah.
• 9:31
  Michael: Because a lot of hidden.
• 9:33
  Michael: So automatically that gives them an information advantage.
• 9:35
  Michael: Let's get into it.
• 9:36
  Michael: This is why um they're gone.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: This this is why um meta was caught training their models off pirated books, because you know, not everyone has the crawlability that Google may have.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, they they cut corners, but at the end of the day, they're they're always just trying to find tech starter to build up their models.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:55
  Michael: It's an interesting discussion how how AI can be used, just as financing, but how AI can be used in your business, you know, load in all your financial data, for example, ask it to model your and forecast for you.
• 10:06
  Michael: Where can you?
• 10:07
  Michael: I mean, I've done things like how do I save on tax here?
• 10:10
  Michael: Like be legal, um, but think outside the box.
• 10:14
  Michael: And then I'm like, shit, that's quite clever.
• 10:16
  Michael: Um, and and I run an accountant, and he's like, Wow, yes, that would work.
• 10:20
  Michael: Where do you learn that?
• 10:22
  Michael: Where do you learn that?
• 10:22
  Michael: Interesting to to my accountant, and he was saying how he used to have a much bigger team.
• 10:28
  Michael: He just needs a third of the team now because he's implemented Chat GPT, because a lot of the decision making is is especially for the repeatable task, but also for knowledge, like you know, read this giant document.
• 10:40
  Michael: Uh another thing, I was talking to not sound like a dick, but have a wealth manager.
• 10:44
  Michael: It's a bit sounds cleverer than and and more than the guy who does like investments and stuff.
• 10:49
  Michael: And he said, Oh, Michael, we need to figure out a guilt ladder and what we're gonna do here, and yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 10:54
  Michael: And I said, Well, I've got this.
• 10:56
  Michael: And he looked at it and he went, Chat GPT.
• 10:58
  Michael: I mean, yeah, 100%.
• 11:01
  Michael: And he said, Yeah, use that.
• 11:03
  Michael: It's better than what we can come up with, and it's not gonna charge you one and a half percent.
• 11:07
  Michael: Yeah, he said the people that are now continuing to use them are the people who are so wealthy, they don't care if they make 200 grand here or 500 grand there.
• 11:17
  Michael: It's just, you know, they've got 100 million, but who cares?
• 11:20
  Michael: But all of those people who are sort of a bit lower down the the the other end, they do care.
• 11:26
  Michael: They do care about one and a half percent.
• 11:28
  Michael: You know, imagine you've got 10 million pounds in investments, let's say.
• 11:31
  Michael: Sounds a lot to a lot of people, but 10 million pounds investments and you're paying one and a half percent, you've got to beat the market by one and a half percent, and you're not beating the market, um, it's just costing you money.
• 11:41
  Michael: So it's it's really interesting.
• 11:43
  Michael: Or he said it's those people that um just have no knowledge or um they're just either too late or intelligent enough whether like I don't want the stress of looking at my portfolio, just deal with it, please.
• 11:54
  Michael: Um and that that's worth the money.
• 11:56
  Michael: But I think that's really interesting because AI is taking over everywhere.
• 11:59
  Michael: But let's let's get into the first question, which is I remember uh back in the day, something eight, ten years ago now, um I was in the tech sector, and I remember this brand new mega thing coming out called blockchain, and it was huge, and everyone had to do blockchain.
• 12:14
  Michael: It was the most important thing in the world.
• 12:16
  Michael: If you suck blockchain in your product name, you could raise 50 million, no problem, no questions asked, people were just throwing money at you.
• 12:22
  Michael: And there are some similarities I'm seeing with AI, where you see a lot of stupid shit getting funding and investment.
• 12:29
  Michael: You're like, how?
• 12:30
  Michael: And I see that same kind of thing now, but it's pretty much to the ordinary person at least, is pretty much dead.
• 12:36
  Michael: In fact, I think most people nowadays wouldn't even know what blockchain is or how to describe what it is.
• 12:42
  Michael: Um, do you think AI could go the same way as that?
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's that's an interesting, that's an interesting one because like I think it's true that in the US specifically, there are companies, let's just call them ChatGPT with some different logo.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: Companies that are exactly like ChatGPT, they actually use ChatGPT, like open AI as models, brand it, sell it to their customers, blah, blah, blah.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: And they're raising like millions and millions of dollars.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: In a sense, it is true that this whole drop in an AI and um money will appear.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, when we first started, when we registered the name Lingo.ai, 2023, there weren't a lot of AI companies coming out.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: One week after our domain registration, the firm from New York had reached out to us, had no clue what we did.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't even have the website up.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: We just registered the domain, and my contact was associated with the domain.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like the first one comes out one week later.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: In about a month, we had 10 people reach out.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: Again, a lot of it was like, hey, let's get the data, let's figure out what the market's doing.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: And they weren't real investment offers, but like that's really how they were operating.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's like AI showed up, let's go see if you know we should throw our money at it.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: So it does exist, but where I think AI is different from blockchain is it has actually impacted value to a certain extent to the end user.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like, like you mentioned, um, your accountant who doesn't need to hire 30, 40% of their staff because now they have tools to do that.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like it has this like fundamental value.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's not just like, hey, let's buy Ripple or Bitcoin and hopefully it goes up 10 times.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's if I do this, it will help me with XYZ.
• 14:23
  Michael: Fundamental value to the end user, but also to the business, right?
• 14:26
  Michael: So businesses now, I think if you took AI away, we wouldn't say they'd collapse, but productivity would would collapse and be a lot of problems.
• 14:34
  Michael: 100%.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so you it definitely is that.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: And and like, you know, full disclosure, I am pessimistic on blockchain.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I was part of launching one of New Zealand's first blockchain accelerators, but you know, a few years later I'm still pretty pessimistic on the industry in general.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of those technologies that's like been around for so long and we still struggle to see where the real-world application at scale can happen.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: I I know there are some very good use cases in certain parts, but for how much money there's actually gone into it at scale, it's, you know, aside from the finance aspect, it's just very difficult.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: What is interesting with AI though is like the adoption was like there was no friction.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: The end user just understood it.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: They can start using it, or the businesses can start using it.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, it's just so disposable.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: Like when the first PCs came out, there were, you know, tens of thousands of dollars.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, sure, it made the accountant's job easier if you had an Excel sheet that could calculate everything and you could save a week.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: But that upfront investment is super expensive.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: But when you have something like Chat GPC, which goes, hey, for 25 bucks a month, I can help you code, I can help you with your wealth management, I can help you with your accounting, it really just changes the playing field.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I think it's it's very different in that specific sense where like the value being derived is much higher than the value being put in.
• 16:02
  Michael: Yeah.
• 16:02
  Michael: So let's talk, uh let's go back to accountants and uh computers.
• 16:06
  Michael: We've recently seen a lot of criticism in in this industry, in the MSK sector, about AI and um uh unit costs and so on.
• 16:15
  Michael: And it reminds me of back in the day when there were a lot of accountants who said, that computer costs so much money, I can do this on paper or on my abacus.
• 16:24
  Michael: Why do I need this computer?
• 16:26
  Michael: And they forgot about all the other benefits, the productivity, the time saved, and so on and so forth.
• 16:30
  Michael: And it made me think, particularly in the UK sector, it's very resistant to change, but certainly digital transformation, right?
• 16:38
  Michael: And you can see that with with practice management systems, right?
• 16:42
  Michael: In no other industry would the practice management sector get away with releasing such utter fucking bullshit.
• 16:50
  Michael: Like it's terrible, it's absolutely awful, but they get away with it in this industry because people are like, yeah, this will do.
• 16:56
  Michael: I wonder then I you know, you get sorry, I called you an Australian earlier.
• 17:00
  Michael: I didn't I realize you were from New Zealand.
• 17:02
  Michael: Um just really it's just an island.
• 17:05
  Michael: Yeah, people it's an Australian island, isn't it?
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, in the northern hemisphere, they treat it as another state of Australia, so used to it.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: We get things off the maps too, so no worries.
• 17:16
  Michael: But it is interesting because when you look at Australia, that is where a lot of the innovation in tech is happening.
• 17:22
  Michael: And certainly adoption rates in in tech.
• 17:24
  Michael: I was talking to someone yesterday clinically about how Australia is is a little bit ahead and the way that they're a bit more innovative and healthic and so on.
• 17:32
  Michael: But certainly from a from the software side of things, Australia is so much more advanced.
• 17:37
  Michael: You have so many more businesses.
• 17:38
  Michael: It I can't think, yeah, every time there's a a company I come across in the sector, it's it's started in Australia.
• 17:44
  Michael: Why do you think that is?
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: So that's an look.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have an answer to it, but I find it quite fascinating.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's specifically skewed in the industry we're working at in in like the allied health space, where you know, you look at Clinico, you look at Nuclear, you look at Heidi, all these companies that are like sort of world class in what they do, and they're all coming out of these, like off the west coast of Australia and uh East Coast.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like I I don't I don't know why that is, but I think like there's there's a few elements which you know you can tell me how how it works in the UK is Australia typically has had a pretty high labor cost.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, for reference, an average medical receptionist here will kind of be at 80,000 Australian dollars plus, which is about 40,000 pounds.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: There'll be 12% superannuation.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: So employers have to put in another extra 12% on top of that for their retirement funds.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: If they go over time, there's like time and a half, and there's there's a lot of like stuff that just adds up.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: So to start with, like labour is somewhat high in Australia.
• 18:55
  Michael: It's higher in the UK.
• 18:56
  Michael: Uh we'd have to give three percent um a month on uh wages uh for for pensions.
• 19:02
  Michael: Oh my god you've got to give uh yeah, contribution is three percent.
• 19:06
  Michael: Uh there's one and a half, I don't know the exact numbers, one and a half, two percent on PAYE.
• 19:12
  Michael: The the costs here are actually massive.
• 19:15
  Michael: So I'm not sure it's a cost thing.
