Adam Torres and Vinod Kumar Ramachandran discuss retail and AI Agents.
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Show Notes:
How have consumers’ expectations changed when it comes to online shopping? In this episode, Adam Torres and Vinod Kumar Ramachandran, Co-Founder & CEO at Big Sur AI, explore online shopping and Big Sur AI.
About Big Sur AI
Big Sur AI transforms the shopping experience with an always-on AI Sales Agent designed to engage shoppers and increase conversion rates. By providing real-time assistance, the platform delivers expert shopping guidance 24/7, ensuring a seamless and personalized experience.
With advanced natural language processing, Big Sur AI understands any query, offers high-quality recommendations, and provides instant answers to complex questions. The platform enhances browsing with dynamic content, predictive AI prompts, and personalized product suggestions, ultimately driving higher engagement and increasing basket size.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right, today I have Vinod Kumar Ramachandran on the line, and he’s co founder and CEO over at Big Sur AI.
Vinod, welcome to the show. Hi, Adam. Great to be here. Thanks for hosting me. All right. we got a lot to talk about here today. So we’ll talk about revolutionizing retail and AI agents and, tools. we got a lot to cover. And when we think about AI in general, there’s a lot of business owners, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of executives out here that listened to this show, I guess just to take a step or two back, but no, before we get into Big Sur AI, maybe talk to me a little bit more just about you got into tech in general.
Like, where’d all that begin for you? Well I started my career as a software engineer several years ago, you know, working for Motorola, building many wireless solutions, you know, some of the 4G technologies that we use today, or we used to use earlier I contributed to some of them. And so that’s what got me interested into tech, which then eventually led me to spending a long time at Google building some of the.
Most exciting consumer products like chrome and then many you know, advertising and shopping related products when you were working on those products. I’m curious, like, taking me back to the early days a little bit more. Like, what was that? Like, working in that big, infrastructure of Google or just in general, what was that?
Like, Well, I think my early days at Google were some of the best in my career in terms of the kind of innovation that was going on. You know, just across the company. I felt like, you a kid in a candy store. That’s what I’m thinking. It’s like, go ahead. Yeah, it’s I think the best part is like the amazing talent that the company had at the time.
And everybody doing some really interesting work, you know, almost every launch was you know, impacting users in a really positive way. And you can feel the energy and the vibe at the time, you know, it was it was really wonderful. And I think I almost feel like every. Tech employee should go through some kind of experience like that in their career, not just at Google, but anywhere where, you know, you’re building some really awesome stuff that reaches the consumers or your customers in a profound way.
Now, did you know maybe you did, maybe you didn’t, I don’t know if this was like a specialty or something that you already had figured out or in general. So obviously correct me on this, but did you know you were going to. Start like going further and further into AI. And did you also know that one day you’d be an entrepreneur, like a co founder?
Well, I think the desire to start a company and build something with a team myself you know, this has been a desire for. A few years now, and so it’s not like an overnight thing before we started this company. So we’ve been thinking about this for many years. But you know, the evolution of AI, you know, many people used to work on machine learning, which then, you know, kind of like transition now to AI.
I think there was a time where. It was very clear to me and to my co founder that there is a major destruction and a shift that is happening. And so from a timing perspective, it was perfect to start a company because a lot of like the ground was shifting underneath. And so there are a lot of opportunities to go build some interesting new things for in various verticals.
So we are working in the retail and e commerce space. But more generally, I think this opened up a big sort of opportunity to go build new companies. Hmm. so with your skill set, your background, obviously you’re in, correct me if I’m off in this, you were, you were in NorCal, right?
Yes, that’s right. I’m in the Bay Area. Correct. That’s what I thought. I mean, obviously lots of contacts, lots of individuals there. You’re, you know, Google alum, a lot of different things you could do. How did you settle on Big Sur AI? Like, how’d you settle on the concept? Let’s start there maybe.
Yeah. So as I said, you know, I spent a long time at Google working on, Many advertising and shopping related products. and one of the things that I observed from close is that every brand, as you know is spending on ads on either Google or meta or another ad platform just to keep up. And so I’ve been on the side where they’re spending all this money, but usually these advertising ecosystems favor, the largest enterprises will have the deeper pockets, and what happens is the smaller and mid sized businesses are just like kind of forced to spend more and more.
