Beyond Chatbots and ChatGPT: Harnessing AI for Rapid Business Growth In The Digital Era - Vengo AI
- Harvest Growth
- Mar 28
- 18 min read
What if you could build a sales team that never sleeps, never takes a coffee break, and knows exactly how to convert every single website visitor into a potential customer? Sounds like a fantasy, right? For today's guest, the answer is yes.
That guest is Jason Sherman, Founder and CEO of Vengo AI, the most intelligent and easy-to-implement sales AI platform today. He reveals how you can transform your business into a profit center by integrating cutting-edge AI sales software that surpasses regular chatbots by naturally communicating with prospects and converting them to buyers. If you want to scale, improve your win rate, and outcompete, tune in now.
In today’s episode of the Harvest Growth Podcast, we’ll cover:
The limitations of traditional chatbots, ChatGPT, and FAQs, and how AI-powered sales agents differ.
How businesses can quickly increase website conversion rates from 1-5% to potentially 40%
The ease of implementing AI sales tools that outperform ChatGPT without extensive technical expertise
Future predictions for AI in business operations and customer interactions
Strategies for staying ahead of competitors by embracing AI technology
You can listen to the full interview on your desktop or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Or, click to watch the full video interview here!
Looking to increase sales conversions with less fuss and at lower costs? Tired of losing potential customers on your website? Visit www.vengoai.com now to learn more about implementing an intelligent sales agent that works harder than your entire sales team.
To be a guest on our next podcast, contact us today!
Do you have a brand that you’d like to launch or grow? Do you want help from a partner that has successfully launched hundreds of brands that now total over $2 billion in revenue? Set up a free consultation with us today!
Prefer reading instead of listening? Read the full transcript here!
Jon LaClare [00:00:00]:
What's next in AI that can help your business? Hopefully by now we're all using ChatGPT or similar tools to make our days more efficient and more productive. But today's guest shares a new way of using AI that can expand your sales team in a way that customers can interact with you 24 hours a day in a conversational way to let you get some rest while you convert more of your website traffic into customers and grow your revenues. He also shares what's next in the world of AI. It's a timely topic that we all need to be studying, and he breaks it down in an entertaining interview.
Announcer [00:00:35]:
Are you looking for new ways to make your sales grow? You've tried other podcasts, but they don't seem to know. Harvest the growth potential of your product or service as we share stories and strategies that'll make your competitors nervous. Now, here's the host of the Harvest Growth podcast, Jon LaClare.
Jon LaClare [00:00:56]:
Welcome back to the show. I'm excited to be speaking with Jason Sherman. He's the founder and CEO of Vengo AI. So we're going to talk a lot about AI in general towards the end of this interview and sen what's next for AI. But first we'll dive into specifically what Vengo AI does and how it helps business owners. It's a really cool tool that I think a lot of you should check out or certainly learn about. So before we dive in any further, first of all, Jason, welcome to the show.
Jason Sherman [00:01:22]:
Thanks, Jon. It's a pleasure to be here.
Jon LaClare [00:01:24]:
So if you could explain for our audience, what is Vengo AI? What does it do?
Jason Sherman [00:01:30]:
So the way I like to explain it is that it's basically your best salesperson. You know, take 50 of your best salespeople and it's better than all 50 of them put together. It doesn't sleep, doesn't need coffee breaks. All it does is nurture your customers that come to your website, capture those leads and turn them into customers. That's really the gist of what we do. And a lot of people think about, like, chatbots. It's like the pretty normal term that people have heard over the last, you know, 20 years. But it's not a chatbot, because the chatbot doesn't learn. It doesn't really know how to give personal conversations. Like more human. Like, it can't learn from your customer conversations. It doesn't know how to sell. You know, something I noticed pretty recently is you ever go to a flea market and the guy who you're buying something from eyes you up and decides on what to sell you that widget for versus the other guy who's dressed nicely, so he changes the price. It's 20 bucks for you, 5 bucks. And I can, you know it can do that, right? It can figure out, based on your conversation, what it is you're looking for and how much you're willing to spend on it. Chatbots can't do that. So that's really where we are. We're in a capturing lead system and, and nurturing prospects and turning them into customers.
