AI continues to hold ample potential for SMBs. That includes everything from marketing to operations. Here, it’s all about automation for time-starved and tech-challenged SMBs. AI can help them scale their time and output by offloading rote tasks and non-core administrative tasks they dread doing.
For all those reasons, AI could be embraced by SMBs faster and more pervasively than past emerging tech waves, and we’re already seeing evidence of that. Meanwhile, SMB SaaS players continue to blitz AI in their software offerings – a feature arms race that’s quickly ratcheting up in the Localogyverse.
One of those companies making smart moves is Vendasta. The longstanding leader in SMB marketing has begun to roll out agentic AI capabilities that are purpose-built for various roles. These include things like receptionists to schedule appointments and intelligently answer incoming customer queries.
But it’s not stopping there, with several functional roles to follow – from sales agents to reputation management. To break down the company’s rationale, market insights, and product road map, we recently had the chance to catch up with co-founder & CEO Brendan King. See the full interview below.
Our audience is familiar with Vendasta and your leadership, but for any newer readers or those outside of the Localogyverse, tell us about Vendasta, its founding principles, current trajectory, and any figures that can give us a sense of operational scale..
Vendasta was founded in 2008 in Saskatoon with a simple but ambitious purpose: to democratize technology for local businesses by making it easy, accessible, and affordable.
What started as point solutions evolved into an AI Workforce platform for SMBs that redefines how SMBs work and grow. It works “out of the box,” powered by our proprietary data moat and integrated workflows, and allows them to create and manage AI Employees that can do work across their entire operation.
Today, we have thousands of partners serving over 6M SMBs, with over 225K of those SMBs paying for software each month. We are a global company with offices in Canada, the United States, and India.
Vendasta’s mission has been pretty consistent over the years, though it has adapted to market realities and underlying technological capabilities. The current inflection is AI. Before getting into the particulars, first tell us about how Vendasta is looking at AI as a way to elevate the business and the product.
It is clear that AI is changing the nature of work. Technologies like generative AI come about once-in-a-lifetime, and completely change what’s possible for customers and businesses.
We are moving from a paradigm of “people using software to do work” to one where AI is doing the work and humans are orchestrating and managing AI.
This means that humans move from “doing” tasks to orchestrating outcomes by creating, managing, and training their AI Employees to do work across their organization, freeing them up to handle higher-level strategy and build deeper human-to-human relationships with their customers.
One of the characteristics of this early stage of AI’s emergence is that there’s lots of experimentation to see where it fits. It’s powerful, but it’s not a silver bullet. What is your opinion on the types of areas/functions where AI is particularly additive, especially when it comes to local business marketing? What are some areas where it isn’t as applicable?
SMBs need technology the most but are least capable of implementing it. Our job is to use our data and workflows to make AI work for them out of the box.
We are carefully choosing the “jobs” that we are building AI Employees to do. The most additive jobs are ones that build trust. Jobs where AI can perform better than a human (e.g., content research), or jobs that are not economically feasible for a human (answer phone or chat instantly, 24 hours a day).
There are countless roles where this applies. Here are just a few examples we’re already seeing today: lead capture and nurture, phone reception, appointment booking, missed-call text-back, meeting analysis, CRM updates, customer support, review response, content creation, and business intelligence.
Today, AI is less applicable to roles that rely on building human relationships or high-level strategic thinking — like high-touch sales, business development, marketing and business strategy, software architecture, and in-person customer support. All of these roles will become easier, freeing humans to focus on high-level strategy, creativity, and connection.
Much of this culminated for Vendasta in the recently-announced AI Customer Acquisition and Engagement Platform, and its first agent function, a receptionist. Let’s take those one at a time.
First, the platform: tell us about the thinking behind the platform and its strategic direction. How does this elevate Vendasta’s existing product and mission, and how does it meet the moment in the opportunity for automating SMB business functions, and empowering SMBs to scale?
Our thinking and our mission have evolved. We’re building an AI workforce platform for SMBs that redefines how they work and grow.
Our thesis is that SMBs will want a single system to manage their AI Employees across their entire tech stack, and that we can be the AI Employee platform that powers their AI workforce across their entire operation.
We have three main advantages:
- Works out of the box. We are able to automatically collect, build, and maintain a massive set of proprietary SMB data. This data provides the essential context for AI to function effectively. SMBs are unable to do this work themselves.
- AI does; people orchestrate. Our headstart in AI is transforming our platform from a place where users do work to a place where AI does the work and users build, manage, set strategy, and monitor the AI Employees across any product or service integrated into our platform.
- Channel partner distribution. Our partner distribution gives us the ability to cost-effectively acquire, support, and deploy our AI Employees at scale. We can capitalize on our channel partners’ expertise and in-market presence to build and deploy industry-specific AI Employees.
This elevates Vendasta from a toolkit to an AI Workforce for SMBs — the next step in democratizing technology.
Moving on to the platform’s first function, tell us about the value proposition in automating receptionist tasks. What does that offer, what does it look like, and what’s the goal in terms of any metrics or KPIs it will bring to local businesses (time saved, fewer headaches, etc.). How is it differentiated from other agentic offerings?
We started with AI lead capture and receptionist tools to solve a problem that plagues most SMBs. SMBs are time-starved and often lack efficient operating systems — resulting in up to 30% of leads going unanswered. One of our large franchise customers calls this “corporate crime,” given how much they invest in generating those leads.
We set out to solve these problems across web chat, form fills, emails, and inbound calls — and the AI Receptionist was born. The goal is to ensure businesses leave no lead behind.
Our AI Receptionist answers, engages, books, and qualifies leads 24/7 across voice, SMS, chat, WhatsApp, emails, and forms — all trained on the business’s data and tone. It’s like having an always-on team member who never misses a call, never gets tired, and always knows what to say.
This customer has close to 4,000 AI receptionist deployments and has seen dramatic results:
- Response time was cut from 48 hours to under 30 seconds
- 372% more revenue-converting leads for one franchise partner
- Thousands of booked appointments with no human interaction
It’s differentiated because it’s not a generic chatbot. It’s a brand-trained, multi-channel AI Employee that works within Vendasta’s unified CRM and customer acquisition platform — closing the loop from inquiry to booking.
We’ll pause there and pick things up in Part 2 of this interview series with more from Brendan King.
Header image credit: Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash
