Introduction to Guest

Rob LoCascio is the founder and CEO of LivePerson, a conversational AI company that connects brands and consumers on the world’s most popular messaging platforms, making life easier for people and brands everywhere. Rob is one of the longest-standing founding CEOs of a tech company today, and LivePerson has grown to about 1,200 employees serving 18,000 clients worldwide, including some of the biggest brands in the world like HSBC, Delta Airlines, and T-Mobile. Rob is also the founder of FeedingNYC, which has packed up and delivered over 80,000 Thanksgiving meals to families in need since it was founded after 9/11.
Rob was born and raised in New York and graduated from Loyola University Maryland.

Call to Adventure

Coming from a family of entrepreneurs, Rob always possessed the desire to start his own business. After losing his first job right out of college, Rob was led on a path working in technology, and eventually became a technology leader and entrepreneur. In 1991, Rob came across the concept of interactive kiosks — touch screen kiosk and digital video — and struck an interest in the idea. This was during a time where there were no digital videos on computers. However, Rob was fascinated by this concept and soon started to think how he could apply his new discovery to his business. This was Rob’s first call to action.

Rob’s first company went under in 1995. He had just moved to New York and did not have enough money for an apartment, let alone an office. In fact, he wound up choosing an office that was four square feet with his bed being a couch. Rob even went to his health club to shower. Even though times were tough, he kept at it. In 1997, Rob began to ponder an idea about his website — “how can you have a conversation with people digitally?” — which was unheard of in the 90s. With this question weighing heavily on Rob’s mind, he invented communication through web chat in 1997. This groundbreaking invention led Rob to filing his first patent in 1998 and receiving his first round of financing in 1999. Rob realized commerce is powered by conversations, which proved to be a necessity to truly fulfill the commerce experience.

Testing the Product & Validating the Market

Over the last 20 years, LivePerson faced a number of crossroads, which included the realization that webchat was never going to get LivePerson to a grand vision of commerce if it’s only powered by digital conversations. 10% of all conversations were via chat, while the remaining 90% through voice calls. Instead, LivePerson decided to leverage messaging tools, creating systems using Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp to communicate with customers.

This was an ah-ha moment for Rob. As consumer behavior moved towards asynchronous messaging and mobile messaging, Rob built a platform to connect the messaging front ends. From this market validation, LivePerson launched their new platform four years ago, called Live Engage.

Rob understood that if you are going to scale conversations, you must have automation running using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. With over a billion conversations in storage from some of the largest brands in the world, LivePerson is able to use AI and machine learning to build conversations that can automate the entire customer care and commerce value chain.

Looking at conversational commerce, retail is a massive market when using automation. In stores across NYC, LivePerson set-up QR codes next to specific products, where through the QR codes you have the ability to ask questions and find out information about each particular item. The retail industry is proving to be a massive part of the conversational commerce experience, especially through using Artificial Intelligence.

On Scaling AI

LivePerson is using a platform called the Conversational Cloud. Early on, Rob realized that AI has been in the hands of technologists, data scientists, and engineers. But if you’re talking about conversational experiences between a consumer and a brand, the people who have those conversations with consumers are contact center agents. They are the people having millions and millions of conversations a day. With that in mind, LivePerson wanted to build a toolset that enables these people to be empowered to develop the automation, deploy the automation, and own the automations — taking their job from agent to conversational designers and bot managers. LivePerson took this approach and built their platform to have this secret weapon, which is taking the agents and getting them involved with AI, and in turn, scaling at a high rate. Rob labels this method the tango human machine working together.

Disrupting Consumer Experience

With their product in major retailers such as David’s Bridal and Chiptole, LivePerson is taking the user experience to a whole new level. Customers are able to have conversations and/or place orders with each company’s particular app. There is no need to speak to someone over the phone or wait for a service in person. With the ease of using Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, users can easily communicate with their favorite restaurants and retailers, saving everyone time and energy.

Not to mention LivePerson grew revenue 29% in Q2 of 2020, the best quarter in the history of the company.

Advice for Industry Leaders & Future Endeavors

The advice for industry leaders is bring together all teams in your company, especially the care and technology employees with those who work in IT. Set your vision for how conversational commerce will enhance the consumer experience. From there, bring each team together on a path to work with a platform provider, like LivePerson, where the platform can offer precise expertise and technology to advance a company. Make sure you have a backhand system that is available, not a lousy bot that will direct you to a 1-800 number. Get your backend systems exposed so your consumers will have rich conversations, then bring in the care workers to design the conversations and implement them. Make sure you can scale the conversational commerce experience.

Rob predicts in the next five to ten years we will see massive amounts of e-commerce being consumed by c-commerce, a race that has already begun by massive companies such as Facebook, Amazon, WeChat, and Google. LivePerson is confident that they are a huge part of that race.

Advice for Future AI Entrepreneurs

The biggest mistake Rob has seen is many bot companies show up out of nowhere with no real plan, receive funding, and then fail, or they just remain a small business. Playing in the enterprise is really difficult, and quite slow. Rob’s advice is, instead, build something in the consumer space, perhaps an AI platform that you can sell to a company, that will benefit their consumers. Come up with an automation that helps solve consumer use.

Rob also shares that when you hit a low point, you have to go within and listen, for this is when you will learn the most. Do not look at low points as failures, but as gifts. Try to meet more people, listen, and stay open minded. Do your best to lose the ego. When hitting a low point, shift the way of thinking to: “great, now I get to grow as a human.” Know that you are not alone, and this hard moment will give you something greater than you had ever imagined. Also, never quit when you are at the bottom.

Challenges Encountered & Moving Forward

While there has been a plethora of challenges, such as 9/11, the financial crises, and COVID, Rob has never looked back, for massive changes mean massive opportunities. Even during multiple times when LivePerson almost went under, Rob credits surrendering to the higher power and letting go in moving forward. Rob iterates if you’re going to be an entrepreneur, tapping into spirituality is a must, and is a massive reason Rob has found success. The spirituality behind being an entrepreneur begins with the power of creativity, an idea you envision, and bringing that idea into existence. You then must organize people to help you as you pour your heart and soul into this creation, a creation that began in the mind.

When challenges occur, Rob has always asked himself, what can I do to change my trajectory moving forward, and what can I do to be open to understanding? What’s the bigger purpose here?”

When Rob was going through one of the most challenging moments of his life, after he lost his first company at the age of 27, he learned that he was wearing a set of “glasses” which caused him to see the world in a way that was not serving his life. Rob had a vision but his glasses and the way he perceived the world was not in alignment. Rob needed to see the world clearly, so when he met new people and made decisions, he was serving himself. These were all realizations Rob experienced from starting his own business.

Going Within

There was a massive shift for Rob 12 years ago after visiting an ashram in India to learn how to meditate. It was through this moment, finding his inner voice, where his life completely changed. Taking an inner journey is different for everyone, but it is a journey that proves to be life changing. Through Rob’s meditations, he was able to clear out the other voices in his head. The voices of his friends, family, and of society telling him how to live his life. Through his time in India, he learned how to hear his own voice and intuition, especially during challenging times. To this day, Meditation helps Rob make decisions, while providing him tools to tap into his intuition and inner knowing. When Rob feels stressed, he can now find a place of calm through meditation, deactivating any unnecessary noise that might consume him

Rob has lost a lot and failed a lot, yet he has been able to build a massive, successful business, earning himself a name as one of the top technology entrepreneurs in the industry. Rob’s purpose in life is to inspire entrepreneurs to take the journey, but to also understand that the journey to build a business is not a rag to riches story, but a lifelong commitment into one’s self and inner knowing.

https://www.liveperson.com/