Jon LaClare [00:02:49]:
And, you know, we've had times at my agency over the years with and without sales people. I've always been here doing sales for our company. But sometimes we have support, sometimes we don't. And when we don't, it's. It's that lag. Right. It's where a lead comes in. Frankly, even when we've had sales guys in the past that have sometimes been slower to respond, that's the issue. Right? A human, like you said, they're not working 24 hours a day. Of course. Right. But also they may be doing something else and they can't get back during the work hours. So how has that been? I guess maybe describe the advantage you've seen by being able to respond immediately to requests or questions on the website.
Jason Sherman [00:03:26]:
It's a, it's a great question because if you historically look at the Internet and business websites, we'll just say there's 50 million of them. Those 50 million websites, let's say 5% of them, really small number, might have a chatbot on their website. Maybe the rest of them usually have FAQs. Do you want to read through 200 FAQs? No. Do you want to fill out a contact form with your name, email, phone number and write a message? Usually not. Those are not really popular. And then there's that leave a message box like, hey, leave a message. We're not here. You're not capturing leads, you're not capturing information, you're just leaving all that money on the table. So if you shift over to what looks like a human being ready to talk to you, ready to have a conversation, and it's continually leading you towards a sale, that is the key thing to remember here. An AI agent is there to drive you towards a sale. You're not going to get that on a website that's missing an AI agent. You're going to get crickets and you're going to lose. Let's say you get a thousand visitors a day on your website. If you have an AI agent you might capture 50% of them as customers. Without that, you might get 1 to 5% as a customer if they decide to call you, you know, so it's a big difference if you think about it.
Jon LaClare [00:04:45]:
And I think about, you know, the way I shop. Right. Especially for big ticket. If you're getting a service or a big ticket item, you know, I'll go around, I might submit a form. I don't want to call anybody yet. I'm just kind of thinking. But if I've got a way to interact and get questions answered immediately, it stands out. Right. Still, in today's world, that is different. And I don't want to call anybody, I don't want to be on the phone yet. So it gives the opportunity to have interactions, but stay sort of feeling anonymous. Right. As the customer. Right. Starting that journey where I'm not, I'm not yet giving you all my information. I'm just asking some questions and you lead them further down that path. Until now, they are ready to share information in a way that, you know, you know, when you call and actually have a phone conversation with them, they're more prepared.
Jason Sherman [00:05:26]:
Yeah. And not only that, you bring up a great point. Personalized recommendations, right. Detailed information about the product or the service. Let's say you're looking to redo your kitchen, for example, and you just leave a message. That's not good. But if you can talk to someone on the phone, like the owner of the company, they're going to give you insights, but that owner is sleeping where they're busy. The AI can actually recommend to you and answer your questions in detail because it has the knowledge of that kitchen designer. So you're going to get the actual answers you need and you're more than likely going to place that order because you were able to talk to this AI in a very personal, detail oriented way.
Jon LaClare [00:06:06]:
Talk to us about the preparation because I think back to the old days of chatbots, you know, from five, 10 years ago, before AI kind of really existed, at least in the way we see it today. And there was a lot of preparation, yet it kind of had to have, okay, if they say this, you respond this. If you say this, respond this. There was this whole big process that went into it. How has AI helped to make the preparation side easier? So people sign up for Vengo AI, for example. What does the preparation look like to have it ready, to be able to respond?
Jason Sherman [00:06:35]:
I love that question because that is literally our core value proposition, simplicity. We made the platform very easy to use. I like to give an analogy of pre Internet, we'll say when the Internet just came out and we had, and I went to college for computers and web building, so I had to build websites. It was very primitive and we had to learn how to build websites. People had to learn how to build websites. It was very hard to do until something called WordPress came out and it made everything drag and drop and simple for people to build a website. Same with Wix and Squarespace, etc. Shopify, we did the same thing. We made this drag and drop platform that makes it easy for anyone to drag and drop their documents, their company files, their company manual, their sales manual, their PowerPoint presentations, the conversations they've had with clients that they transcribed into text on all that stuff. Just drag and drop it into the platform and answer a couple questions, pick a voice, pick a picture and then your AI is ready to go. That quick, that simple, one line of code, put it onto your website and it's up and running. It's like that simple.
