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The WP Minute brings you news about WordPress in under 5 minutes -- every week! Follow The WP Minute for the WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Hosted by Matt Medeiros, host of The Matt Report podcast.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack. Today's episode features a segment from Matt's interview with Matt Telfer, Marketing Director at 20i, a pillar sponsor of the WP Minute. He stopped by to tell us about 20i's customer-first approach, their new AI assistant, and his take on the hosting landscape. Now, you can catch the entire interview over on our WP Minute Plus channel. Visit thewpminute.com
for all the details.
Matt Telfer (00:32)
This year we launched our own AI assistant that we call 20. ⁓ And that has been, it's been fascinating to see it roll out and be used because there's always a little bit of apprehension when you launch something so fundamental and what you hope is going to be success and you hope it's going to achieve certain goals for customers. then when you release it to the wild, is it then going to do that or?
our expectations too high for it but what we didn't want was just a simple bot which basically brings back answers from our knowledge base because we have a knowledge base, a searchable knowledge base just...
putting an AI wrapper on it or giving it the little stars logo which all the AI have or making everything purple doesn't add any value. So what we wanted was a genuine AI tools which would, yeah, okay, it can answer your question, but also it can look at code and tell you where you've gone wrong. It can write copy for you if you want to. It can come with ideas for new domain names. can actually query the data about your accounts or how much bandwidth did you use this month? How did that compare to last month or last year or two years ago? Things like that.
and it's been really great to see the kind of feedback we've got on on 20 which has been super positive but also even when
as with anything that people have kind of hit dead ends because it's ours. We've been able to go and fix it. We're not having to go over to a third party and say, hey, these are our problems. And then waiting six months to a year for them get around to it because we own it and we developed it. And the team that works on it, six in the same office as I do, as support, as the sales team, as sysadmin, it's great because then literally within...
within hours, it's a simple thing, or days, if it's more complex, it's updated. ⁓ So that's been probably the great thing that it's just freed up time for our customers. It's enabled them to do more and faster. But also just from an internal process and resource. So if the customer's got a question, which...
they can go to AI and get the answer for. That means that our support team is dealing with more complex problems and they can spend more time on that and that helps that customer. The other customer's got a fairly straightforward question, gets the answer straight away. So that's been great to see as well. I think it's just speed and efficiency and accuracy and hopefully more productivity of things, what we've seen so far in terms of the use of AI.
Matt Medeiros (03:05)
Yeah. Have you been? Well, has the support team been using it for even that frontline support? Like, I've got a question. How do I reset my password? Is it serving up those types of answers ⁓ or is it getting connected to a human straight away when somebody somebody chats?
Matt Telfer (03:24)
Yes, the way we've done it is, the first attempt will be the AI and honestly more often than not it gives the answer but then there's always like I said, always those edge cases where ⁓ either the answer isn't quite right or...
it simply doesn't know the answer to it because it's an edge case and then we'll always then connect them with a human and straight away they'll be on it. So yeah, just hopefully just covers that 80 % which has been asked many many times and then the human will deal with the 20 % with that kind of old 80-20 rule where 20 % which needs, it's a bit more complex and needs a kind of human brain still to get involved.