• 19:17
  Michael: I think it might be a maybe a cultural thing, but but I'm particularly thinking about just like clinic owners, like clinic owners will adopt in Australia, which is possibly why the Australian companies are opening up there, because they're like, okay, we have a market that is quite easy to get into.
• 19:32
  Michael: In this industry, we've seen this in this sector in the UK, it's very difficult to penetrate the market without being very clever.
• 19:42
  Michael: You know, there's there's certainly, for example, massive distrust of tech in the UK market.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think that that that probably adds to it.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, I again in our specific industry, I've still yet to figure out why this exists.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: But I think if we look at it overall, like Australia and And similar to New Zealand, but you know, we've seen countries where when big software is launched, they're like, hey, like we'll come over, we'll help you get set up.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I think Dell and HP and stuff kind of that's how they run their remote banks and a service.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like that didn't really exist back in the day because they were so isolated from these big tech hubs like London or San Francisco or New York, where they were kind of forced to just figure it out.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: Like if, and geographically, Australia's so spread out, geographically, New Zealand's so spread out.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: If you want someone coming over to your clinic and helping you set up, that's gonna cost a fair chunk of money.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I think like naturally it was like, hey, let's figure this out.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it has just created this like tech adoption in clinics, which tends to be a bit natural.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know, like we've talked about this.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: Like our clients here in Australia, very, very easy to just go, hey, drop in an API can we'll get you onboarded.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas our clients in the UK, we generally typically jump on a call, just make sure we are human, we're not AI.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: This is what we do.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: Here are the clinics that use it.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that trust element is probably a factor.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: Again, is it a regional thing?
• 21:09
  Michael: No, I think there's there's definitely a trust element, but I think also um I would never forget this.
• 21:15
  Michael: Another company, AI company, was looking to get an API off for clinic owner.
• 21:19
  Michael: The clinic owner said, um, but is that going to give you access to my bank account?
• 21:23
  Michael: And so it was this kind of uh just zero knowledge around what an API is.
• 21:28
  Michael: Now there's no, I don't want to help clinic owners.
• 21:30
  Michael: This isn't a slight on them in any way.
• 21:32
  Michael: Plenty of stuff I don't know about.
• 21:34
  Michael: Um, my anatomy.
• 21:36
  Michael: Everyone has different skills, but it does seem like uh a lot of clinic owners this side of the pond have less technical skills, that's tech skills, than those in let's say Australia.
• 21:48
  Michael: And it's just an interesting, interesting point because certainly you've found that penetrating the UK market, you know, you've got to have an awful lot more phone support.
• 21:56
  Michael: Uh you've got to have an awful lot, you know, you you you when you're onboarding a client, you can't just say click here, put your details in.
• 22:02
  Michael: You've got to be ready for a call and and to explain to them what an API does and what it is and so on and so forth.
• 22:08
  Michael: So it's just an interesting kind of thing.
• 22:10
  Michael: No one's given me an answer yet, and and I don't know, I who knows, but it's an interesting um kind of thing to look at is is is how different markets respond differently to tech.
• 22:21
  Michael: And moving on to that, I something many years ago, and I think this is a really important point uh for Clinic Ains to know about.
• 22:28
  Michael: Many years ago, companies like SAP and Oracle, all the big, big giants, they released products that did everything, right?
• 22:35
  Michael: You had Stack BW, basically you had the CRM, you had the data warehouse, you had everything.
• 22:40
  Michael: The the forecasting and financial consolidation.
• 22:43
  Michael: Yeah.
• 22:44
  Michael: And it was the worst thing you could possibly do was to standardize on a single company.
• 22:51
  Michael: Sort of philosophical or common sense point of view, it made a lot of sense.
• 22:54
  Michael: If you just buy everything from one company, you have one contact, not actually true, but you have one point of contact, you have one company, you have one big invoice, it just feels nicer.
• 23:04
  Michael: It's all from one single company.
• 23:06
  Michael: Yeah, the same now applies in this industry.
• 23:08
  Michael: There are a lot of tools, um, particularly we'll talk about practice management systems.
• 23:13
  Michael: There are a lot of practice management systems out there that are asking people to standardize.
• 23:18
  Michael: We do the AI notes, we do the IFO answering, although not many do, if any, actually.
• 23:22
  Michael: Um, we do the the emails out, we do everything.
• 23:25
  Michael: So just standardise.
• 23:26
  Michael: And something I have said for a long time now is just like back in the late 90s and early 2000s, where standardization was something that people did, and now nobody does it, right?
• 23:38
  Michael: No company, no big company in their right mind says, let's all standardize and do everything through one company.
• 23:43
  Michael: We have to change this market as well, because there is no single tool that can possibly compete against a product with an open API with a ton of developers creating the best of breed kind of software and products.
• 23:57
  Michael: And I think that's one of the reasons why Joel and Clinico have been so incredibly successful because they've said we know what we're doing here.
• 24:05
  Michael: This is this is our core business.
• 24:07
  Michael: We're gonna open up the product and everybody can build stuff around it.
• 24:11
  Michael: And that's why we're successful because as an ecosystem, it's absolutely incredible.
• 24:16
  Michael: I mean, I'm yeah, I've I've spoken to Joel.
• 24:18
  Michael: I don't, there's lots of things I don't like about Clinico, but as an ecosystem, it's absolutely insane.
• 24:23
  Michael: So I want you to sort of talk a little about standardization, but also in a non-technical way.
• 24:29
  Michael: Let's start off with, because we mentioned it a few times.
• 24:31
  Michael: What is an open API?
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so in a non-technical way, an open API is basically the doors to let builders like us come and build on practice management systems so clinics can benefit from what we're building without waiting for their practice management system to actually build it.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: The open and open API is it's open to everyone.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have to sort of like chemoose up with the partners, we don't have to click tickets, we don't have to negotiate contracts, it's open to everyone.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: It is a common misconception that open actually means unsecure in healthcare.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I don't know if you face this a little bit, but like, you know, it it, if anything, it's the opposite.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like open APIs mean the APIs are publicly available, everyone can scrutinize it, everyone can see that, you know, are these reliable, secure APIs?
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, so it just allows people just like us to kind of go on and build tools on top of their practice management systems.
• 25:29
  Michael: And and the way I've often explained it is uh showing my age a bit with DVD players, but um, I don't think they exist.
• 25:35
  Michael: But it's like you have a tele do you have a television from Sony and a DVD player from Sony.
• 25:40
  Michael: If I knew television, because there's a better one out there, I can buy a television from Toshiba or whoever, it doesn't matter, and I can just plug the DVD player in.
• 25:49
  Michael: Or conversely, I want to buy a new DVD player or a new sound system.
• 25:52
  Michael: This is an open API essentially.
• 25:54
  Michael: It just allows you to plug everything in and make sure it all works together.
• 25:58
  Michael: And you have a lot of practice management systems out there which don't have open APIs, which means that uh and we had a question on HMDG Connect the other day.
• 26:06
  Michael: Does uh anyone know any AI answering services that work with moments, which is like a booking system?
• 26:13
  Michael: And I'm like, No, because it's just not gonna, you know.
• 26:17
  Michael: So I think um it's really important for clinical owners to understand that for for me, I would now not buy a product in any industry, in any sector, in any area that doesn't have an open API, because I want it to be able to communicate with everything else that I've got, because otherwise you're just running information in silos.
• 26:35
  Michael: And so open API incredibly important, which is why who do you you only work with a few practice management systems, not through choice, because you'd love to work with all of them right now.
• 26:45
  Michael: Yeah.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: So we we work with Clinico and Nucle at the moment.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: We are actually working with some closed source providers now.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, like the flip side of that argument is and wouldn't have been valid a couple of years ago, but I can see the flip side now, which is hey, look, you know, there is every sort of everyone in the world who doesn't even understand how to code.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: So jumping on these AI tools, vibe coding an application, not understanding the security risks and understanding what data they're actually plugging into and how they're moving it around and connecting it up to practice management systems and then selling.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: So their philosophy is around can we be the gatekeepers to make sure that clinics choose the right and appropriate tool?
• 27:31
  Michael: No, no, no, bullshit.
• 27:33
  Michael: No, they are wanting to make money.
• 27:35
  Michael: This is a purely monetary discipline.
• 27:38
  Michael: Anyone who tells me they they they care about the security, the nonsense, because they can fix that, right?
• 27:43
  Michael: They can fix it.
• 27:44
  Michael: 100% Clinico saw that you were doing something dodgy, you could switch off like that, right?
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, so it's it's about like where they want to commit their resourcing.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because like it it it there are there are ways that you can monitor this, there are ways you can go about it, but what tends to happen more frequently is closed source APIs are like, cool, how much off the ticket can we clip?
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the negotiation contract behind closed doors.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, cool, like how much do we get out of this if you connect to us?
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why clinics end up paying the price when systems like us do connect to closed source systems, because we go, hey, here is our pricing, but now we have to buffer on top this like sort of like tax that we have to pay to even operate in that industry.
• 28:29
  Michael: Well, there's an even bigger um problem over time, isn't there?
• 28:33
  Michael: Because let's say you're incredibly successful, and let's use a uh I'm just using it as an example, a closed system like TM3 or Jane, or it doesn't really matter which one.
• 28:42
  Michael: Let's say you you get the contract with them, you pay the money, the customer then pays, but they see how incredibly successful you are.
• 28:49
  Michael: They can return pretty damn quickly, right?
• 28:52
  Michael: 100% year, suddenly it's double the price, and now you can't afford it.
• 28:57
  Michael: So for me, whenever you're getting into any tech product, one of the most important things is ongoing support and the ability to use the product.
• 29:04
  Michael: And actually, this it doesn't really matter.
• 29:06
  Michael: It could be a Bluetooth speaker, it could be, it doesn't matter what it is, but particularly when it comes to you've got to safeguard yourself and protect yourself because what you can't do is go with a system that may not be around in six months and invest three months of time integration, integrating it and changing processes and so on.