Jon LaClare [00:07:41]:
I love that, I love that because that I know was a drawback. We tried chatbots, I don't know how many years ago, a long time ago. And you kind of get stuck, right? Because either, either you take a ton of time. Yeah, it's clunky, right. To get it to work right, takes a lot of time and you always feel like, oh, not quite there yet, not quite there yet, not quite there yet. But AI has that capability, as you said, to learn and to improve kind of on its own through interactions and through content that most of us have for our businesses.
Jason Sherman [00:08:05]:
The big difference you brought it up again is chatbots. They're historically decision trees, they are if then statements and it's a lot of pre programmed information. So you can't really get out of those restrictions. AI breaks through all of that. It's just completely, it doesn't use any of knows what to say because you taught it what you know and it acts as if it is you. That's really the key here, is that it is an extension of yourself in a way that you cannot get from your best salesperson. Because you can train people all day long, but they're still going to make mistakes. The AI cannot because it just doesn't have a way to get out of those guidelines.
Jon LaClare [00:08:45]:
Nice. Let's talk about cost. I don't want to dive into all the details. People can go to your website, which is vingoai.com and see all, unless you do, of course. But I do want to talk about just generality. So as I look at this and I was frankly shocked at how affordable the tool is compared to some other platforms I've seen out there that try to be the same or similar to what you're doing, but are order of magnitude higher in terms of their costs. And the thing about, as I, as, as our listeners might be thinking, whatever you're doing in your marketing currently, it's likely relatively expensive. Right. So a lot of companies are paying thousands of dollars a month, sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes more per month. And a simple tool that can just, if all it does is boost your conversion rate by, you know, from 2% to 3%. Awesome. But as you said, 2% to 40%. Amazing. Right. The capability is there to further boost and think of it as enhancing your media expense that you're probably already doing for your business.
Jason Sherman [00:09:49]:
Yeah. And it's, you know, you're bringing up so many good points in this case. You know, we look at it like this. If you were to use us for just say one month and it's free for that first month, 30 days, you're going to automatically get the cost that you paid times 50, you know, because you're going to get say, 50 leads that come to your website that you would have, you know, normally not gotten. And so the cost is irrelevant in my opinion. Whether you're going to go with the small tier, the middle tier, or the larger tier, a more custom tier through enterprise, it doesn't really matter because as soon as you get that first sale, because you got the lead, you instantly it pays for itself. It's like one of those things where it pays for itself, you know, and business owners who are not using it. This is the key here. All of your competitors are going to use AI, at least the smart ones, they're going to steal your customers. And that's how we look at it as well. Like, we used to think about the Internet as this thing that we were using. And now when you go on Instagram, you don't say, I'm going on the Internet. That's kind of what AI is going to be like too. Eventually you have to start thinking. You're not going to say, oh, I'm using AI to do this. No, I'm capturing leads, period. End the story. And I think people have to get past that. And it takes a long time to evolve to that mindset. Just like we had to evolve from, you know, candles to electricity and horse and buggy, to cars and rotary phones to smartphones, AI is the same thing. Internet was there now it's AI and move past that and think about the results you're getting from it and not what it's actually doing for you.
