On this bonus episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Ashu Dubey. Ashu is the CEO & Co-Founder of Gleen AI, a highly accurate and capable generative AI solution for e-Commerce that boosts online sales and automates customer support. We talk about aligning AI capabilities with customer expectations, incorporating AI into help desks, editing and customizing AI responses, and so much more!
Ashu Dubey is the CEO and Co-Founder of Gleen, a leading generative AI-based customer service solution.
As a serial AI entrepreneur, Ashu previously was CTO and Co-Founder of 12 Labs, an early pioneer in AI-powered personalized health recommendations.
Ashu led top of the funnel user growth at LinkedIn, where he significantly accelerated user growth and was instrumental in launching innovative products such as LinkedIn Events.
Ashu has an MBA from UCLA, attended IIT Dhanbad, and consistently merges technology and innovation to shape industry landscapes.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Ashu Dubey
People should expect that AI won't be solving all your problems.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. I'm your host, Chase Clymer.
And today I'm welcoming the show Ashu Dubey. He's the CEO and co-founder of Gleen AI. They are a highly accurate and capable generative AI solution for Ecommerce that boosts online sales and automates customer support.
Ashu, welcome to the show.
Ashu Dubey
Thanks, Chase. Really excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. So you got a wonderful elevator pitch there. But just explain to me, if I use your guys' app, what do you guys help me do on my Shopify store?
Ashu Dubey
So if you're a Shopify store owner, Gleen will help you increase the profitability of the store in two main ways.
One, it will act as a virtual store concierge for your users, helping them find products, make a purchase decision, driving convergence on the store. And second, it will automate your support query. People asking questions like, “What is my order? What is my return? What's the return policy?” Those kinds of questions, the AI will answer. And it will automate up to 70% to 80% of your support queries, and that will reduce your support costs.
So it helps in both ways by increasing sales and reducing costs.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing.
Where did you come up with the idea to work on this problem, to solve this problem? What was going on?
Ashu Dubey
On the customer support side–our roots are on the customer support side and I've been very active in the AI discord, gaming, and web3 communities. The customer support in Discord sucks. If you have not used Discord, it will take you 20 minutes to just figure out how to go into a particular server and interact with people. That's really ridiculous in this day and age.
So we decided to fix the customer support problem in Discord in the beginning. That's where we began.
Then we started seeing people… There is a fair bit of overlap in Discord and Ecommerce, and some of the Ecommerce users who are buying products are also in Discord. So they started calling us, saying, “Hey, we have a store, could I use this bot in my store?”
And we started getting more and more of these requests. And that's when we thought, “There is a bigger problem that we can go and create an impact on,” and that's how we came into Ecommerce.
And once we came into Ecommerce, the field was wide open. The state of AI in Ecommerce is not very advanced. And we thought we had a chance and I'm glad we did.
Chase Clymer
So in the last year, there's been a lot of buzz about generative AI, and there's been a lot of negative news about how it hallucinates or it can be biased.
How does that play into this whole component here? Is it too early for retailers to really find the benefits of generative AI? Or have you guys found a solution to use it on?
Ashu Dubey
So the concern around hallucination is actually legitimate. That's one of the key problems we ourselves encountered when we started going into AI and trying to fix the problem. So we oriented our whole company around an AI that doesn't hallucinate, and we fixed it.
So we were the first company to claim and actually do zero hallucination AI. And as such, we have a bit of a trust on that front that our political currency, if you will, on that front in the AI community.
And so I think it is a deal breaker for customers. For serious businesses, you need an AI that doesn't hallucinate, it should give reliable answers, I shouldn't have to go and double check the answers that an AI is giving. That's a deal breaker.
In addition to that, there are a bunch of other things also. And so, yes, the concerns around the negatives of AI are legitimate, but if you see the benefits that an AI can provide, if you can mitigate the risks around the hallucination and reliability, then the benefits are immense.
The upside is unlimited while the downside is... If you can mitigate the downside.