Just to keep up right and and over time you start seeing diminishing returns and you know, I refer to this as like the Google or the meta tax that brands have to pay in order to stay in business, right? And what happens is that what they called it Customer acquisition costs or the CAC continues to go up.
And even when you’re spending more and you’re bringing those users to your site, the conversion rates have basically remained stagnant for a long time. And so, how could you kind of like do something about this imbalance? And that’s what, really inspired us to think about a solution.
Think about a platform that can we build this platform that could level the playing field for. All brands, regardless of their size, right? And I strongly believe, the advent of a I. That this imbalance can only widen if simply the status quo continues. And if nobody does anything about it, so that’s why, you know, we wanted to kind of address some of the inefficiencies that we saw too many businesses sort of wasting their budget on ads that weren’t generating enough value.
And so can we actually change that? And that’s how this whole idea of mixer AI was born. You know, can we help every brand compete and thrive regardless of their size, because ultimately. That’s what leads to more consumer choices. Yeah. and many people, I would argue, I liked the way you word that the meta or the Google tax is just a given just to, just to keep up, even if, even if they, you know, intuitively or not by intuitively, excuse me from your numbers or data.
Right. I’m spending more, but we’re staying pretty level. And you’re like, what is this? Like that diminishing return on this? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just to give you a stat, right? I think yeah. People say people have found that the CAC has gone up by 222 percent in the last, like, 10 to 12 years, right? So it’s basically, it’s become so much more expensive to acquire these users and there is no concept of you know, like, Hey, once the user comes to your brand and, you know, maybe makes a purchase that they become your user for the future, either basically, the users kind of go back to these meta platforms every time they are beginning a shopping journey.
So you are almost like forced to pay the stacks for every transaction that happens on your store. And so I think with the AI, there’s an opportunity to kind of like, you know, maybe perhaps change this a little bit, maybe make the brands a little less dependent on. Other platforms you know, particularly on advertising.
And so that’s yeah, that’s the genesis of our company. , so go further on into that. So why should online merchants be thinking about AI tools? Like, like, how not as big, sir, really kind of help solve some of this problem. Yeah. So you know, we are basically trying to shift the control for brands from these advertising platforms to where they have the most control, which is their own website, their own business operations and so on.
So what we are building, you know, I tend to say this, like, you know, we are building the only AI platform that an e commerce brand will ever need. So you can think of it as your team of specialized AI agents. Each tailor made for handling different functions within a retailer’s operation. So, for example, our AI sales agent transforms online shopping conversion rates by creating AI experiences on the merchant’s website that mirror the personal attention that you would get if you walked into a brick and mortar store and talked to an amazing salesperson there.
So, we are bringing that experience online. Which helps guide customers through their shopping journey with, like, better, more and more personalized product recommendations, which in turn leads to higher conversion rates and incremental sales for the brand. Another AI agent is our AI content marketer, which is, an employee of the brand’s marketing team.
That can supercharge their team by instantly creating high impact landing pages for both paid campaigns and SEO. So things that would take multiple weeks for them to produce can be done in minutes, right? So it’s like a superpower that their marketing team can acquire. And then we also have our AI data scientist, which is basically about putting powerful analytics in the People’s hands at the retailer so that it can turn all the complex data into insights for growth.
So we’re building out this platform off even more agents to cover every function of a retailer’s business so that these businesses have those tools to be able to thrive in this area. So you can think of our vision is to become sort of the one stop solution for everything. AI in e commerce. That’s where, you know, we are moving towards.
That’s great. And, and when you think about it, I was kind of visualizing when you were, say, when you were talking about this, like, some of my in-person experiences, and I’m not gonna say the name of some of these big box retailers because it’s just not fair and no, no point in even doing that. But, but I will say some of ’em you walk into and you’re like, and I miss like what you’re talking about now for many of the, maybe some of the brick and mortars That service that like custom tailored experience, even when you’re meeting somebody in person kind of is lacking sometimes. So I’m thinking like if I, if an AI agent that I interact with a particular brand, and if that kind of gets to know me and it’s, I think in time and it could feel superior for me, I mean, as a shopper specifically, I’m not talking about as a technologist or creating the stuff.