Jon LaClare [00:11:32]:
I mentioned that I've spoken with a couple of competitors back, you know, months ago, before you and I met, and a lot of them have pricing that's kind of hidden. You have to talk to them first or maybe even go through their AI tool. And when you find out, I mean, it's, it's for shockingly expensive. The beauty of yours, I love that it's transparent. Like, you can go to your website, you can see your pricing, free month to try it out. It's easy to set up and get going and you know what you're getting into. And it's, it's. I, I don't know how you do it at the price you do, which is, which is awesome. But I do encourage our audience. Check it out on the website to learn more. I do want to ask for the benefit of our audience because we've got a lot of different business owners that listen to this. Of all different types of businesses. And some of them are, you know, we're selling, call them big ticket items like our business, right? So our new customer comes on, it's thousands of dollars of revenue, right? So it's, it's a different world than selling a $20 product, for example. How does it work? You know, is there a sweet spot? Is there an industry where it works particularly well versus not, or because of that low cost, does it work, you know, on kind of every kind of website or business?
Jason Sherman [00:12:29]:
I mean, that's a great question, because there are a lot of industries where I see AI as transforming, just in general, right? AI, I see it transforming sales, customer service, marketing, obviously. But there's also the hiring process, like interviewing people. Like there's, you can have an interviewing AI to just interview people all day long and then spit up the conversation summaries to give you the best candidates. Content creation, script writing. I mean, there's so many ways of doing that. So in our particular business, in general, it's more about the customers. When I say customers, the business owners that have a product or a service that people are asking hundreds of questions a day, same questions, over and over again. These are the ones that are going to benefit the most. And it's because you're wasting time. That's the key here, right? If you're a business owner and you're answering the same 10, 15, 20 questions every single day, hundreds of times, you're losing sales. You should be Just calling the people because they've already talked to your AI, calling or emailing them to close the sale, to get the money that you know they're going to pay for that product or that service. So I look at it as less of a, you know, industry aspect and more of a business owner who has a product and service, has a lot of answers that they have to give all day long and they just want to close those sales instead.
Jon LaClare [00:13:56]:
And I'm terrible with sales acronyms. I'm sure you know better than I do, but I think it's. Is it bdr, Business Development Representative, I think is a common, common tool or term that's used for. You kind of have that opening salesperson that is just the one getting leads, having quick conversations and then feeding them onto the closer, a little bit higher level. And this is kind of where that space where it helps or replaces that early, where it's not, it doesn't have to be overly skilled. You still need the closer, depending on how expensive your product is or service, of course. Right, but you may still need the closer, but it starts that journey or starts that conversation. And as you said, you get them ready for the close, get them, get them instructed. Now, some of our audience might be thinking, I imagine when I say AI, most people think CHAT GPT, right? That's our, that's our common interface that most of us use on a relatively frequent basis. There's obviously so many more tools out there beyond that. But somebody might be asking, well, can I just put ChatGPT on my website to answer questions? So how does this differ from doing something like that?
Jason Sherman [00:14:55]:
Everybody uses ChatGPT that is a technologist or is smart enough to realize that there is a lot of value in using AI to boost your productivity. Right? But when you get into the weeds and you start to really use ChatGPT, you realize that it is not biased whatsoever. It will talk about your competitors, it will, you know, veer you off onto different links to different products and yours is no longer the focus. And that's a big problem when you're a business owner trying to sell your product or your service. That's the first problem, right? The second is you cannot put ChatGPT on your website. You have to log into ChatGPT and using your account. All of your answers are closed in their closed source platform. And you can't put it on your website. There's no way to embed it in your website unless you hire a team of developers and you spend, you know, six figures and a year of working with their APIs and getting it all worked out and then building your own platform for your sales lead capture, which ChatGPT doesn't have. There's just a lot of not haves. There's so many things that you can't do and it doesn't have. So the real answer is you have to custom build what we've built. And, and we're not. We didn't build it on ChatGPT. We built it on multiple different LLMs so that we're not relying on any one service. And then we built our own framework and platform on top of that with our own machine learning and our own LLM on top. So everything is custom built on top of frameworks and you have to do the same thing in order to do that. Might as well just use us.
Jon LaClare [00:16:36]:
Agreed. Especially at the prices you guys offer, it's certainly worth it. So you are in the AI space. You're closer to it than most of us that are certainly myself or most of our listeners. Listeners too. What's next? What's the future of AI, do you think, in terms of how it is going to help business in the future?
