Gina: Hello everybody. Today we're chatting with Justin Barnard, who's the senior account executive at AmplifAI. Justin, welcome to the Tech Matchmaker. AmplifAI is doing some really interesting things in the contact center space right now, and we're really glad to finally have you on.
Justin Barnard: Thanks, Gina. It's a pleasure to be here. I look forward to the conversation and speaking with you and Think Forward.
Gina: Awesome. Well let's start with the basics. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Justin Barnard: Yeah, Justin Barnard, senior account executive here at AmplifAI. I've been in AmplifAI for a little over four and a half years now. Started as an SDR. I did some work in the channel space and then I've been on the direct sales team for actually about two years now.
Gina: That's wonderful. Tell us one thing about yourself that we won't find on LinkedIn.
Justin Barnard: I'm a big jiu jitsu fan. that's what I spend most of my personal time doing, trying to stay in shape. You can see the home gym back here. but jiu jitsu is definitely a big hobby of mine.
Gina: I love that. tell us give us the AmplifAI elevator pitch. And you can make it the you can make it the Eiffel Tower or you can make it a a nine story, whichever you prefer.
Justin Barnard: Whatever it works for you, but If I have to put AmplifAI into one sentence for your audience, I call this a data ingestion and action platform. We really have three core products: performance enablement, quality automation. And then recently we just launched CX Analytics. But what I think about is we look to replicate your top performers. And we do that by taking in all the data from your existing systems, analyze it, and say, well, what makes Gina the best person at Think Forward and how do we make more of her? And those are the actions we recommend, and then track how effective. they are. that's a high level foot there for you.
Gina: And you kind of sit at the intersection of AI, agent performance, and coaching, then, right? Is that kind of a good summary? Like you're the middle point there. When you are talking to somebody that may not have seen the platform before, how would
Justin Barnard: Mm.
Gina: you kind of describe, aside from like we take your best agents, we replicate them, how would you describe the impacts? Like, what are the outcomes that people see from your product?
Justin Barnard: Yeah, so I mean on the performance piece, the most common thing we say for clients is time, right? Supervisors today are overwhelmed with the number of systems they're dealing with. They're logging into a bunch of them and they're likely in charge of 15, 18, 20 different agents. And our goal is to figure out well, how do we make their day easier and give them a list of actions? Right. So the whole step of pulling in all the data from the various systems, that's just a a requirement for us to pull in. Once we have that information, what our AI is doing is calculating, well, what makes that person the best and how do we close that gap? And that's what we're really delivering to the client, along with measuring how effective all of those actions are that we recommend.
Gina: I love it. And I mean the conventional wisdom right now is automate everything, right? AI, AI, AI, I reduce headcount, cut costs, but AmplifAI philosophies a little bit. If you guys kind of push back on that. Do you want to talk
Justin Barnard: Mm-hmm.
Gina: a little bit about how so how you do that and what your philosophy is?
Justin Barnard: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I I think the the starting point of that philosophy is we're coming up with what your top performers are doing. So somebody's already able to accomplish it. So why can't we get everybody else there? And I think that's the core thesis, right? But what we do beyond that in trying to figure out that like cost cutting effort, reducing a headcount, that's okay. I mean, when we're creating some additional time savings for those team leaders. they could handle more agents. So we do have clients that do cut some heads. But generally speaking, you look to save the time and then it's a question of where does each client want to reinvest it. I have case studies for any number of clients across various industries as well.
Gina: Well, and you work with some really impressive brands like Home Depot and Cox Communications and Discover. What does it look like when a contact center at that scale, the Enterprise Contact Centers, actually implements AmplifAI and starts seeing results?
Justin Barnard: It's incredible because you're looking at rolling it out for various teams around the world for some of these organizations. And there's a lot of complex data that we're ingesting. But what you end up seeing as results for some of those clients, you mentioned Home Depot. Home Depot's been a long time client of AmplifAI. We have a case study showing a 20% boost in customer satisfaction. And a subset of that was likelihood to shop again. So they saw what equated to about $135 million revenue boost just off of the overall impact of AmplifAI.
Gina: It's incredible. And you mentioned automated QA it being a big part of of what you guys do. You know, it's still it still surprises me when I have conversations and people are still only doing the sampling right and it's manual and supervisors. What are the biggest changes you've seen in organizations that move from the here's the two to three samples that we do a month or a quarter or whatever that number might be? And then they switch to that hundred percent automation. What are the biggest changes that you see?