• 29:22
  Michael: And so I'm a little bit someone says, you know, that we we've got access to this closed system, okay, it's better than nothing, maybe, but my advice would be go to an open system and use the same product.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the clinics may go, well, you know, the closed system has said they're gonna build it.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: Coming back to what you were saying about SAP is what a lot of people, and even in tech, this isn't just clinic owners generally, like even in tech, what a lot of people don't understand is software takes a lot of resourcing and efforts to just maintain, not develop, just maintain, like keep it operational, keep the security high.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, this is where most of Clinica's work goes now.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's like they're at a scale where a lot of their efforts are just like, cool, how do we keep this security as high as possible?
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: So when those players are focused on the core infrastructure part of their work and they invest all their resourcing on that, they don't have time to sort of screw around with everything everyone might want.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know, some clinics want AI phone answering, others don't.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, how do PMS decide like which one, which features are important and which ones are not?
• 30:27
  Michael: Yeah.
• 30:28
  Michael: I I on that, just on that, I we get that criticism.
• 30:32
  Michael: I hear that all the time against lots of different tools.
• 30:34
  Michael: If only they could just implement this one tiny feature.
• 30:37
  Michael: Nothing is a tiny feature.
• 30:38
  Michael: You implement that one thing, it will break everything else.
• 30:41
  Michael: And all connect.
• 30:43
  Michael: And there's no way you can just go, oh, if only you could do this.
• 30:46
  Michael: Okay, maybe an extra custom field is okay.
• 30:49
  Michael: But you want to, you know, so I think it's much, much more difficult than people realize.
• 30:54
  Michael: And this is why development timelines is it's just that I don't ever see a development timeline call it a timeline.
• 30:59
  Michael: It's like the development dream because no one's ever here about the timing ever.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's why we call them cycles, because we're like screw putting times onto things.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: We'll just call them cycles.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, like, and the other part of that, like that's the first phase.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then the other part of that is trying to bundle everything in one is actually a talent issue, too.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like, we put in so much effort.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I personally interviewed five, 400 to 500 people for our first hire to make sure that we can try hire like the best engineers there are to build a voice AI product for healthcare.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the engineers that we ended up hiring aren't the average engineers that will work on building a portal for a healthcare system.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: And that matters, right?
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: Like these are new technologies that are coming out.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: There is no playbook, there is no best practices.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: You figure it out, you put a lot of effort into RD.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: And to expect that the PMS will funnel majority of their sort of money away to just tinker with this thing, it's like that's where.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_00: So we've been in talks with PMSs that have gone, hey, do can we white label you and we we don't white label our system?
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um they go, cool, we'll build it.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um and we're two years down the line, and then we're revisiting those talks of like, cool, now they want us to connect into their closed source APIs because they struggle at the end of the day, there just isn't resourcing or talent to actually plug and play it.
• 32:20
  Michael: Yeah, I I think also it's a common misconception.
• 32:23
  Michael: Someone looks at again, doesn't matter what company, a Nucal or a TM3 or a Jane or whatever it might be, they go, Christ, these must be mega, mega companies.
• 32:32
  Michael: Terribly they're not.
• 32:33
  Michael: Um now if you Google, you can go and or open it out or meta, right?
• 32:37
  Michael: You can offer someone 500 million to come and join your team as an engineer.
• 32:40
  Michael: But these companies, they're very small companies in real terms.
• 32:43
  Michael: They they make very little, not Clinico, I'm you know, they're making plenty, but it's interesting, right?
• 32:49
  Michael: Because the majority of these companies make very little revenue, very little profit if they do make revenue.
• 32:54
  Michael: They simply can't hire the best and brightest, they can't get the resources in to build all of these different things.
• 33:00
  Michael: It's just not not possible.
• 33:01
  Michael: And the fact that Clinico, with all of the money and the might that they have, because they are, I guess, the Google of this sector, they're still staying from it, tells you don't it it it's very difficult to do.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they they actually tried and pulled back one of the most simplest implementation of AI.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: So they've kind of like dabbled in the customer support side and they've gone, actually, this isn't working for us.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, which which is totally fair because it takes a lot of effort to make that work.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: If you push out a very small, slicier company and go, hey, can you make this work?
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's 99% of the time, it's just not going to happen.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_00: And this is why we actually see even the Googles and the Apples of their own industries making so many acquisitions in the space.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's even the biggest and the richest companies in tech can't keep up with everything.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: So to expect like the smaller companies in our industry to do that, it becomes a bit unrealistic.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not saying they'll never do it.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'm saying you probably don't want your PMS to release an online booking widget when everyone else is releasing AI note takers.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's about how do you stay competitive as a clinic.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 34:07
  Michael: And we see Apple Intelligence, not exactly.
• 34:12
  Michael: Give me five minutes to check with.
• 34:16
  Michael: Well, I could have just done that though.
• 34:18
  Michael: Exactly.
• 34:18
  Michael: No, it it it is an interesting one.
• 34:20
  Michael: And I think you know, the clinic who's looking at bringing in AI, phone answering, or any of the other really cool tools that are out there at the moment, they're always really disappointed when they're like, I'm with tool X, and it doesn't they don't want to connect.
• 34:32
  Michael: And they seem to blame you rather than the tool because they don't understand that actually they don't have an open API and it's not your fault, it's their fault.
• 34:41
  Michael: There are some some serious uh tools.
• 34:44
  Michael: Um Splose is a good example where Splose is like we do everything and we're fully AI and all of the rest of it, but they do have an open API as well, um, which is kind of an interesting take.
• 34:56
  Michael: Now, the last time I looked at Splose, I know other people at HMDG have been in touch with with them.
• 35:01
  Michael: Last time I looked at Splose, there were lots of issues with it, from especially from a UK thing.
• 35:05
  Michael: But that could be a very interesting kind of tool in the future.
• 35:09
  Michael: And I'm not until I look at it, I'm never gonna say even look at it, because I I I don't know.
• 35:14
  Michael: But it could be an interesting cuthouse where you do have the internal stuff where where they try and do a bit more.
• 35:21
  Michael: Maybe you can save money, for example, on really good email automations.
• 35:24
  Michael: Maybe you don't need to use Pep Talker or Clinic Apps, maybe they do a decent job, enough job there, decent enough job, but then you can also use something like Lingo to plug in.
• 35:32
  Michael: Um so that's a kind of the best of both worlds approach, I think.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think what's what's interesting in the AI space is it that there are very real world costs involved in doing anything AI.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: So the minute anyone goes, hey, for a flat fee, we will do X, Y, and Z.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: The first thing that pops into my mind is cool, like what corners are you cutting or what models are you implementing.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: So and I think this is why also Clinica stared away from it, is you know, they're about this super accessible practice management system, aside from the fact that they don't actually just like AI in general, is let's let the people that want to specialize in this specialize in this, and then they can charge what needs to get charged.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: There are tools out there that do sort of AI phone stuff for the cost of what it actually costs us to host a clinic.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: Now, we don't just slap an API key into an AI model and go fingers crossed.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: Let's hope that works.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: But we get to run evaluations on top of it.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: We run multiple models on top of it.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: So we're analyzing when calls are happening, which ones are safe, which ones aren't.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_00: We had a self-harm call happen at a pharmacy the other day.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_00: It escalated to helpline, it flagged with the pharmacy, it flagged with us.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_00: We were on to it on a Saturday.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_00: The things that we can put in place to make it extremely compliant, probably more so than a typical call center or a VA.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but the minute you start cutting corners, it's like, which one of those are you not implementing?
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because all of those costs are extremely high.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: To give you um insights into it, when we started 2023, guess how much our first call was costing per minute?
• 37:12
  Michael: I reckon eight to 10p, eight to 10 pennies.
• 37:15
  Michael: So it was eight, eight dollars a minute.
• 37:18
  Michael: Jesus Christ.
• 37:19
  Michael: Okay.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_00: So it was just, it was just not a feasible, commercially feasible model.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like us as a team with more focus on like, can we technologically make this happen?
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_00: And feasibility wasn't top of mind because we're like with most technology, prices will drop 10x over the next year.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: But again, like they're not at the stage where we go, hey, this is cheapest chips, it's just like normal software, you know.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the first thing that pops into mind when people go, hey, we'll do everything and we'll do it for this small ticket price.
• 37:44
  Michael: Yeah, and we'll get into because I think it's an important topic, what to look out for in tools, because you you've got to be careful what you're using.
• 37:51
  Michael: But this brings up two kind of interesting questions.
• 37:53
  Michael: First is something around is it's around funding.
• 37:56
  Michael: And I am always very, very reticent to recommend any product that doesn't have proper funding behind it because doing this stuff is expensive, but not just the technology, not technology, it's the support, right?
• 38:09
  Michael: How do they how is it possible with someone with zero funding to scale at the levels that they all want to scale and have 15 support people and pay all the the tech costs and pay the developer costs and pay?
• 38:23
  Michael: I don't think people realize that it costs thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars, just for maintenance, right?
• 38:29
  Michael: Just for an engineer to sit there and go, let's keep it all running and you know, run the engine.
• 38:34
  Michael: And so there are some tools that do it.
• 38:37
  Michael: I don't want to put down anyone that doesn't have funding and they're all crap because that isn't true.
• 38:42
  Michael: But generally, I think funding, I wouldn't choose a tool that doesn't have funding.
• 38:46
  Michael: Because again, what I don't want to do is put all of my time and effort into something and then it goes pop in three months' time, six months' time, or a year's time.
• 38:55
  Michael: Um now I know you guys are finding into the the funding conversation on on your side too much, but you got funded, uh, which I think was obviously important because of the costs.
• 39:04
  Michael: But in terms of um uh funding for you, what how do you see funding within the industry?
• 39:10
  Michael: Because it it does to some extent hinder you a little bit, right?
• 39:15
  Michael: When you take on investment, they want you to move too fast sometimes faster than you're comfortable with.
• 39:20
  Michael: Yeah.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I think two parts to that.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_00: One, funding is a tool to just make happen what you want to make happen as a company.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: And like you said, you know, best companies don't always necessarily need funding.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: But I can speak to our scenario for sure is when we started at$8 a minute, you can imagine how much basically cash we would need saved up if we wanted to run RD on that.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: We were spending, you know, our first hundred thousand dollars just vanished.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: It it was very expensive to do.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_00: And if we wanted to attract the best talent in the market, again, no one had Built this, no playbooks, no best practice.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how do we bring people on that can learn in one week's time what a typical engineer would take a few weeks to learn?
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, we have engineers that were brought on from the one that set up automation factories at wish.com and Shanghai to um engineers that worked at uh UNSW quantum computing here in Australia.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's a lot of transferable skills that they could bring to make sort of Lingo come to life.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: But the biggest thing the funding unlocked is, you know, we weren't optimizing for a business for the first couple of years.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_00: It was how do we make the best possible product that clinics can use in real-world scenarios?
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_00: Again, to like go back to 23.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_00: OpenAI at that time could not interact with a single external application.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_00: So we had fine-tuned some of the early GPD 3 models to start doing these tool callings and bring out information from Clinico and how does that get mapped out?
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: How does that be secure?
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it was all about building that from the ground up.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what it allows us to do, right?
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_00: Like we can build a purpose-built system for healthcare from the ground up without going to off-the-shelf tools that exist in the US, which a lot of these sort of competitors are doing now.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: There's so much noise in the space, is cool.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_00: Let's grab this tool, let's snipe our logo on, and let's just sell it to a clinic.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: Who cares if the data goes to the US?
• 41:24
  Michael: Can you explain that a little bit?
• 41:25
  Michael: Because I think people don't realize how easy it is to um for me to buy a mobile app, a fitness app, and it Michael's best fit in the world, and release it to the world and everyone go, oh my God, hasn't he got a great app?
• 41:38
  Michael: Just explain how this all works.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I guess the terminology, white labeling, is basically you get a blank canvas to any most popular softwares you think of, like Uber, you think of Airbnb, you know, in the phone answering space.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_00: Basically any software that's popular enough will have a tool generally based, you know, overseas somewhere that go, hey, for a fraction of the cost, Michael, you come slap your logo on and you go sell it to your clinics.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think in your industry, Go High Level is probably, I've seen some clinics use go high level and um they have, you know, the partner agency model where it's a look, just rename this as yours, go charge whatever you want to charge, do whatever you want to do.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_00: But what that actually means is the underlying tool, the underlying engine of that software is still in their hands.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: So even if you, with the best intention, go out to the clinics and you go sell the software and you do everything you need to do correctly to make this happen, at the end of the day, that data is in the hands of someone that you have no control over.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: So for clinics, all of that data goes to some provider in the US that they actually don't have much control over and they can change their terms any time of day.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like there aren't enterprise level agreements that go into place when people wipe label.
• 42:58
  Michael: Yeah, and I think you just on the Go High Level thing, I think this is the biggest scam in the industry in in the UK at the moment, is someone going, oh, let's call this patient demand top level increase or whatever you want to call it.
• 43:14
  Michael: And then they slap their logo on it and then they sell it to clinics.
• 43:17
  Michael: Not only are they getting the referral fee from Go High Level, they're also being charged 600 quid, 800 quid, 1,000 pounds a month for running this system, which is just someone else's system.
• 43:29
  Michael: It's a sit and it's also been around for bloody ever.
• 43:31
  Michael: No one in the corporate world uses it because it's a peer pilot of crap.
• 43:34
  Michael: But they bring it into the market and everyone goes, Oh my god, look at this new.
• 43:38
  Michael: I don't want to name any names, so I'm trying not to think the patient accelerator, and everyone's like, oh my god, isn't this wonderful?
• 43:44
  Michael: This guru's released this patient accelerator.
• 43:46
  Michael: It's like, no, that's someone else's tool.
• 43:48
  Michael: Your data's going somewhere else.
• 43:50
  Michael: You're you're if it goes wrong, it's got nothing to you've got no one to go to, right?
• 43:55
  Michael: And you can't yourself for a tenth of the cost and just get it implemented yourself.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_00: But I think in this I was gonna say on that specific note, it's like, you know, look, I I respect anyone that can pull out a hustle, but healthcare is different.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like you can't, you can't be doing shit like that in healthcare.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like when you're a clinic, all that responsibility actually comes onto the clinic because um if you read through the fine prints of any white label reseller, it's like they're not really taking any of that responsibility on.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_00: Be surprised if a lot of those are even locally registered companies.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_00: At the end of the day, healthcare requires a lot of compliance, a lot of security, and that comes at a cost.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's like running them all without security in place.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like when you put the right measures in place, the price goes up.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_00: These white label solutions are made for the everyday industries without the security and compliance required for healthcare.
• 44:52
  Michael: But I think as well, uh it's interesting because we look at this from two very different angles.
• 44:56
  Michael: You're looking at security and compliance, which is absolutely crucial, right?
• 44:59
  Michael: I think it's it's something that no one should forget about.
• 45:02
  Michael: From my side, I'm taking a more sort of humanistic approach, which is charging businesses for subpar products that you know are 10 times more than they should cost.
• 45:15
  Michael: That's all right.
• 45:16
  Michael: You can do that to you can sell whatever you like to Ferrari, right?
• 45:19
  Michael: Or to sell the SMEs.
• 45:22
  Michael: These are real people, right?
• 45:24
  Michael: These are real people where if you take a thousand pounds off them, that affects what goes into the pension, their holidays, their kids' education.
• 45:31
  Michael: And I always say this to clients we have always drummed into the team how important it is to realise that these are real people.
• 45:38
  Michael: We can't just take a grand off of them or 500 quid or 200 pounds and and be okay with it.
• 45:43
  Michael: You've got to make sure that you're providing value and you've got to make sure that they're getting something from that.
• 45:47
  Michael: And I, in good conscience, I couldn't white label eight go high level or whatever that product might be and and and charge five times more for it.
• 45:56
  Michael: I just couldn't do it.
• 45:57
  Michael: I I don't think it's okay.
• 45:58
  Michael: And I know there's an argument of, yeah, but we've added some stuff to it, or we've kind of put our intellectual nah come on, it's in five minutes up.
• 46:08
  Michael: But certainly on your, you know, with with a lot of the white labeling, and and this is why I think the market in this area is so crowded.
• 46:14
  Michael: I have seen, I think this week alone, it's only Wednesday, two new products in the market.
• 46:19
  Michael: There are probably 20, 30.
• 46:20
  Michael: I'm not saying they're all bad.
• 46:21
  Michael: I'm sure there are some very in fact, I know there are some very, very good uh uh other tools out there.
• 46:27
  Michael: Um and may do slightly different things too, but they're very, very good tools.
• 46:31
  Michael: But there's a lot of crap out there.
• 46:32
  Michael: Um and I the reason it's it is so crowded is that I can go onto Gemini 3 and I can create a an AI phone receptionist, right?
• 46:42
  Michael: Because I've done it, I've tried.
• 46:43
  Michael: And it works pretty good.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, 100%.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the thing, like it makes it incredibly hard for clinic owners to sift through the noise, right?
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like I think I can't even I don't even know how many players are in the industry now.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_00: We stopped counting because it was a waste of time.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I think less than a handful are probably actually good at what they do.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that matters when you're implementing AI, because you know, 70 plus percent of businesses when they implement it, uh, it doesn't work.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't matter if you're a clinic or not.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like most of the times people use tools and they go, oh shit, we've spent all this money and it just doesn't work.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, you might have heard in the news when Microsoft is sort of scaling down the efforts on Copilot because they've done this big push and it's like no one wants to use it.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_00: So actually being intentional about why you want to use it, making sure like all the nuances are handled.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when people slap AI onto everything, it doesn't actually understand the nuances that are required for clinics or whatever industry they're going down.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, very few, and you're right, like there are a few out there, not just us, that do a good job, but it's rare to actually come across them in the pool of noise that actually exists throughout all of the internet.
• 47:56
  Michael: Yeah, yeah, 100%.
• 47:58
  Michael: And I think um that's that's it's interesting because there's a good segue into how uh, and let's assume they're good products, um, and and particularly Lingo, how you're actually finding iPhone and answering actually being implemented in clinics.
• 48:11
  Michael: Like what does what does that look like from a clinic standpoint?
• 48:14
  Michael: So as an example, um, I I I get a lot of people saying, oh, we we've got great receptionists or whatever, um, so we've got no use for it.
• 48:21
  Michael: Well, your receptionists don't work when someone wants to book an appointment for the next day.
• 48:25
  Michael: And so my advice is always don't just put you know, throw away technology because you can't see use case for it.
• 48:31
  Michael: There are always use cases, and and we see how many calls are missed between sort of 7 p.m.
• 48:36
  Michael: or on Sundays.
• 48:37
  Michael: That's one area where I I think Lingo and other tools can be implemented to actually have some really great success.
• 48:42
  Michael: Because let's be honest, most people don't leave a voicemail.
• 48:45
  Michael: Um, they will go somewhere else or do something else.
• 48:47
  Michael: So, in in in what you've seen, how are you seeing things being lingo and and other tools being implemented?
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think like the market is still very new to this.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_00: So a big part about the first stage implementation is just trust and understanding how does it work?
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_00: What does it do?
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_00: Where can it help me?