Jason Sherman [00:16:52]:
Yeah, I think about this a lot because I brought up a couple of analogies today and you know, I remember trying to convince my parents to start using a smartphone, for example. It took years for me to finally convince them to use a smartphone. It's now taking me the similar amount of time to convince people to use AI. Right. And like I mentioned before, eventually there's going to be a day where you and I are both going to witness this, where people no longer say that they used AI because it's just part of your daily life. So I think there's going to be a day, five, ten years from now where it's just going to be completely integrated in your daily life. It might start to make decisions for you. This is important to say it might start to make decisions for you. So, you know, a simple example would be dinner. We all know that once you become an adult, you have to start making your dinner every single day. It's one of the most annoying parts of the day. Right. Maybe the AI will start ordering food or cooking food for you every day based on your mood, based on your schedule, based on your habits. That might not sound like a big deal, but that's a big thing. Put that into your business. It might start sending emails out on your behalf without your knowledge. It might start buying products for your office because it notices you're running low. It might start to close Deals for you. Now we just talked about this, right? You said that a closer has to come in, right? So what if the AI can then be the closer? Now we're talking. You are obsolete, you know, now it's not only doing the conversation and getting that lead for you, but then it's closing a deal meeting, it's sending out the invoice, it's collecting payment, it's reaching out to the customer to make sure everything's okay. AI can start doing that at some point because it's just going to get better and better and better and better. I think that one of the things where I would like to see it happen as well, because I'm going on these customer meetings every day on Google Meets and Zooms and whatnot is an AI version of myself. And I'm not kidding here, an AI version of myself going on those meetings and selling for me. That is when we've reached peak AI intelligence to the point where what am I doing all day long? You know, so. And then from there, of course, the big one that's on everyone's mind, at least anyone who's really reading into the singularity and whatnot, is AI robots standing next to us and doing physical work with us, being next to us as an assistant, a teammate, a co worker and not so much just a prompt on the screen. That's when things really start to go to the future.
Jon LaClare [00:19:33]:
It's fascinating to think about for sure. I love that you are one step into the future beyond what most people are already thinking or using AI for. So I think if nothing else, I encourage our audience to check out your website just to see how on the sales side, AI is being used as a tool to do some human functions to help take some time off of your shoulders as a business owner or off of your customer service team so they can do more, more advent advantageous things with their, with their day. So it's a great way to check it out again. VengoAI.com Jason, is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would be helpful for our audience?
Jason Sherman [00:20:10]:
I guess the only thing I would say to really close things out is at the end of the day, the businesses that embrace AI now will be the ones that are leading their industries tomorrow. And don't think, oh, AI is the future AI. I better, you know, I'll do it later. It's already happening now. We both talked about it. It's already happening now. And if you don't get involved, whether it's with Vengo AI or some other tool, you're going to be left behind just like everybody else was that didn't want to build a website 20 years ago.
Jon LaClare [00:20:41]:
I think that's great advice. It's a topic we need to understand and really start to use because if you don't, your competitors are and somebody gave me the quote a while ago, I'm trying to think who it was, but they talked about how AI isn't necessarily going to replace, but your competitor using AI will. Right? So if you don't use it, somebody's going to come along, do a better job, do it cheaper, whatever it might be, because they're using these tools. So getting smart with AI and you know, adding it in where we can testing out, it's not going to work for every task yet that we do in our day to day life. But testing and finding out where you can become better, where you can become more efficient I think is great advice.
So thank you for the interview. This has been a lot of fun. If nothing else, it's something that our audience really needs to be thinking about. We all do. How do we better incorporate AI into our work lives? And one of the ways to do that potentially is to visit VengoAI.com and explore how you can use it in the sales process. Also for our audience. Did you know you can meet with a member of my team absolutely free for a 30 minute strategy consultation. We've launched and grown hundreds of businesses since 2007 and learned some of our strategies while growing OxiClean back in the Billy Mays days. We're here to help, so please go to harvestgrowth.com and set up a call if you'd like to discuss further.