Episode #34: The Human Touch in Manufacturing AI: A Conversation with Nelson Bruton
In this episode of U.S. Manufacturing Today, powered by Veryable, host Matt Horine discusses the intersection of AI and human interaction in the manufacturing industry with Nelson Bruton, president of Manufacturing Chats. Nelson highlights the potential drawbacks of highly advanced chatbots and the importance of human-centered selling in building business relationships. The conversation covers the evolving landscape of U.S. manufacturing, the role of live chat solutions in capturing sales opportunities, and the balance between utilizing AI and maintaining authentic human connections. The episode also delves into marketing strategies for small and mid-size manufacturers and the significance of keeping the human element in the next era of industrial growth.
Links
- Nelson Bruton LinkedIn
- Manufacturing Chats Website
- Navigating Trump 2.0
- Veryable Is Revitalizing U.S. Manufacturing
- Sign Up on the Veryable Platform
- Veryable Shop
Timestamps
- 00:00 Introduction to U.S. Manufacturing Today
- 00:27 Guest Introduction: Nelson Bruton
- 00:54 The Limits of AI in Manufacturing
- 01:09 Nelson's Background and Digital Marketing Journey
- 02:20 The Chatbot Debate: Human vs. AI
- 03:29 Human-Centered Selling in Manufacturing
- 05:13 Challenges and Opportunities in AI Adoption
- 06:32 The Role of Automation in Manufacturing Sales
- 12:02 Reshoring and Reindustrialization Trends
- 19:25 Marketing Strategies for Manufacturers
- 25:04 The Future of AI and Human Interaction
- 27:16 Final Thoughts and Takeaways
Episode Transcript
Matt Horine: [00:00:00] Welcome back to US Manufacturing today. The podcast powered by Veryable where we talk with the leaders, innovators, and change makers, shaping the future of American industry, along with providing regular updates on the state of manufacturing, the changing landscape policies, and more.
Today's conversation is no stranger, but it dives into something every manufacturer and business leader is talking about, which is ai, but not in the usual way. Our guest argues that sometimes the smarter the ai, the worse it could be for business. We're joined by Nelson Bruton, president of Manufacturing Chats, and for over two decades, Nelson has helped B2B manufacturers grow and scale their business.
Bridging the gap between modern digital strategy and the deeply human relationships that still drive industrial sales. Nelson believes that while manufacturers are world-class innovators and production, their marketing and sales strategies often lag, which is true of a lot of industries. And relying on outdated methods, poor automation, or even over automation.
We'll talk today about the limits of ai, the rise of human-centered selling, and how manufacturers can combine both [00:01:00] to strengthen America's reindustrialization push. Nelson, welcome to U.S. Manufacturing today.
Nelson Bruton: Hey Matt, great to be here.
Matt Horine: We're excited to have you on, and I thought we'd kick it off. Maybe we'll start with a little bit of background about you.
You've got these two decades of experience working with manufacturers and businesses and their strategies, and then we'll dive right into what we're doing with manufacturing talks.
Nelson Bruton: I got fascinated by the internet way back in the day when Prodigy and CompuServe and AOL were just mailing these disks all over the country.
50 free hours, a hundred free hours, a thousand free hours. Put that disc in your gateway desktop, right? You could just go into chat rooms and surf the web with excite and web crawler. And it was just absolutely fascinating to me. That was probably my 10th grade and 11th grade year in high school. Just when I started thinking, okay, I definitely wanna be involved with computers and the internet when I get older.
So computer science degree, that's what I went for. And then funny story on that, I pivoted over to more of a business degree when I took my first programming class c plus. I was like, yeah, this isn't for me putting comma in my colons in the right spot. My brain [00:02:00] wasn't wired like that, but ended up still working in the digital marketing internet landscape.
Matt Horine: You threw me back there with a couple of mentioning Gateway or AOL. I have a recurring joke about using my AOL instant messenger name for various handles and other things like that. It's not that long ago, but sometimes people will say, take me back. 'cause that was some of the good days on, on the internet.
Let's jump right into it. I think you said something in our previous chats and what I've seen online that was really compelling to me and what's a lot of people aren't willing to say, which, and I'll get the quote right here. The better the chat bot, the worse it can be for your business. Can we unpack that a little bit?
Because I think a lot of people would be very interested.