Chase Clymer
If I'm like a scrappy store owner out there, I have a DIY mentality. Why can't I just use something like ChatGPT in my store?
Ashu Dubey
Yeah. And so if you start using a ChatGPT, you can get a prototype going within a weekend. But the problem is you will start running into the problems of one hallucination. So the bot will sometimes answer questions that it should not answer, or that it just makes up a fact out of thin air.
So that's one problem. Your customers will get 50-50, sometimes correct, sometimes incorrect.
The second problem is how do you maintain it going forward? Let's say you are a store owner, and you have to connect with Shopify. You may have some FAQs. You need to build all these integration points.
The third is you probably are using a help desk like Zendesk or FreshDesk. In that case, you also need to connect with Zendesk so that your support agents can answer the tickets that the AI is not able to answer.
So building all of this in a scalable way that's maintained is non-trivial. It can take you months to get there.
Unless you have a large developer team that is dedicated to doing this, I would say do not do that.
Chase Clymer
If I make the decision that I want to implement something like this into my store for customer support, what are some of the pitfalls I should be looking at to avoid?
Ashu Dubey
Absolutely. I think one is around the expectations. So far, you should not expect AI to solve all your problems.
In the beginning, when I would speak with customers, I usually lead with, “If you had a magic wand, what would you want the AI to do?” I hear a lot of wishful requirements, which is great because then I can map where the tech is and what the users want.
But then in the very next question, I need to bring them to the ground saying, “Yes, that's great, but AI can do A.B and maybe C and D in the future, while E and F are not going to happen in the next two years.”
And so people should expect that AI won't be solving all their problems.
People, they look at the AI solution from a point perspective; sometimes they ignore the maintenance aspect of a generative AI solution. It needs to constantly relearn. If a bot is making a mistake, you need to be able to give it feedback so that it can improve next time.
So when you are looking at a solution, are you looking at just the point solution at the moment, or are you also looking at how you are going to use it in the future, from a maintenance aspect?
The third one is the security and regulatory compliance aspect. If you're new, it needs to be software type to your data. Your customer's data and their security and privacy is paramount.
If you are in specific industries like healthcare, you may be looking at a HIPAA compliance solution as well. Those are the three main things.
And finally, on the business side, I would say, always, always test the metrics impact.
I'm a seller, and so we will tell you we can sell you the moon, but you should always test. I've also been on LinkedIn running lots of growth experiments, so what we think and what's actually just come out, they can be very different.
So make sure you test it in your environment, in your store, to see whether it's generating the ROI that you initially expected it for.
Chase Clymer
Alrighty.
So if I am a retailer out there and you're talking to me and I'm just like, look, there's no way I'm ever going to have AI just automatically interact with my customers. What are you going to say to me?
Ashu Dubey
The first thing I would say is, “I understand where you're coming from. You're not the first one. And it's totally fine to take incremental steps towards generative AI. And it's not an all or nothing proposition. So you can take small steps.”
And what do small steps look like? One, you can use AI as an answer provider to your support agents or whoever your internal team is for internal users.
For example, let's say a user is asking a question. You ask the same question to an AI, see the answer, and whether you like the answer or not, depending on that, you use it. Then you can edit that answer from the AI.
So your users are not interacting with the AI, your agents are, your support reps are, they’re interacting with the AI and then editing that answer. So that will be the first step.
The second is you basically add it as an app inside your help desk or on your email. So the live agents, they don't have to ask in a different interface. Essentially, it's part of their interface. With the click of a button, they can use the AI answer or they can decide to use their own answers or they can edit the AI answer.
So that's literally the crawl, walk and run approach. So this is the walk, and the run approach is of course, once you get enough confidence, once you have tuned the AI to your liking and for correctness, you can expose it incrementally to answer automatic questions to the customers.
And even then I would say take a percentage approach. So in AB testing, we always go with 1% exposure, 5% exposure, 50% exposure, and then 100% exposure to the customers.