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_00: The ones that actually go through that process before they implement something tend to have a better rate of a successful implementation.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_00: The ones that kind of go, hey, shit, Michael has implemented AI in his clinic.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_00: I probably need to implement something in mine.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's where it becomes tricky.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_00: So starting from like good implementation, what tends to happen is a good implementation is one that's actually worked through the change management piece on both the admin team side inside the clinic, and then the change management piece on the customer side.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_00: So letting them know why you're implementing this tool, like, hey, we want to implement this for the best possible service we can provide without hiking up the costs.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_00: What that could look like if they have a full-time receptionist is well, we'll just start it up at between 5 p.m.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_00: when the clinic closes, and we'll keep it running till 9 a.m.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_00: till the clinic's opened again.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um where some of the bigger customers that we deal with, they generally start from after hours and overflows.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because what we also see is Monday mornings and lunch times is when most of the calls happen.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like receptionists can't keep up because there's just been this huge spike of calls, and then they're playing phone tag, but everyone after their lunch finishes, goes back to work.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_00: So there's all these like mess that they have to go through.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_00: So the bigger clinics tend to do it after hours and overflows.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then the smaller, so like not just solo practitioners, smaller clinics that maybe have part-time staff.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_00: And around this time of year, a few clinics hire like students to come answer their calls.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you know, that can be a bit of a very temporary situation.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_00: They'll show up some days, they won't show up the others.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_00: It can be a very good first point of contact.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_00: So if your clinic doesn't have reliable first point of contact in clinic, then Lingo can pick up, answer the calls, manage the bookings.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_00: Few drivers are actually um obviously capturing appointments.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_00: So clinics are spending thousands and thousands of dollars in marketing and they drive all this lead to their website, and then people want to call them, and then they miss half their calls.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_00: So, like you said, I think it it's it's something like 80% of callers these days don't leave a voicemail.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then I think it's something like 70% won't pick up a phone and call from a number that's not in their contact book.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_00: So when you start playing phone tag, you essentially lost that lead.
• 51:25
  Michael: But you also have the if you do not get back to them within a minute, then they're gone anyway, right?
• 51:31
  Michael: You're not waiting around for hours, you've gone town somewhere else.
• 51:34
  Michael: So you have all of those three things.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_00: 100%.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_00: So it's really on like driving, you know, especially when clinics are running these campaigns and stuff, like driving that capture for the new appointments.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_00: And then for reschedules and cancellations, it's more around like, hey, look, how do we prevent no shows?
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because we've had clinics where people got frustrated that they've called twice to reschedule, no one picks up, and then they go, okay, screw this.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just not going to show up.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then they get charged a cancellation fee, but they go, hey, look, I left you a message.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_00: I called twice.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't on me.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_00: And fair enough.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_00: But also, you know, clinics are busy, they miss calls.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard to always keep up.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_00: And this it's kind of this lose-lose situation where the customer is frustrated and now you have lost business and even missed opportunity because no one else could be booked in then.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's around, cool, like Michael's calling.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_00: How do we reschedule you just today?
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_00: You find out, you know, 8 p.m.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_00: here, and it's probably just before business hour, your time too.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_00: You find out like you have, uh, okay.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, at night, you call up, you go, hey, look, I can't make that appointment because my Christmas lunch has moved.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_00: And all of that matters because that that's that's good customer service.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_00: Now you aren't playing Chaser.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you want to leave a message to then you can handle that escalation.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_00: So instead of like, again, getting your reception staff to do these mundane sort of repetitive tasks that systems can do very easily, you move you can move them away from, hey, look, just keep hammering down the phone calls, do a bunch of this inbound, chase up these, to what does a high value human interaction at our clinic actually look like?
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_00: So to give you three examples for the physios, what we started seeing, like the ones that again, these come from like this has been told to me by clinics.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_00: So this isn't, I can't take credit for these observations, but the clinics that actually do their homework before they come to us and they go, hey, look, we're a physio clinic, you know, very focused on customer experience.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_00: The last thing I want is when someone walks through my clinic, they don't get created because my reception staff is on the phone.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, let's drive this like, hey, how are you, Michael?
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_00: How has your week been since your last appointment?
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_00: And when you're sort of leaving the clinic, take your payment and make sure you're rebooked for the next week.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_00: Don't leave it up to you to rebook.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like, capture that then and there before you even leave the clinic.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_00: For the podiatries, for the podiatry clinics, the most high-valued human interaction, again, is when you're leaving, if your practitioners recommended you footwear or insult, like how do we upsell you that if that exists in the clinic?
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why do you have to go somewhere to go purchase that if you have it in the clinic?
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's a better experience for you and obviously, you know, grows the bottom line for the clinic.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then, you know, on the flip side, we have psychiatrists and psychologists where their highest human interaction, like the value, comes from the first call.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, hey, Tamai, that first new patient call means everything to us.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like we triage them, we figure out what's going wrong, we really like win them over as a human, and then Lingo can step in and do everything else.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: So we were trying to be flexible, is like it's very clinic dependent, it's very sector dependent, depending on how they run their clinic, depending on what team they have, what resourcing they have.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_00: We try to keep it moldable so it's not a one size fits all model, but it's like, you know, there's there's a few models that fit most.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that's really the approach we're taking.
• 54:52
  Michael: Yeah, it's an interesting point.
• 54:53
  Michael: I I was just thinking to myself, how many times I've been somewhere, wherever that somewhere might be, and someone's like, oh, hold on, I've just got to get this phone call.
• 55:00
  Michael: Or you feel really crap because you know you stop you're stopping them from answering the phone because you're dealing with them.
• 55:05
  Michael: So really about that interaction.
• 55:08
  Michael: But that that's absolutely right, isn't it?
• 55:10
  Michael: It it can piss off that situation and cause more pressure and stress.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_00: 100%.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_00: And and when we talk to reception as well, it's the phone isn't their funnest part.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's some receptionists might like it because they get to talk to certain people, but like majority of the reception staff we've talked to, like they end up being on that first call because it's one of the highest drivers of like burnout, is this like context switching chaos, is they have to do this, they have to do that, they have to run around.
• 55:39
  Michael: Yeah.
• 55:40
  Michael: Let me let me ask you something on that, because I know everyone's gonna be asking it, and uh and I've heard it before as well, um, which is that you you get AI to answer your your first call.
• 55:51
  Michael: This is a patient who wants to make a booking to pay for their physio for back pain, whatever it might be.
• 55:56
  Michael: Um now I know in reality two things.
• 55:59
  Michael: Uh number one, we do call tracking and we know what percentage of calls are answered.
• 56:04
  Michael: And whenever a clinic says, we answer all our calls, I know they're talking bullshit.
• 56:07
  Michael: I know that that's not true.
• 56:09
  Michael: We had one clinic who missed 300 calls in three months, right?
• 56:13
  Michael: Um so in reality, you're not answering at best, you're answering 80% of the calls.
• 56:17
  Michael: I don't know if you've got any stats on that.
• 56:19
  Michael: I think you're closer to 70% into account out of hours.
• 56:22
  Michael: You're probably at about 50% at best.
• 56:24
  Michael: So that's the first thing.
• 56:25
  Michael: Second thing I hear is people want to hear a real human voice.
• 56:29
  Michael: So well, oh sorry, our receptionists are so well trained, and they can really talk to them like human beings, and people need to be understood.
• 56:36
  Michael: When I know that most receptionists pick up and go, Yes, how can I help you?
• 56:40
  Michael: And people are just like, I just want to book an appointment.
• 56:42
  Michael: Okay, great, when Wednesday.
• 56:44
  Michael: Yes, we can see on Wednesday, 3 p.m.
• 56:45
  Michael: with John.
• 56:46
  Michael: Yeah, okay, great, that's it.
• 56:48
  Michael: And then a bit of you know, uh so I think it's very played.
• 56:52
  Michael: This whole I need a human to interact with the clinic, it's own otherwise it destroys our brand and and so on and so forth, which I think is nonsense again, because I think not answering the phone destroys your brand, right?
• 57:02
  Michael: Not answering where they are.
• 57:04
  Michael: Yeah, but what are your thoughts on that?
• 57:05
  Michael: And do you have any numbers?
• 57:06
  Michael: Like, do you see when you've brought in AI engineering, have you seen a downtick in numbers of new patients, let's say, on the same number of calls?
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, no, I I have some numbers from when we started early on.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like we're we're doing a big sort of reporting push for the end of the year.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_00: So might might be we'll get some more updated numbers to you.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_00: But like generally what we saw was early on when we started, and this could be early adopter sort of specific numbers, but it was more than 52% of calls, which was shocking.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it tends to be like practitioners run around, reception run out.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_00: The whole team was invested in making sure when the phone rings, we answer.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_00: But even then, it was like 50%, 52% of calls were left unanswered.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_00: At best, we were seeing like yeah, I think around 65, 70% early days.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_00: So there was still this huge volume that was unanswered.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like in fairness, there are stages of receptionists.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's a junior, mid-level senior.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't say AI is as good as a senior receptionist.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like your senior receptionists in clinic will always trump any experience the AI can do if it can answer the phone instantly whenever your caller needs.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_00: But what it's really good at, and you know, like most clinics don't actually have heaps of money to hire very talented receptionists.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_00: What tends to happen is they have very thin margins and they either hire junior or mid-level receptionists or just outsource their calls to a call center or a VA.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now that's where AI becomes a lot more comparable, where when you're just fighting function to function, it becomes so much better.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like when we first started, the biggest concern was majority for my podiatry clinics in rural Australia, it's hey, look, we have an elderly sort of patient base.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_00: They're not gonna like this, this isn't gonna flip with them.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_00: And the response from the elderly patient base was actually surprising, even to us, because they went, oh my God, this AI is incredibly patient.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like if they don't have their um sort of, you know, date up and running, instead don't have their calendar and they're like, oh, can I grab it?
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, yeah, of course, Michael.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't you grab your calendar?
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'll wait for you till you're ready.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like when reception are chasing hundreds, like tens of 20, 30 calls, it becomes really hard for them to keep their call because it's like, man, I missed five calls here because you didn't figure out what date you wanted to be booked in before you call the clinic.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_00: And um, that human element kind of plays in.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the other side to that is like human interactions are always going to be a lot more valuable if done correctly.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like if the receptionist isn't burnt out, if the receptionist is wanting to actually talk to those humans.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_00: But the other side is even if they are, like, I think the e commerce scenario for clothing is really interesting for this one.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like 10 years ago, if someone had gone, oh, would you buy that polo that you're wearing?