Nelson Bruton: Yeah, absolutely. The better the language model gets, the better your chat bot is. The more data you've armed it with, the visitor's gonna get what they want. Meaning they're gonna get all the answers and hopefully all the answers are accurate.
They're gonna get all the answers, and then they're gonna leave the chat. But you as the company who provided that chat bot that provided all the answers to that visitor, is gonna miss the conversion. You're not gonna capture the person's name, email address, phone number, and find out where they [00:03:00] are in the buying cycle.
The qualification questions about why they're asking all these questions is, is missed when you have a chat bot that is reactive to the prompts, AKA questions that a visitor asks. So just to summarize that long answer, the visitor gets what they want, but the company doesn't necessarily get what they want.
Matt Horine: It's a really interesting paradigm because a lot of the old school mentality and thinking around that is like the customer, happy customers. The customer's always right. They're walking away with it. But what does the business do to grow out of that? And I guess that in manufacturing relationships and trust kind of drive orders, right?
You hear that a lot in the manufacturing space, a lot of business spaces. But what happens when AI becomes too good at mimicking people? What does that look like as the impact on directly on the business?
Nelson Bruton: It's interesting for my being in the industry for two decades, people like, especially in the industrial space, whether you're making machinery, making components, people buy from people, it's, very much relationship businesses.
Many of 'em are family owned, multi-generational family businesses. That relationship is [00:04:00] still very important that the human to human relationships in those businesses is still highly valued. This is an easy way to continue that human connection as part of a digital strategy by putting a human live chat instead of a chat bot.
And in my conversations when I go to trade shows all over the country, nobody likes dealing with chat bots. Nobody. Nobody likes being forced to deal with ai, right? If there's a choice, great, but being forced to deal with ai, it's the same thing when you call in on a phone. And would you rather talk to an press one for this, two for this and listen to all eight options, or would you rather have a human that can assist you right away and acknowledge you. Right?
Matt Horine: So much of that, what you just said speaks about the manufacturing industry, which most people prefer, people to people business, and I think of my own like daily life. If you're calling your bank or calling somewhere to get some type of level of service and you're forced into some type of funnel that's trying to replicate the best of human relationships, it's never the actual human relationship.
And so a lot of companies and maybe you can give [00:05:00] us some insight. What you're seeing with your clients. Are companies adopting this kind of AI and chat bot structure because it solves problems, or is it just because it's the fashionable thing to do? It looks like they're innovating or bringing something forward.
Where do you think the drive for this is?
Nelson Bruton: So I think it's a little both to be honest with you, and putting a chat bot on your side is better in most cases than not, because you're at least offering another capture tool. Another point of contact with your company besides your phone number and your contact form.
Chatbots will produce a certain level of success. So I don't wanna say chatbots are completely useless by any stretch of the imagination 'cause they're better than having nothing. It's always better to offer more touch points for a company. But I think that when you, when you talk about AI or solutions, any solution for your business, what is the problem we're trying to solve?
How are we gonna measure the success of the test run? What are the metrics? And once you get a clear understanding of that AI or any other solution. It's just, it's the same business, pragmatic decision making process. Do the test, here's what we expect from it, here's why we're doing it, here's the problems we're trying to solve.
And then have a way to inspect [00:06:00] what you expect once you run a test run.
Matt Horine: Yeah, that's, I think only a lot of people miss, is that they think it's a turnkey and it solves all their problems. And maybe they'll get that jump in revenue they were looking for. They'll get increased service marks. But in manufacturing specifically, and you know, if this goes back, probably drawing on your experience as well, dealing with manufacturers.
The reality of selling and manufacturing, there's a lot of different stakeholders, right? Engineers, buyers, sourcing in general, procurement. How does automation fall short of what those buyers actually value? Those specific buyers? 'cause that's where most of us are landing in manufacturing.
Nelson Bruton: In manufacturing, it's a very technical sales process, right?
If you're manufacturing, production, run components that are specified. For an airline or for an automobile, manufacturer, there's a long sales cycle that starts with the initial touch. Right. Okay. This company is gonna give us a chance. Now you gotta go into the engineering sales process and then designing the initial prototype, the prototype run, and then prototype proves itself.
Then you get into the production run, which is the actual sale where the revenue comes in. [00:07:00] So three months to six year sales cycles, right? For a lot of these manufacturers. So I, I think to your question about automation. Because people can be in so many stages of their buying process for all types of reasons.
