At Data Council 2023, DJ Patil recalled the story of how he got chewed out in the oval office - twice. DJ was acting as CTO under Barack Obama, and as part of the role is to conduct extensive research into how the country is feeling on certain issues and to more deeply understand the sentiment of the country.
DJ presented his findings, a collection of charts and graphs he had meticulously spent days piecing together. Barack responded, yes these numbers are interesting, but have you actually gone out and “talked to the people?” Embarrassingly, despite the enormous amount of effort he had to conduct his broader research, he was looking at numbers and rows in a database.
In business, we often fall into the trap of relying solely on dashboards and surveys to understand our users. Every person and interaction gets reduced to a data point — a row in a database. But in that translation, something important gets lost: the nuance between the data points. Aggregate analytics are useful, even essential, for grasping patterns at scale. But they often miss the depth, context, and human complexity behind each number.
What If You Could Actually Talk to Everyone?
Our ability to truly talk to users has long been constrained by a simple reality: there are only 24 hours in a day. Jeff Bezos was known for bridging the executive-to-customer empathy gap by diving into customer support tickets daily. But what if you could scale those conversations — not just with customers, but with prospects too? And what if the insights weren’t just data points or dashboards, but rich, nuanced stories you could actually hear and absorb?
Why voice is different this time
Admittedly conversational voice AI started make noise again, I was skeptical. The voice hype train has come by a few times, and let us down time and time again.
But this time felt different. It wasn’t about commands or intents. It felt like a real conversation — natural, fluid, human. Conversation — real, verbal conversation — is an entirely different mode of feedback. It taps into System 1 thinking, as Daniel Kahneman would say: fast, intuitive, effortless. Talking is energizing. Typing into a blank survey box? That’s System 2 — slow, deliberate, and draining.
Talking invites truth. It invites emotion. It invites nuance. It allows you to probe, clarify, and go deeper in the moment — something no survey ever could.
Turns out humans are more honest with AI
But you can always just talk to your customers, right? You can, and you should. Thought anyone who’s talked to customers knows the feeling — they’re being polite, agreeable… but not completely honest. There’s always something they’re not saying.
In Everybody Lies, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz shows how human-to-human interactions are deeply filtered. We self-edit. We try to sound smart. Our response biases avoid saying things that might seem too emotional, too petty, or too blunt.
But something shifts with conversational voice AI. There’s no judgment. No social pressure. Just a neutral voice that listens — patiently and without ego. And in that space, people open up. We’ve seen users be more candid, vulnerable, and forthcoming with AI than with human moderators. They share what they’re really thinking — things they’d never say in a traditional interview.
That unfiltered honesty is where the real insights live — not just in what customers say, but how they say it, what they emphasize, and where they pause.
That’s the power of conversation — and why voice AI opens a new frontier in truly understanding your customers.
Introducing Pulse
We believe there is much more to learn about customers, our emotions, our desires, our decisions - and conversing is one step towards learning more about ourselves. That’s why we built Pulse — a conversational voice AI platform that helps you truly listen to your customers, at scale.
We need to stop treating every customer as an interaction or a dot on a chart, after all - every data point has a story.