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_00: Off a website without trying it on.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_00: You would have been like, that's stupid.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_00: Like, who would buy clothes without even putting it on themselves and trying it?
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then sort of the e-commerce wave happened and figured out a way where actually I could buy it.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_00: I could buy a couple different sizes, try it on, and whichever one I don't like, I could send it back.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_00: Arguably, that should have been a more of a painful process to go through.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, it becomes better for business and it becomes better for you as a consumer because you're like, I don't have to leave my house now.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that's that's really what I like to compare it with.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, even if your receptionist is someone that the callers actually want to talk to, you being available when the callers need you is far more important than you taking the call the right way.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it's sort of like marketing, right?
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'm sure you get a lot of businesses that go, oh, we haven't pushed out content because we're trying to perfect it.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes it just comes down to a volume scheme.
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_00: You just need to do it.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need to always be perfect at it.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_00: You just need to do it.
• 1:00:56
  Michael: The clinical version of that is I need to get thinner before I go to the gym, or I need to get more bendly before I do Pilates, right?
• 1:01:03
  Michael: No, you don't.
• 1:01:05
  Michael: And I think actually an important point there is also consistency.
• 1:01:08
  Michael: It doesn't matter what area of business or your life it is, consistency is always the most important thing, whether you're losing weight or it doesn't matter.
• 1:01:16
  Michael: Consistency, consistency.
• 1:01:18
  Michael: And AI phone answering brings consistency to a level that nothing else will.
• 1:01:23
  Michael: Um and one question I had was uh in terms of um a use case.
• 1:01:30
  Michael: So let's just say I was clinic and I said to you, I get it, I still want to keep my senior receptionist.
• 1:01:36
  Michael: Um and I but I want you around.
• 1:01:38
  Michael: So I want you for out of hours, I want you to answer the phone between 7 a.m.
• 1:01:40
  Michael: and 9 p.m.
• 1:01:41
  Michael: I want you to do just Saturdays from 4 p.m.
• 1:01:44
  Michael: and Sundays, but I also want you to answer calls if um we can't answer them within two rings um throughout a normal day.
• 1:01:52
  Michael: Is that the kind of thing you can do quite easily and and just get up and running?
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, 100%.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that that's where it comes down to that, you know, like everything we've done from day one is to make sure we aren't a friction point in a clinical workflow.
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_00: Like we want to be accessible and available when the clinics need us, not hey, if we're gonna do this, we want to do all of it.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's cool.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like you need the phone to ring three times before you figure out your team's busy or not, then we'll let that happen before it comes to us.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_00: Or hey, you just want us to answer it after hours, or hey, you just want us to answer existing patients and you want to actually handle the new bookings, fine.
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's okay too.
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because like some clinics have a 20-minute intake sort of process that they have to go through.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_00: So we just capture a message.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_00: We're like, hey, Michael, thanks for calling after hours.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_00: We'll get the clinic to call you back if they have that process.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, it really comes down to like mending it to the clinic, clinic's workflow.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_00: So it actually works best for their team.
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, we're trying to build it in a way where it's a multiplayer for the reception staff, not sort of crushing head on head against them.
• 1:02:53
  Michael: And that means so so that's fine.
• 1:02:55
  Michael: But do you also, because I know you do, because I I know a few of your customers, do you also get those customers who are like, okay, reception is a bane of my life.
• 1:03:02
  Michael: I have employed four this year, they've all left.
• 1:03:06
  Michael: It's cost me 40 grand, 50 grand, 60 grand a year.
• 1:03:09
  Michael: Can you just take this over?
• 1:03:10
  Michael: I don't want a receptionist anymore.
• 1:03:12
  Michael: Do you get those sorts of clinical a lot?
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_00: 100%.
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_00: And we have customers right now where we run their front desk 24-7 100% of the time.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_00: And they tend to be certain types of customers as well.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, your clinic needs to operate in a way where that's possible.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_00: Your front desk, all you do is phone answering.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_00: So there's there's a lot of like the homework that needs to go into place to like automate the emails, automate the intake forms, and make sure the practitioners process the payments.
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_00: And like, I think if your clinic is set up in a way, we can actually come in today and handle that front desk for you.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, like it's it's not something we push towards.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you, you know, a lot of this is built on relationships as well.
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, relationships clinic owners have with their admin teams, relationships customers also have with their admin team.
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like they figure out what works best for their clinic, and we're there as a software to support them, whether they want us for one call a month or a thousand calls a month.
• 1:04:10
  Michael: Yeah, I I think you you can't completely dominate your clinic call, particularly in healthcare, because personal relationships matter.
• 1:04:15
  Michael: But I think 100% emails should be automated, in-take stuff should be automated, booking systems should be automated, follow-ups, phone answering, patient nodes like anyone who's not doing patient loads to me is just mind-blowing.
• 1:04:29
  Michael: Um because that pieces clinicians to do an awful lot more face-to-face, do much more on the relationship side, and other people in the clinic as well.
• 1:04:37
  Michael: And I think that's what people forget is this isn't about necessarily can we be better?
• 1:04:42
  Michael: Although I think in most cases they are, it's freeing up time, it's being more productive.
• 1:04:46
  Michael: It's going back to that.
• 1:04:47
  Michael: Um, I'm an accountant, I'll keep using my abacus, thank you very much, rather than using Excel.
• 1:04:51
  Michael: You know, yeah, that it's funny now that anyone would ever say that, but they did, right?
• 1:04:56
  Michael: They they absolutely did.
• 1:04:58
  Michael: And um and you're seeing clinicians do it now.
• 1:05:01
  Michael: Oh no, I don't want all that rubbish, it's never gonna be as good, whilst in the meantime their clinicians are burning out because they're doing patient notes at the end, they're trying to keep up, their receptionists burning out because he's running or he's running around trying to get calls in, and and and I think that's what what's often forgotten.
• 1:05:18
  Michael: 100%.
• 1:05:18
  Michael: I want to have is because this is an interesting one.
• 1:05:22
  Michael: I don't know the answer to this, but should the phone answering service always say that it is AI or should it not?
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_00: So we have done this um from day one.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_00: We have actually mandated it.
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_00: It was very intentional with, you know, like I say, there's a lot of noise in AI.
• 1:05:43
  SPEAKER_00: There are bad players and good players, and it was very intentional with the brand we wanted to create.
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_00: We wanted to create a brand like we will be ahead of compliance.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, we weren't launching outbound calls before outbound became a thing.
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_00: Before it was regulated, we weren't like jumping into spaces for compliance reasons.
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_00: There's two things that we disclose.
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_00: And when Clinics wanted to remove it, we actually didn't let them remove it.
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_00: Was one, the phone call is AI.
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then two, the call is recorded.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now, whether the phone call is AI or not, in the future, I don't know where that will end up.
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like maybe Iran just becomes used to it.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it becomes like any software where you people just expect to interact with an AI.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I think there's a time where it will eventually fall off.
• 1:06:27
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, I think those disclosures were important to us because, you know, like again, imagine you calling a clinic, not knowing what was going on.
• 1:06:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like what we there's two parts of it.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_00: There's a disclosure side of like, hey, this is what's happening.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_00: But then the other side, which was early days, 2023, the voices weren't as good as what we have today.
• 1:06:48
  SPEAKER_00: So this isn't a voicemail, Michael.
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_00: Don't hang up.
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_00: So there's the two parts where telling them it's an AI, but here are the exact things we can help with.
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that's super important.
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like what we can help with and what we can't.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_00: We try to make that as clear as possible.
• 1:07:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like we can help you book an appointment, we can do this, we can do that.
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because as you know, like, you know, you talk about Jim and I, I'm sure you've tried some of those other app building AI tools.
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_00: Every single one, it's how can I help you and a chatbot.
• 1:07:12
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I can go in there and go, like, hey, can you close my front door?
• 1:07:16
  SPEAKER_00: And like 100% of them won't be able to do that.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_00: And you don't actually know how it can help you unless if you try wrangle it for hours and go, oh, can you actually even help me with that?
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_00: Or can you not help me with that?
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, like something that we went down early on was like, let's try to make this interface as obvious as possible, but also have the right disclosures in place just because we were early.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_00: If we were starting today, I don't know what that would actually look like.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_00: I think we'll probably still have those disclosures in place.
• 1:07:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but yeah, that's that's just what we do.
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_00: I I know there's a lot that don't.
• 1:07:47
  Michael: No, that's an interesting one because my intuition would be I wouldn't want to say that it's AI.
• 1:07:53
  Michael: I think it should just be obvious that it is.
• 1:07:56
  Michael: But um from a compliance side, that's actually a really good point.
• 1:08:00
  Michael: Yeah.
• 1:08:01
  Michael: Yeah, that's that's a really interesting point.
• 1:08:03
  Michael: I guess it is important.
• 1:08:04
  Michael: And also the recorded part of it, right?
• 1:08:06
  Michael: Um, when it comes to things like GDPR and so on.
• 1:08:09
  Michael: Um, talking of which then, going on to security, I don't want to get too technical.
• 1:08:14
  Michael: So let's not get too technical on this.
• 1:08:16
  Michael: But I know we we met up recently and uh you were talking to me about the reason that Lingo doesn't have a chat bot that does AI answering or booking or whatever.
• 1:08:25
  Michael: Can you take me through why you don't?
• 1:08:27
  Michael: I think it's an interesting, interesting.
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so one, so the overarching reason is security, partly because text-based AI can easily be manipulated into doing things that it's specifically instructed not to do.
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the way it works is sort of like they call it prompt injection.
• 1:08:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's a bunch of symbols, code, anything that can override what the general instructions for the AI were.
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_00: And there's there's multiple different ways to do it.
• 1:08:55
  SPEAKER_00: You can just put it in the text bot, or you can go book a certain type of appointment in the clinic using their online booking widget, and then you can go extract that information using the chatbot, and then you can make it do funny things.
• 1:09:07
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's there's a hundred ways around this.