Justin Barnard: I think the accuracy of the insights relative to a given agent. I mean, if you QA what two, three, four interactions a month for an agent, you're not really getting a holistic view of how their performance is. So getting that increased view into those interactions and how they're performing, that's gonna give you a more accurate view. But I I'm also seeing clients not look to go all the way up to 100% because it's overwhelming to get that amount of insights. So I have a handful of clients that are like, Hey, we can get statistically significant insights with 20 or 30% automation.
Gina: Mm-hmm.
Justin Barnard: There's no need to pay for that extra 70%, and we're flexible with how we deploy that.
Gina: And so do you often start at the hundred and then scale back, or do you start at the twenty and kind of stay there? What what what do you see happening?
Justin Barnard: Generally, I see clients approach us to look to automate and it comes down more so to what their use case in industry is. in more heavily regulated, compliance heavy industries, they're gonna need a hundred percent. But maybe in a retail environment, you might only want twenty or thirty percent because it's not necessary. I have a a background checking organization that recently engaged with us, they're doing twenty five percent. Yeah.
Gina: Right, right. And you've mentioned it, but the data unification, it it seems as you said, is the foundation of kind of what you do, right? Why do you think so many contact strengt centers struggle with that problem, like getting it across? Is it because of the Frankenstax that we see out there or or you know, where why is this now kind of it it is very important, but where is that stemming from and and how do you help solve it?
Justin Barnard: Hmm. The so each client has their own tech stack and it it differs for each of my conversations. But at the end of the day, the the core issue of having to still go into six different systems. You likely have one phone system for your CCaaS platform, you have another for your CRM, and some solutions out there have trouble connecting to the other systems. So that's why we're effectively that overlay. And that allows us to take in the data from these other providers. We don't have to create the data from scratch. We're now just Taking a deeper look at it.
Gina: What would you say your biggest differentiator in the marketplace is?
Justin Barnard: Hmm, I funny enough, if you had came to me when I first started to AmplifAI, it was all that performance enablement piece. And I think it still is. But a key distinction is we've been around for eight years and quality automation, we added that about two and a half, three years ago now. And the reason why we added it is clients were saying, Well, you're already doing all this, why can't you also do the quality? And now I've kind of flipped. So when clients come to talk to me, they say, Hey, we're looking to do quality automation. I'm like, That's great. We can do that for you. But my follow up question is What are you gonna do with these extra insights? You've now gone from one percent all the way up to twenty, thirty, hundred percent. You have all of this extra information, and that's what our core product of performance enablement still solves. And I I still think that separates us from anybody else.
Gina: Excellent. And now we've talked about Home Depot, but is there another use case that you'd like to share that maybe shows the full power of the platform from, you know, data chaos to the measurable performance outcomes?
Justin Barnard: Mm. I I know we work with a lot of large BPOs. I I don't know which ones to call out in particular. Again, it's a lot of time savings and the flexible use case because the idea here and and you also mentioned the the larger enterprise logos that have teams around the world. When you have teams in all these different areas and they're measured on different KPIs from all these different systems, that's what allows us to support all of them. So the custom ROI is unique for everybody. The time savings, we save roughly one to two days per week per supervisor is that out-of-the-box stat. And that
Gina: Wow.
Justin Barnard: is what creates the opportunity to drive the other KPI improvements. Right. So clients
Gina: Absolutely.
Justin Barnard: on customer satisfaction, MPS, average handle time, agent productivity, whatever that might look like, we can customize based off the time savings.
Gina: I mean one to two days is that's enormous time saving, right? W what's
Justin Barnard: Mm. Yeah.
Gina: next for AmplifAI?
Justin Barnard: I think actually at CCW Vegas this most recent week, we won our 2026 Automated Solution of the Year, which is fantastic, feather in our cap. but at the event, Sean Minter, our founder and CEO, did a talk with CVS Health where they actually previewed some of our CX analytics views. That is the latest offering at AmplifAI. It's starting to be rolled out for a handful of clients today, and it's definitely picking up traction, and there's a lot of buzz about it.
Gina: Talk to us a little bit about it.
Justin Barnard: Yeah, so think about the ability to search across your data from a holistic perspective. Everything's already brought in. You're analyzing all the interactions and I can get into like predictive analytics, predictive CSAT and MPS. You can query the data with a chat functionality on the right hand side. There's a lot of cool views. It it's very new over here, so I'm still learning every day. And that that's a really cool part about being at an AI organization that is always evolving. I mean I've been here four and a half years. I'm not bored of of learning new stuff every day yet.
Gina: I love that. Is there anything you'd like the audience to know, Justin, that I haven't asked you?
Justin Barnard: I I think that you've asked a lot of really good questions. I'm more than happy to have conversations with you, any of your potential clients, or have people approach me directly. But I I'm a very open book for for those conversations.
Gina: Love it. And to wrap things up, I've always been a fan of James Lipton. And so to end the podcast, we do a little bit of rapid fire. So what
Justin Barnard: Okay.
Gina: is a sound or noise that you love?
Justin Barnard: Sound or noise that I love. I was just in Vegas. Any sort of cha-ching when a when a bet caches, right? Any sort of you you win, a a ding ding ding, you win. Whate whatever
Gina: Yeah.
Justin Barnard: that is on whatever game you prefer. I I was just out there
Gina: Love it.
Justin Barnard: last week, so I think that's that's fresh in my mind.
Gina: Love it. And what noise or sound do you hate?
Justin Barnard: anything like very high pitch. Like I I have a little shihtzu, she doesn't bark a ton.
Gina: Yeah.
Justin Barnard: but sometimes I I go out on a walk and there's other yappy dogs and they're a little too high pitched and s no bueno.
Gina: Love it. And what profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
Justin Barnard: I don't know. I was always told I I should go look into like lawyer legal field. I like to have logical arguments. I don't like to be like mean and just yelling back and forth, but I I like to look at both sides of the equation. I like playing devil's advocate and looking at the other side. So I I feel like lawyer would be the next next profession I'd check out.
Gina: Which absolutely suits in the sales too, both sides of the table, right?
Justin Barnard: Yeah, you gotta see the problem from all angles and and figure out how to best approach it and that's a that's a skill.
Gina: Absolutely. Now, Justin, if somebody wants to learn more or or get a demo of AmplifAI, who should they reach out to?
Justin Barnard: They can reach out to myself directly, JBarnard@AmplifAI.com. They can check out our LinkedIn and our website's just AmplifAI.com. There's scheduled demo pages all over the place.
Gina: Justin, we really appreciate you joining us. Thanks so much, and I can't wait to see the latest demo for AmplifAI.
Justin Barnard: Thanks, Gina. I'm looking forward to continuing the conversation.
Justin Barnard: Thanks, Gina. It's a pleasure to be here. I look forward to the conversation and speaking with you and Think Forward.
Gina: Awesome. Well let's start with the basics. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Justin Barnard: Yeah, Justin Barnard, senior account executive here at AmplifAI. I've been in AmplifAI for a little over four and a half years now. Started as an SDR. I did some work in the channel space and then I've been on the direct sales team for actually about two years now.
Gina: That's wonderful. Tell us one thing about yourself that we won't find on LinkedIn.
Justin Barnard: I'm a big jiu jitsu fan. that's what I spend most of my personal time doing, trying to stay in shape. You can see the home gym back here. but jiu jitsu is definitely a big hobby of mine.
Gina: I love that. tell us give us the AmplifAI elevator pitch. And you can make it the you can make it the Eiffel Tower or you can make it a a nine story, whichever you prefer.
Justin Barnard: Whatever it works for you, but If I have to put AmplifAI into one sentence for your audience, I call this a data ingestion and action platform. We really have three core products: performance enablement, quality automation. And then recently we just launched CX Analytics. But what I think about is we look to replicate your top performers. And we do that by taking in all the data from your existing systems, analyze it, and say, well, what makes Gina the best person at Think Forward and how do we make more of her? And those are the actions we recommend, and then track how effective. they are. that's a high level foot there for you.
Gina: And you kind of sit at the intersection of AI, agent performance, and coaching, then, right? Is that kind of a good summary? Like you're the middle point there. When you are talking to somebody that may not have seen the platform before, how would
Justin Barnard: Mm.
Gina: you kind of describe, aside from like we take your best agents, we replicate them, how would you describe the impacts? Like, what are the outcomes that people see from your product?
Justin Barnard: Yeah, so I mean on the performance piece, the most common thing we say for clients is time, right? Supervisors today are overwhelmed with the number of systems they're dealing with. They're logging into a bunch of them and they're likely in charge of 15, 18, 20 different agents. And our goal is to figure out well, how do we make their day easier and give them a list of actions? Right. So the whole step of pulling in all the data from the various systems, that's just a a requirement for us to pull in. Once we have that information, what our AI is doing is calculating, well, what makes that person the best and how do we close that gap? And that's what we're really delivering to the client, along with measuring how effective all of those actions are that we recommend.
