“What is the thing every day you find yourself doing for two hours that kind of looks like the thing you did yesterday? Those are really the moments where Glide AI agents tend to really shine and actually be useful.”
Stew Fortier, CEO and co-founder of AI YC-backed startup Type.ai, had what he describes as “a great problem.” Their business was getting a ton of signups every day. Since their operation runs on a freemium model, it’s important for Stew to be able to find potential leads so he can nurture them to help them adopt their product. “Finding who these people are takes me a ton of time,” Stew said.
The solution was a custom AI agent to support lead scoring that he calls UserVIP. His most valuable clients include novelists, SEO writers, and bloggers—this app helps him connect with them more effectively.
Ian Janicki, owner of GAMUT agency and Glide Expert, helped get it built—fast. “User VIP basically parses through thousands of different new customer records and narrows it down to a select few people that he should personally reach out to and book a call with,” explained Ian.
Not only does this save Stew a bunch of time as the CEO, but it also increases customer lifetime value and retention by forming stronger relationships earlier in the signup process.
Type.ai’s lead scoring agent improves adoption, drives revenue, and saves time
“The impact we're starting to see though is actual conversion improving. ”
Stew estimates the AI agent saves him at least 5-10 hours every week while also enabling him to send 10x more custom emails. Since he is spending less time filtering through leads, Stew can spend his valuable time identifying the most important people and doing personalized outreach that will turn them into long-term customers. “It allows him to have a deeper relationship with the customers he never would have had before without having this AI agent,” said Ian.
The result is improved conversion, better retention, and driving increased revenue for the business. “We're able to reach out to folks sooner in their life cycle,” said Stew. “With just a little bit of focused outreach, we can help our adoption double-digit percentage improve—and that ultimately drives our bottom line.”
Type.ai’s Glide agent does 3 important tasks:
Parsing lots of data: It goes through every new signup entry and determines if they are a “VIP".
Add custom language: Looking at the users’ data, AI generates a unique introduction that is organic & relevant.
Take action: Automatically reaches out to customers via email to get them to schedule a call with Stew.
Working with an agency helped Stew get a working MVP in less than a week
With GAMUT’s help, Type.ai was able to get an MVP of their app launched and ready to test in just a couple of days. From there, Stew was able to test the agent in real life, provide feedback, and quickly refine it to better suit their needs.
“The iteration process is just so quick”
“The client is able to reach out to their Experts and make improvements on the fly,” said Ian. “There's no wait time. The user can refresh immediately and the new updates are there. And that's just really, really powerful when it comes to businesses that increasingly need to move in a very competitive environment.” Working with a skilled agency gives him both technical expertise to draw on and a much faster build time.
Glide helps Type.ai use AI effectively to solve business challenges
Both Ian and Stew explained how important Glide’s no code platform was for helping them deploy AI in a customized and effective way. “Glide is uniquely powerful when it comes to AI agents for three reasons,” said Ian. “The first is it has an incredibly robust workflow process.”
It helps them access the newest AI functionality, gives them access to workflows they need to get the most out of those models, and allows them to create a custom user interface that suits Type.ai’s specific needs.
With Glide, their AI agent could also hook directly into Type.ai’s data. Stew was able to hook it up to anything from Google Sheets to larger business databases and software. “Not to mention syncing in data from third-party tools such as HubSpot or Salesforce,” added Ian.
The third piece they mentioned was the ability to build professional, functional user interfaces. Stew could use that interface to monitor how the agent was working and every action it took and then provide direct user feedback to improve the agent over time. With the agent performing such a critical business function, auditability was vital. “I think that combination of those three pillars is what makes Glide kind of the perfect AI agent platform,” he explained.
Type.ai is staying ahead of the curve with Glide AI agents
Stew is already planning the next suite of custom apps for Type.ai. “When I think about where we go from here with all the integrations we're building with Glide, I just think about our customers and how we can actually get better at facilitating their needs,” explained Stew. “How do we give them a better first user experience? How do we educate them about new features? When do we reach out at the right time to help them learn a new feature that we've launched? I think there's an app for that at every stage that we could build and grow into.”
“Using AI agents is a multiplying force factor on existing teams. ”
Ian has been seeing the huge impact AI agents are having on businesses firsthand through his agency. “I've seen very small teams do an incredibly large amount of impact not just by using AI but using AI agents,” said Ian. “And this trend is only going in one direction. If you're not using them, you're going to fall behind.”