You could take the same approach with the automatic response to your customers. So the key is to get incremental confidence and take next steps, but do not sit and do nothing. That is the riskiest thing you will do because your competitors are going to use AI. Many of them are already using it.
Chase Clymer
Fantastic advice.
Alright. So what if I am listening to this episode and I'm pretty interested in checking out a Gleen or solution like it, how much lift does it require for me as a busy merchant?
Do I have to train this data myself? How does it learn these answers?
Ashu Dubey
Yeah. On the lift side, it depends from solution to solution and also on your needs.
For example, with Gleen, if you are on one of these Ecommerce platforms like Shopify or BigCommerce, and you're using one of the core help desks, like for example, Zendesk or Gorgias, you really don't need to do much. You can do it in a self-survey, get going in less than five minutes.
We have a Shopify app as well. Just search for Gleen accurate answers, and it will come up. Just go and install it. It will return everything. You don't have to do anything, and we will let you know via periodic communications when and what you need to do, if you need to do anything.
But the goal here is to make it as easy as possible.
That's for the sales part, but let's say you need a specific tools integration, the tool integration that we don't have. You talk to our team. We are very responsive. We make it possible in 1-2 weeks.
Watever new integration requests we receive from our existing customers, we prioritize it all the time.
Chase Clymer
Awesome, Ashu.
Now, if I've not been really paying attention to the last 15 minutes of this podcast, what are the top 3 things I should remember about Gleen compared to the rest of the competition?
Ashu Dubey
Yeah. That's a great question.
Glean does not hallucinate. The answers are extremely reliable, and that's critical for you as you evaluate different solutions. 80% of our tech is focused on preventing hallucination. We give you your own LLMs if you need one, or we default with the best that's out there.
Glean is a unified suite of AI services. So don't just think of Gleen as either a support solution or a product sales solution, think of it as like a one-gen AI for all your Ecommerce needs that you will ever need. It's a platform where you can launch multiple AI.
Maybe your marketing team is looking for an AI solution. Gleen can meet that. You can create different profiles within Gleen to do that. If your sales team is looking for a specific one, maybe replacing a quiz on the website, Gleen AI can do that.
And of course on the support, that's where our core strengths are.
And finally, on the third side, Gleen is extremely compliant. We take your user data and privacy very seriously. We are SOC 2 type 2 compliant, which is the highest compliance grade you can achieve in the US. So you can trust Gleen to keep your stores data, your customers data secure and confidential.
And we worked with very large retailers already. So if you are looking for references or case studies, go to our website, check out some of the case studies.
Chase Clymer
That's a great answer.
And I feel you guys had a special for listeners and viewers.
Ashu Dubey
100%. I'm glad you asked. Exclusive to your viewers and listeners, we got $250 worth of credits on Gleen’s paid plans. This means you get access to the advanced features and also dedicated support from our team. So feel free to avail that opportunity.
Chase Clymer
We'll make sure to link to the proper program in the show notes. And again, 250 free credits for any of Glean's paid plans if you go to that link in the show notes.
Ashu, I can't thank you enough for coming on the show today and sharing all your insights.
Before we go, is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience?
Ashu Dubey
One thing is just... I talked about everything, but one thing I probably didn't touch on is the omnichannel aspect of Gleen.
Usually, you don't interact just with users on one channel. You're interacting with them on websites, on email, on WhatsApp, on Instagram. Gleen is an omni channel solution so it can meet your users where they are. It's the same AI but across all the channels. So that's one thing I didn't add and it's super important.
Chase Clymer
Oh no, that is absolutely important. Ashu, you've been a wealth of knowledge. I'm sure I'll have you back on the show talking more about generative AI in the future. We're going to have all the links in the show notes today.
If people want to get a hold of you, Ashu, where can they find you?
Ashu Dubey
They can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Ashu Dubey - Gleen. And also on Twitter, my handle is Ashu Dubey. Actually, my Twitter handle is dubeyism. And so just on Twitter, you can find me with that handle.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Ashu Dubey
Thanks Chase. Thanks so much.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
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