Gina: I love it. And I mean the conventional wisdom right now is automate everything, right? AI, AI, AI, I reduce headcount, cut costs, but AmplifAI philosophies a little bit. If you guys kind of push back on that. Do you want to talk
Justin Barnard: Mm-hmm.
Gina: a little bit about how so how you do that and what your philosophy is?
Justin Barnard: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I I think the the starting point of that philosophy is we're coming up with what your top performers are doing. So somebody's already able to accomplish it. So why can't we get everybody else there? And I think that's the core thesis, right? But what we do beyond that in trying to figure out that like cost cutting effort, reducing a headcount, that's okay. I mean, when we're creating some additional time savings for those team leaders. they could handle more agents. So we do have clients that do cut some heads. But generally speaking, you look to save the time and then it's a question of where does each client want to reinvest it. I have case studies for any number of clients across various industries as well.
Gina: Well, and you work with some really impressive brands like Home Depot and Cox Communications and Discover. What does it look like when a contact center at that scale, the Enterprise Contact Centers, actually implements AmplifAI and starts seeing results?
Justin Barnard: It's incredible because you're looking at rolling it out for various teams around the world for some of these organizations. And there's a lot of complex data that we're ingesting. But what you end up seeing as results for some of those clients, you mentioned Home Depot. Home Depot's been a long time client of AmplifAI. We have a case study showing a 20% boost in customer satisfaction. And a subset of that was likelihood to shop again. So they saw what equated to about $135 million revenue boost just off of the overall impact of AmplifAI.
Gina: It's incredible. And you mentioned automated QA it being a big part of of what you guys do. You know, it's still it still surprises me when I have conversations and people are still only doing the sampling right and it's manual and supervisors. What are the biggest changes you've seen in organizations that move from the here's the two to three samples that we do a month or a quarter or whatever that number might be? And then they switch to that hundred percent automation. What are the biggest changes that you see?
Justin Barnard: I think the accuracy of the insights relative to a given agent. I mean, if you QA what two, three, four interactions a month for an agent, you're not really getting a holistic view of how their performance is. So getting that increased view into those interactions and how they're performing, that's gonna give you a more accurate view. But I I'm also seeing clients not look to go all the way up to 100% because it's overwhelming to get that amount of insights. So I have a handful of clients that are like, Hey, we can get statistically significant insights with 20 or 30% automation.
Gina: Mm-hmm.
Justin Barnard: There's no need to pay for that extra 70%, and we're flexible with how we deploy that.
Gina: And so do you often start at the hundred and then scale back, or do you start at the twenty and kind of stay there? What what what do you see happening?
Justin Barnard: Generally, I see clients approach us to look to automate and it comes down more so to what their use case in industry is. in more heavily regulated, compliance heavy industries, they're gonna need a hundred percent. But maybe in a retail environment, you might only want twenty or thirty percent because it's not necessary. I have a a background checking organization that recently engaged with us, they're doing twenty five percent. Yeah.
Gina: Right, right. And you've mentioned it, but the data unification, it it seems as you said, is the foundation of kind of what you do, right? Why do you think so many contact strengt centers struggle with that problem, like getting it across? Is it because of the Frankenstax that we see out there or or you know, where why is this now kind of it it is very important, but where is that stemming from and and how do you help solve it?
Justin Barnard: Hmm. The so each client has their own tech stack and it it differs for each of my conversations. But at the end of the day, the the core issue of having to still go into six different systems. You likely have one phone system for your CCaaS platform, you have another for your CRM, and some solutions out there have trouble connecting to the other systems. So that's why we're effectively that overlay. And that allows us to take in the data from these other providers. We don't have to create the data from scratch. We're now just Taking a deeper look at it.
Gina: What would you say your biggest differentiator in the marketplace is?
Justin Barnard: Hmm, I funny enough, if you had came to me when I first started to AmplifAI, it was all that performance enablement piece. And I think it still is. But a key distinction is we've been around for eight years and quality automation, we added that about two and a half, three years ago now. And the reason why we added it is clients were saying, Well, you're already doing all this, why can't you also do the quality? And now I've kind of flipped. So when clients come to talk to me, they say, Hey, we're looking to do quality automation. I'm like, That's great. We can do that for you. But my follow up question is What are you gonna do with these extra insights? You've now gone from one percent all the way up to twenty, thirty, hundred percent. You have all of this extra information, and that's what our core product of performance enablement still solves. And I I still think that separates us from anybody else.