I mean, like as a shopper, I’m kind of putting myself in that mindset and I’m like, man, that’d be nice if somebody knew me for a change, right. From a brand. Totally. Totally. I mean, in fact once you kind of go through those experiences, it’ll be very hard to not have them. Right. And the other mega trend that is happening, it’d be hard not to have them.
So if you, if you’re shopping, it makes you understood what you said. If you’re shopping at one brand and you’re getting the Experience. And then there’s a, you know, a competitor or something else like that. Even if it’s, you know, all things being equal, you might be, if the, if you, if you have that experience with one, you’re not going to want to go to the competitor.
Is that what you’re saying? I want to make sure I caught that. That’s a, that’s exactly, that’s exactly right. I mean, it will become a huge point of dissatisfaction. The brand is not offering this type of an experience, right? So like, you know, you said, if you, if you walked into a brick and mortar store, right.
The way you would communicate with this salesperson is that you are communicating your need. You’re not translating your need into some, like, search query and typing it somewhere, right? You’re actually communicating. I hope not. That’d be kind of weird. Right. And so, so imagine if you’re able to do that and, you know, you could go to a site that sells, let’s say, camping gear and you’re able to say things like, Hey, I’m going camping this weekend with my two kids.
We are a beginner camper. Which 10 should I buy? Right? This is something that you cannot ask anybody other than a smart salesperson today on an e commerce site. Right? So how can we make this experience completely viable with AI and make it available 24 7 to every visitor coming to the store? So once you kind of go through this type of experience, it’s really hard to go back in time.
Right? And the other sort of mega trend that’s happening, as you probably are very aware is. All the AI search engines, you know, whether it’s chat, GPT or Google AI overviews, et cetera, are training users to expect answers when, whenever they issue a question, right, they are, they no longer want to kind of browse through multiple links and do the research themselves.
So when they come to your brand store. They expect the same type of guidance. Hey, can there be something here that can exactly tell me which one would be the right fit for me instead of me browsing through hundreds of products, doing my own research and figuring it out? And so the sort of the user expectation is really changing quickly.
And that’s also driving the adoption of, you know, when you go to any of these websites. Yeah, this is good. I’m, I’m excited to watch how this continues to how this continues to evolve because it seems like. It seems like in all different things, like this is going to be, it’s going to create a more tailored experience.
It’s going to create one more tailor shopping experience, a better user experience overall, and make me want to come back and feel like my needs are heard and being met for whatever, like whatever, whatever I’m going to that particular thing for like site or otherwise, whatever retail and just to make sure I understood.
You said retail is this primarily for retail brands or like, give us a bit of maybe some of the industries that this is being applied to now, or even the vision for like what it’s going to be applied to in the future. Yeah, it’s a great question. So the core of everything that we are building applies to any vertical where you know, any vertical of commerce where any product or services being sold, right?
So we started with e commerce being the vertical where, you know, typically brands which are selling physical products, you could go to their sites and experience our you know, a I powered sales agent or, you know, the content marketer and so on. So we, focused on that vertical. but the sales agent and the content marketer and the data scientist also apply to anybody who’s selling any type of product or service to either an end consumer to or another business.
You know, like it could be a B to B solution. Our portfolio is applicable to those verticals as well. So we are, you can think of us as the AI platform for commerce, We started with e commerce as our first vertical, but then now we are diversifying and expanding into other verticals of commerce.
Amazing. this has been great man. Great having you on the show today. I’m happy that Emily from your team booked you on the show and we were able to meet and have a good conversation. She said you deliver and you did. So thank you for coming on. I want to make sure before you get off the line, how do people follow up?
How do they learn more about Big Sur AI? Hi. Yeah, you can certainly reach out to us through our website, Big Sur dot AI, or you can shoot an email to info at Big Sur dot AI, and we will respond pretty quickly. Wonderful. And for everybody listening, just so you know, my team will definitely put the, put the link in the show notes so you can just click on it and head right on over.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, Be sure to hit that record or subscribe button. This is a daily show each and every day. I’m bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Vinod, thank you again for coming on. Adam, wonderful to be here. Great chat.