• 1:09:09
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, there's companies that just specialize in doing this.
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I know there are chatbots that exist, and I know we've also got through to some patient-sensitive data.
• 1:09:18
  SPEAKER_00: So we can we have gone into chatbots that exist on Clinic's website and gone, cool, my name's Michael, I've actually forgotten my last name and I've actually forgotten my date of birth.
• 1:09:28
  SPEAKER_00: Not that simply, but like, you know, you go through the process and it will spread it out to you.
• 1:09:33
  SPEAKER_00: And when it's chat, you can run a script on the web to do that over and over and over again to go through a whole list of names and make sure you clean out their entire clinical database and you can potentially Can I just ask a question?
• 1:09:50
  Michael: So what you're saying is if I had the right tech skills, I could go to a clinic using an AI chatbot, not any, um maybe some are safe, but I could go in and I could get their entire patient database, all their details, all the conditions, the patient notes, everything.
• 1:10:05
  SPEAKER_00: So it comes down to what it's actually connected with.
• 1:10:08
  SPEAKER_00: So for example, if you want the chatbot to handle reschedules, it will have to connect to your patient record and it will have to connect to the calendar and it'll have to connect to practitioners.
• 1:10:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if your chatbot is also capturing payments and that practice management system specifically exposes the payments API key.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_00: So you have that data flowing in, then there is certain things that it can pull out.
• 1:10:31
  SPEAKER_00: It won't pull out card details because most practice management systems are sensible enough not to push out stuff that they're not meant to.
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, it comes down to the implementation of how it accesses it, what verifications it goes through, and why it's actually accessing it.
• 1:10:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, with voice, security risk doesn't exist as heavily because you can't object a bunch of symbols.
• 1:10:53
  SPEAKER_00: All you can do is switch languages.
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_00: But the security element to what we do in voice around you calling up and trying to get my data, there's still a lot of stuff that we have to do to make sure that doesn't happen.
• 1:11:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's not easily translatable to a chatbot.
• 1:11:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's that's basically what we're working through is if we did launch it, what are the features that it won't actually do?
• 1:11:14
  SPEAKER_00: It may not be as powerful as our voice tool, but like how do we let customers use a chatbot to do what they want to do without doing all the complex things that gets into sort of the deeper data?
• 1:11:25
  SPEAKER_00: So that's where we're sitting currently is like there's a safer version out there, which is less sort of feature-rich, but a lot easier to maintain in terms of compliance and security.
• 1:11:38
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, with voice, the other thing that a lot of people don't know is even if you call me on a private number and you have done something that is on paper illegal, we are like a tier two sort of telco reseller.
• 1:11:51
  SPEAKER_00: We can launch a complaint with that timestamp and pull out that number.
• 1:11:56
  SPEAKER_00: We can get the right telcos to actually go through the processes required to go call his name was Michael, just whereby's base, all number verifications, or all number issuing goes through a verification process.
• 1:12:08
  SPEAKER_00: So they can actually pinpoint it down to who called and what did they do.
• 1:12:13
  SPEAKER_00: Very different to when you launch it on a website where anyone can hide their IP, jump on, and like start brute forcing their way through it.
• 1:12:19
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, we've kind of like played it safe and gone like very new, very, you know, sensitive.
• 1:12:25
  SPEAKER_00: Let's see what sort of like attacks are happening in the space before we just go and launch it out.
• 1:12:30
  Michael: Yeah, and there are some chatbots out there.
• 1:12:32
  Michael: Do you think any of them are, from what you've seen, fully secure and you'd be comfortable using them if you're a clinical?
• 1:12:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I mean, I haven't tried all of them.
• 1:12:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I generally am not, I don't understand website chatbots that integrate.
• 1:12:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like what I do understand, there's some like great free chatbots out there that sort of scrape the website, summarize it.
• 1:12:55
  SPEAKER_00: So you can go on and you're like, hey, I want to book an appointment.
• 1:12:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, here you go, Michael.
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the link, click on it, go book an appointment.
• 1:13:01
  SPEAKER_00: I get those.
• 1:13:01
  SPEAKER_00: Those are amazing.
• 1:13:02
  SPEAKER_00: It makes you navigate the website super quickly.
• 1:13:04
  SPEAKER_00: What I don't get is all that information is already on the website.
• 1:13:08
  SPEAKER_00: Why does it need to tap into that sensitive data piece?
• 1:13:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like the risk is too high and the returns are too low.
• 1:13:15
  SPEAKER_00: You're already on the website.
• 1:13:16
  SPEAKER_00: You can use these chatbots to navigate to booking, which is like the conversion element very easily.
• 1:13:22
  SPEAKER_00: They generally actually end up taking more back and forth.
• 1:13:25
  SPEAKER_00: You go, Michael, enter, thanks, Michael.
• 1:13:28
  SPEAKER_00: What is your last name?
• 1:13:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it's it's so much easier to fill out a form than it is actually to go through a chatbot to do the booking.
• 1:13:34
  SPEAKER_00: You can visualize a full calendar.
• 1:13:36
  SPEAKER_00: You can go, you know, Clinico does that amazing thing where the triangles, circles, and squares.
• 1:13:41
  SPEAKER_00: You can visualize it.
• 1:13:42
  SPEAKER_00: You go, cool, let's lock it in.
• 1:13:43
  Michael: But particularly because it's connected to Clinico anyway, right?
• 1:13:45
  Michael: And Clinico is about as easy to use uh a system as possible, right?
• 1:13:49
  Michael: It's it's kind of idiot-proof, bulletproof, generally.
• 1:13:52
  Michael: Yeah.
• 1:13:53
  Michael: But yeah, yeah, that's that's a good point as well.
• 1:13:56
  Michael: Why, why have a chatbot?
• 1:13:57
  Michael: Aren't you better off using your chatbot to be a WhatsApp where people can ask questions to the team as opposed to something that the same thing as online booking or phoning up?
• 1:14:07
  Michael: Good point.
• 1:14:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:14:09
  SPEAKER_00: And WhatsApp again, so I was gonna say WhatsApp again, WhatsApp, SMS, all of those costs money for every interaction.
• 1:14:16
  SPEAKER_00: So anything that is a barrier to start with is gonna have low, lower sort of, you know, tie kickers kicking around to see what they can do with your um data.
• 1:14:27
  SPEAKER_00: So it's always like a good sort of first phase of like security where it's like, cool, this costs money.
• 1:14:32
  SPEAKER_00: So if for them to get meaningful value out of it, you know, if they're spending thousands of dollars trying to break it, it is your data even worth that much.
• 1:14:39
  SPEAKER_00: So it becomes a barrier.
• 1:14:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's not completely foolproof, but any barriers better than no barriers.
• 1:14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:14:45
  Michael: We've had you on for an hour and 23 minutes now.
• 1:14:47
  Michael: We I said 40 minutes.
• 1:14:49
  Michael: Jesus.
• 1:14:50
  Michael: But it's been a session.
• 1:14:52
  Michael: I want to ask um questions.
• 1:14:54
  Michael: Kind of the same question, but put yourself in in the shoes of a clinic owner.
• 1:14:57
  Michael: Again, you're non-technical.
• 1:14:59
  Michael: What should give me the things, bullet points?
• 1:15:02
  Michael: What should clinic owners ask of an AI phone answering vendor or service um about things like data and access and storage and security?
• 1:15:12
  Michael: What are the like what are the key things?
• 1:15:14
  Michael: And also to make sure it's not a chat GPT wrapper, for example, that's just built by a kid.
• 1:15:18
  Michael: Like, not the kids are bad.
• 1:15:20
  Michael: They're innovative.
• 1:15:21
  Michael: Um, but but but um yeah, so what questions?
• 1:15:25
  Michael: Give them to me.
• 1:15:25
  Michael: What would you ask?
• 1:15:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, the first most obvious one is especially for healthcare, it's you know, do you have you built this from the ground up and do you own all the data?
• 1:15:35
  SPEAKER_00: Because if it isn't built specifically for that, it's most likely going somewhere else.
• 1:15:40
  SPEAKER_00: Something to keep in mind, not a not necessarily a question to ask, is compliance often falls a lot shorter than it needs to to match the security required for to this day and age.
• 1:15:51
  SPEAKER_00: So obviously, you know, make sure it's GDPR compliant, make sure they have all like the right security principles.
• 1:15:56
  SPEAKER_00: The reality is the clinics will have to do their homework.
• 1:15:59
  SPEAKER_00: The teams they're buying from, are they engineers or have they come from a marketing background that are wrapping up different products and just selling it?
• 1:16:07
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, they'll have to go do a lot of this homework by themselves to figure out like, do other people they're buying from, have they built before?
• 1:16:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then two, like looping back to the question like you asked earlier is about funding.
• 1:16:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, can they actually support me to what needs to happen?
• 1:16:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because at the end of the day, like it's all well and good, but at the end of the day, it is the clinic's livelihood.
• 1:16:30
  SPEAKER_00: It is the front door to their clinic when a new customer calls up and they go, hey, look, I'm thinking about this.
• 1:16:35
  SPEAKER_00: What do I do?
• 1:16:36
  SPEAKER_00: You don't want a system that's half baked.
• 1:16:39
  SPEAKER_00: Also looking at systems that are specialized.
• 1:16:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, this is important.
• 1:16:42
  SPEAKER_00: Again, looping back to a question where some clinics may have implemented tools and they might not have worked.
• 1:16:47
  SPEAKER_00: It comes down to handling nuances, is you want to call up, you want to book an appointment for yourself, you want to make sure your partner is booked in right after you.
• 1:16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Most tools won't be able to do that.
• 1:16:58
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, like that's what we've tried to specialize in is call answering, it sounds easy.
• 1:17:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's managing bookings, handling FAQs and escalating messages, but that managing booking piece is extremely nuanced and it's extremely nuanced for each clinic.
• 1:17:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I think like going through like the nuances that you may see in your clinic and just straight up asking them is like if this scenario happened, like what would the system do?