Gina: Excellent. And now we've talked about Home Depot, but is there another use case that you'd like to share that maybe shows the full power of the platform from, you know, data chaos to the measurable performance outcomes?
Justin Barnard: Mm. I I know we work with a lot of large BPOs. I I don't know which ones to call out in particular. Again, it's a lot of time savings and the flexible use case because the idea here and and you also mentioned the the larger enterprise logos that have teams around the world. When you have teams in all these different areas and they're measured on different KPIs from all these different systems, that's what allows us to support all of them. So the custom ROI is unique for everybody. The time savings, we save roughly one to two days per week per supervisor is that out-of-the-box stat. And that
Gina: Wow.
Justin Barnard: is what creates the opportunity to drive the other KPI improvements. Right. So clients
Gina: Absolutely.
Justin Barnard: on customer satisfaction, MPS, average handle time, agent productivity, whatever that might look like, we can customize based off the time savings.
Gina: I mean one to two days is that's enormous time saving, right? W what's
Justin Barnard: Mm. Yeah.
Gina: next for AmplifAI?
Justin Barnard: I think actually at CCW Vegas this most recent week, we won our 2026 Automated Solution of the Year, which is fantastic, feather in our cap. but at the event, Sean Minter, our founder and CEO, did a talk with CVS Health where they actually previewed some of our CX analytics views. That is the latest offering at AmplifAI. It's starting to be rolled out for a handful of clients today, and it's definitely picking up traction, and there's a lot of buzz about it.
Gina: Talk to us a little bit about it.
Justin Barnard: Yeah, so think about the ability to search across your data from a holistic perspective. Everything's already brought in. You're analyzing all the interactions and I can get into like predictive analytics, predictive CSAT and MPS. You can query the data with a chat functionality on the right hand side. There's a lot of cool views. It it's very new over here, so I'm still learning every day. And that that's a really cool part about being at an AI organization that is always evolving. I mean I've been here four and a half years. I'm not bored of of learning new stuff every day yet.
Gina: I love that. Is there anything you'd like the audience to know, Justin, that I haven't asked you?
Justin Barnard: I I think that you've asked a lot of really good questions. I'm more than happy to have conversations with you, any of your potential clients, or have people approach me directly. But I I'm a very open book for for those conversations.
Gina: Love it. And to wrap things up, I've always been a fan of James Lipton. And so to end the podcast, we do a little bit of rapid fire. So what
Justin Barnard: Okay.
Gina: is a sound or noise that you love?
Justin Barnard: Sound or noise that I love. I was just in Vegas. Any sort of cha-ching when a when a bet caches, right? Any sort of you you win, a a ding ding ding, you win. Whate whatever
Gina: Yeah.
Justin Barnard: that is on whatever game you prefer. I I was just out there
Gina: Love it.
Justin Barnard: last week, so I think that's that's fresh in my mind.
Gina: Love it. And what noise or sound do you hate?
Justin Barnard: anything like very high pitch. Like I I have a little shihtzu, she doesn't bark a ton.
Gina: Yeah.
Justin Barnard: but sometimes I I go out on a walk and there's other yappy dogs and they're a little too high pitched and s no bueno.
Gina: Love it. And what profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
Justin Barnard: I don't know. I was always told I I should go look into like lawyer legal field. I like to have logical arguments. I don't like to be like mean and just yelling back and forth, but I I like to look at both sides of the equation. I like playing devil's advocate and looking at the other side. So I I feel like lawyer would be the next next profession I'd check out.
Gina: Which absolutely suits in the sales too, both sides of the table, right?
Justin Barnard: Yeah, you gotta see the problem from all angles and and figure out how to best approach it and that's a that's a skill.
Gina: Absolutely. Now, Justin, if somebody wants to learn more or or get a demo of AmplifAI, who should they reach out to?
Justin Barnard: They can reach out to myself directly, JBarnard@AmplifAI.com. They can check out our LinkedIn and our website's just AmplifAI.com. There's scheduled demo pages all over the place.
Gina: Justin, we really appreciate you joining us. Thanks so much, and I can't wait to see the latest demo for AmplifAI.
Justin Barnard: Thanks, Gina. I'm looking forward to continuing the conversation.
