The $750 Billion AI Opportunity in Customer Service | Mike Murchison, Co-founder and CEO of Ada
The Peel with Turner Novak
Turner Novak
4.6 • 11 Ratings
🗓️ 6 March 2025
⏱️ 93 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mike Murchison is the Co-founder and CEO of Ada, the AI-powered customer service automation platform.
Ada’s product and scale puts Mike at the forefront at how AI is changing software and labor markets, and this conversation felt like both a glimpse into the future, and a look into the past, at a story of pure grit and determination, working seven customer service jobs at once.
We talk about why management capabilities becomes even more important in AI-native companies, how customer service is changing from a cost center to a revenue driver, and how to talk to customers more as you scale.
We also get into why AI is still underhyped, what truly AI native software looks like, the realities of selling enterprise AI software today, and advice for anyone building an AI agent from scratch.
Thanks to Boris Wertz and Fahd Ananta for their help brainstorming topics for Mike!
Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(03:49) Making customer service extraordinary for everyone
(05:44) Management becomes more important in AI-first companies
(12:13) From customer inquiry to solution in production, fully autonomously
(16:01) Why companies talk to customers less as they grow
(20:36) Creating new products from customer service data
(22:45) Broken incentives in customer service
(26:10) Working 7 customer service agent jobs at once for a year
(37:19) Why pivoting to Ada felt like failure
(46:11) How Mike would build an AI agent from scratch today
(49:15) Ways AI will change how we build and manage companies
(56:44) Why the best managers are great users of AI
(1:00:27) How the top 1% of people are using LLMs
(1:06:22) Realities of selling enterprise AI software today
(1:11:02) Building a sales team from scratch
(1:15:21) Reflecting on Ada’s scale + doubling the last six months
(1:16:41) Biggest software category of all-time ($750B)
(1:19:51) Why AI is still under hyped
(1:21:01) Ego is the biggest inhibitor to AI adoption
(1:23:33) How AI will fuel explosion of creativity and productivity
(1:25:20) Large companies will benefit the most from AI
(1:27:41) Multi-modal language models and autonomous (computers
Referenced
Try Ada: https://www.ada.cx/
Follow Mike
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mimurchison
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemurchison
Follow Turner
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak
Subscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | One of the guiding principles that led us to start our company, it has and continues to be |
| 0:06.0 | this notion of bestowing ownership of our product to our customers. We want our customers to feel like our product is theirs. |
| 0:13.0 | And how do you foster that? You foster it by listening deeply and acting on feedback. |
| 0:19.0 | Now, with our previous company, it was growing quite quickly |
| 0:24.6 | and it encountered this customer service problem. Simply put, we couldn't figure out how to scale |
| 0:29.0 | our customer service operations in line with our user growth. And this experience of craving |
| 0:34.6 | customer feedback really started to become challenged by our scale. We witnessed |
| 0:39.4 | our wait times go up in our customer service operations and our number of customer complaints |
| 0:45.3 | grow. And simply put, we woke up one day and we went, this is crazy. Like, why is it that we |
| 0:51.3 | are no longer treating our customers as people, but we're treating |
| 0:54.9 | them as anonymous numbers that we're trying to keep at bay? |
| 0:58.0 | I mean, these are the same people whom we're trying to bestow ownership of our product |
| 1:02.0 | to. |
| 1:03.1 | And so I, you know, I picked up the phone and I cold called as many VPs of customer experience |
| 1:07.6 | that I get my hands on and I asked them, you know, are you talking to your customers more or less as you grow? And everyone said, we absolutely are focused on talking to our |
| 1:16.2 | customers less. Customer service is a cost center. And I'm personally compensated the extent to which |
| 1:21.5 | I can reduce customer contact every year. It's like, well, no wonder customer service is so bad |
| 1:26.6 | around the world. Yeah, everyone's |
| 1:28.1 | doing their job of like talking to them less. Yeah, that's right. And that's why in North America, |
| 1:34.5 | you know, the average person will waste 43 days of their life, 43 days of their life on hold. |
| 1:40.2 | That's how bad customer service is. That's how long as wait times are. It's because the |
| 1:44.0 | incentives all add up. |
... |
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