• 1:17:20
  SPEAKER_00: And just like going through some of those like five hard workflows that you might see day to day in your clinic and actually going through it because everyone will tell you everything does everything.
• 1:17:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the reality is most tools will fall short.
• 1:17:34
  SPEAKER_00: So pull out some nuances that you see often that your reception might be in struggle with, and then shoot it off to the providers to go, hey, how would you handle this?
• 1:17:42
  Michael: What about um around storage of data?
• 1:17:45
  Michael: What should people be asking that?
• 1:17:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I think that again comes down to like whether it's built from the ground up and they own the servers.
• 1:17:51
  SPEAKER_00: So when you talk about data storage, it's like make sure they own the servers and all the data is stored in their servers.
• 1:18:00
  SPEAKER_00: Again, coming back to like sort of like, you know, even with the best intentions, even if it's compliant, because you can compliantly store data overseas, but it just runs the risk if if the companies they're working with end up changing anything or end up being non-compliant, that creates this like domino effect that comes back down to the clinic.
• 1:18:19
  Michael: How do you know and how can you tell if a product is built from the ground up?
• 1:18:23
  Michael: Because uh anyone can say, yeah, yeah, we built this whilst it's a chat GPT wrapper, which they did build.
• 1:18:29
  Michael: How does the ordinary person know?
• 1:18:31
  SPEAKER_00: Honestly, this is this is where I say like clinics have a really hard job at sourcing good tech because it is really hard to know.
• 1:18:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like you are essentially relying on them to disclose it in their terms of service, to disclose it during your calls around like what platforms they use.
• 1:18:48
  SPEAKER_00: If you see companies like VAPI or Retail, there are all these American companies that let builders come and build on top of them.
• 1:18:56
  SPEAKER_00: And then they use Zapier or make dot com.
• 1:18:59
  SPEAKER_00: You may be familiar with it, Michael.
• 1:19:01
  SPEAKER_00: For the listeners, that may not be.
• 1:19:03
  SPEAKER_00: It helps you stitch a bunch of tools together.
• 1:19:05
  SPEAKER_00: Again, these tools are not made for healthcare.
• 1:19:08
  SPEAKER_00: You can pay a lot of money to get them compliant for healthcare, but quite often, if the companies aren't funded, this is probably something to look for.
• 1:19:15
  SPEAKER_00: If they aren't funded, they aren't making those commitments.
• 1:19:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like we make minimum$10,000 a month commitments with our vendors to make sure that we can actually host their proprietary code in our servers.
• 1:19:28
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, like you have to make these big commitments.
• 1:19:30
  SPEAKER_00: So, like there's there's a few things that you can look at.
• 1:19:32
  SPEAKER_00: One, there's like the engineering team.
• 1:19:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like, do they actually have a team that's more than one person that's building?
• 1:19:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then two, do they have a capital where compliance and stuff make sense?
• 1:19:43
  SPEAKER_00: Or have you heard other clinics use them and they've been going well?
• 1:19:47
  Michael: Yeah, well, I'm I'm not sure about other clinics using them because I know there are some clinics using some nonsense.
• 1:19:52
  Michael: So I don't think that's necessarily particularly because it's easy to pull the wool over people's eyes.
• 1:19:57
  Michael: And what I would say is there's not a product.
• 1:20:00
  Michael: On the planet.
• 1:20:00
  Michael: Uber, there's no way that that app is 100% Uber.
• 1:20:04
  Michael: It's generally acceptable in tech to take um certain elements from other products and bring them in.
• 1:20:12
  Michael: You know, that that that makes a lot of sense a lot of the time.
• 1:20:14
  Michael: But what you can't completely wrap something.
• 1:20:17
  Michael: I think a really important one there is um if a company's been funded, properly funded, no one is funding a GVT wrapper.
• 1:20:24
  Michael: Well, they shouldn't be.
• 1:20:25
  Michael: It's very it's much likely.
• 1:20:26
  Michael: So if being funded is important, I would absolutely look at their company's house in the same way as if I if I hire a builder to build me an extension for 100 grand and check their company's house to see how much money they got in their bank account so they can pay for the bank, you know?
• 1:20:40
  Michael: And so check the company's house in the UK of of of that company, check the funding status.
• 1:20:46
  Michael: I'm not saying that you can't, because I think there is quite a cool company out there that we both know don't want to mention them that don't have funding that I think are okay.
• 1:20:54
  Michael: So it doesn't disqualify you, but I think it is an important factor.
• 1:20:58
  Michael: I would check the people and the team, as you say.
• 1:21:01
  Michael: Like when you have a we are AI clinic phone answering X and there's no team on the page and there's no history and there's no company's house at the bomb and there isn't an address.
• 1:21:12
  Michael: No.
• 1:21:13
  Michael: What are they having?
• 1:21:14
  Michael: Um and then the history of the team as well.
• 1:21:17
  Michael: Um, you know, what else have they done in life?
• 1:21:19
  Michael: If if they've done, as you say, if they were a a Google ads manager or a Facebook ads person and they're suddenly the CEO of a AI phone answering service, it's pretty unlikely.
• 1:21:32
  Michael: You know, bet a few quid on the fact that they don't have a decent product.
• 1:21:35
  Michael: But I think if you because I think a lot of people have all these security concerns.
• 1:21:40
  Michael: I don't think there is a security concern if you have chosen the right company.
• 1:21:45
  Michael: The same, of course, goes with your management system, right?
• 1:21:48
  Michael: If you choose something completely crap, there are security issues.
• 1:21:51
  Michael: It's just the way it goes.
• 1:21:54
  SPEAKER_00: No, 100%.
• 1:21:55
  SPEAKER_00: And you you wouldn't you wouldn't have those concerns using Clinico and it's sort of like the same thing, is like you make sure you pick the ones that should align with the similar values.
• 1:22:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I think another good way to see this is pricing, actually.
• 1:22:09
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I came across this veterinary AI phone answering software, and it was like$79 for a thousand calls.
• 1:22:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I can tell you our cost is a lot higher than that.
• 1:22:19
  SPEAKER_00: Even with the credits we have with Microsoft, we we couldn't, we just could not do that many calls for that much.
• 1:22:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like there has to be something going on there where the math isn't mathing.
• 1:22:29
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, a lot of times when I'm like when clinics are asking, and it's such a hard decision to make, and I actually don't know what the right way to go about.
• 1:22:37
  SPEAKER_00: It would be like if I was a clinic owner, I would be like, holy shit, there's just so much noise.
• 1:22:41
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how to navigate through it all.
• 1:22:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I kind of go like, if you are sort of on the edge, instead of making a decision just for the sake of making a decision, I would probably go just hold off till you have the time to actually review it and make the right decision.
• 1:22:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because it is like hiring an employee.
• 1:22:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like you need to put effort into onboarding, implementing, and doing everything well.
• 1:23:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you don't, you'll probably be in the 70% of businesses that try to implement AI and fail because you didn't have the time, resourcing, or the research to do before you implemented it.
• 1:23:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:23:15
  Michael: On the pricing element, I think that's important.
• 1:23:18
  Michael: High pricing is not necessarily bad.
• 1:23:20
  Michael: I mean, it's bad on the balance sheet, but it's not necessarily bad.
• 1:23:23
  Michael: But also, I wouldn't just just so people don't get too confused.
• 1:23:26
  Michael: If something is free, that doesn't necessarily make it bad either.
• 1:23:30
  Michael: Take Heidi, for example.
• 1:23:32
  Michael: Long term, it's probably bad because you're like, oh my god, this is incredible.
• 1:23:35
  Michael: It's free.
• 1:23:35
  Michael: I've got this incredible service, and they're like four grand a month.
• 1:23:38
  Michael: And you're like, fuck shit.
• 1:23:40
  Michael: That's the whole point, right?
• 1:23:42
  Michael: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:23:43
  Michael: But at the moment, I do not think that, as far as I know, there is a single free solution of AI phone answering out there that is playing the Heidi game of let's loss make by hundreds of millions and then we'll make our money.
• 1:23:57
  Michael: I don't think anyone's doing that in AI phone answering, partly because the market is just too noisy and it's it there's just too much competition out there.
• 1:24:04
  SPEAKER_00: 100%.
• 1:24:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:24:05
  SPEAKER_00: No, that's that's true as well.
• 1:24:07
  Michael: Listen, I it's been an hour and a half, over an hour and a half.
• 1:24:10
  Michael: Thank you so much.
• 1:24:10
  Michael: It's been a really good conversation.
• 1:24:12
  Michael: If if anyone's to get into in touch with you, um, I guess go to lingo.com, uh, l y-n-go.com.ai.
• 1:24:22
  Michael: I'll I'll tell you a little crazy story.
• 1:24:24
  Michael: I in 2017 I bought an AI domain, Zumon.ai.
• 1:24:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:24:29
  Michael: I was building like an AI company and then I decided against it because I realized it cost too much money.
• 1:24:35
  Michael: Um and so get in touch with you, lingo.ai.
• 1:24:39
  Michael: Um, and if people want to, I'm sure you're open to people asking you questions and popping you an email.
• 1:24:44
  Michael: What's your email?
• 1:24:45
  Michael: I'll put it in the notes for what's your email?
• 1:24:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's tanme, my first name at lingo.ai.
• 1:24:50
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to be a clinic owner, you don't have to have want to purchase our product.
• 1:24:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like if it's anything clinical and AI, like feel free to drop us a note.
• 1:25:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, also happy to refer you to the right people if we can't help.
• 1:25:04
  Michael: Amazing.
• 1:25:04
  Michael: And I can attest to that because we've had a lot of fun, cool conversations in the past.
• 1:25:08
  Michael: And uh yeah, so yeah, get in touch.
• 1:25:10
  Michael: Um, but otherwise, thank you so much.
• 1:25:12
  Michael: It's been really useful.
• 1:25:13
  Michael: Umks for having me.
• 1:25:16
  Michael: Have a good one, Michael.