Automations are really tough to craft for a catchall of people in the buying cycle. Now. Automations from a general educational success stories, providing people with that educational information and success stories of similar type of customers when they can share that, I think that's certainly important to to do, to put out there.
Here we get into content marketing and automation, right? Content marketing's pushing it out on socials and automation's, really pushing it out through emails in a designed cadence, right? Just to make sure we're all talking about the same thing. When we talk about automation, that same thing, when at what point in a automated.
Conversation with a chat bot. Do you ask, what is your buying cycle? Right after somebody else asked another question, right? So it can get clunky if you don't do it correctly, and then the visitor's really gonna get [00:08:00] frustrated because the spot's worthless, right?
Matt Horine: Yeah, they, it's the abandoned field kind of thing.
Where you get into that human side of it. You can't ask for what the buying cycle is from a company. 'cause that's very subjective. So when you look at metrics like conversion rates or quote requests, where do human conversations really outperform AI and where's that kind of breaking point?
Nelson Bruton: So we have, we've done a few tests over the years, two decades of doing this where people had a chat bot and I convinced them to, Hey, put our chat team, you already have your data on how your chat AI bot's working.
Put our human chat team on for 30 days. Compare the data. Pick the winner. And on average when we've done those tests, and we, the human team wins every time because we generate on average 70% more conversations being a human chat team versus an AI chat bot. 70% is almost double. Right? And just from our tests that we've done, humans are going to drive more conversations.
Now, the interesting thing that you know is also part of this conversation is what is the role of a [00:09:00] chat on the website? And this is where we've really honed in our expertise over the years. The role of a chat, whether you're staffing it yourself, whether you have a bot that you've programmed, or whether you have a company like us that's outsourced the role of the chat box, the chat window, the chat conversation.
It should be very top of pipeline, very top of funnel. You don't wanna get into a sales process in a chat window. Agreed. Not the place teams zoom or in-person meeting and companies have established sales processes already. So get 'em in, find out what you need during the chat conversation. Keep it top level, who the visitor is, where they are, what company they're with, and then a couple top level qualification questions about the project or the application they're working on.
That could be, if it's a new system, a new equipment, or if it's a current customer that's having an issue with their system that's down, they, they need a part for this machine or whatever it is, it's still who, who are you, where are you? What company are you with, and can you describe the issue in more detail or can you describe the project you're working on in more detail?
Those top level questions allow us to. Get what we need from the visitor. The visitor gets acknowledged and then we [00:10:00] say, all right, great. One of our experts will help you as soon as, or get back to you as soon as possible, and then boom, get it right over into your normal process.
Matt Horine: That seems like the right answer because it does accelerate a lot of the things that are time consuming.
You may not know the answer to the question. The human error on that is, let me try to answer a question in the moment, instead of actually getting it to the right person, which kind of breeds a little bit of ambiguity around what's actually going on, or can leave customers frustrated. I'm sure. As part of that, the better human conversations online, how much detail, what does that look like from the human answer side of your business?
How far are they willing to go in, in terms of that process of taking intake? That question?
Nelson Bruton: There's a law of diminishing returns each of our customers. From our perspective, the way we deploy is different because the script playbook, as we call it, the script that our team works off of it can continuously get improved with feedback from our customers.
We've had customers who gave very little feedback. We dialed it in and the script works and it's worked for 10, 12 years. We didn't get very much feedback from the customer. We've had some customers that send us emails, one or two emails a day with feedback, [00:11:00] Hey, change this to this or say this next time.
And we've gotten to where we, we dial in and then another six months later they send us a few more and we've, and it's good. And there haven't been any issues. We've had some that have really given us a bunch of feedback and gotten our team a little bit too deep into the weeds. To where the conversations get awkward.
'cause our team's trying to be smarter than they are. Right? Honestly. And so what we've seen is, and the coolest part about the way we work, we can say, Hey, you know what? This we see it's getting clunky. We're trying to get too deep in the weeds. Let's go back to where we were three weeks ago with the script, right?
So we can dial it back once we observe that law of dimensioning returns where we want feedback. 'cause we wanna make the script playbook better and better for our customers, but we don't want to ever try to get our team to be seen as a. Expert or a sales team member. Again, the role of the chat. Get 'em in, get 'em out into your normal process.
Matt Horine: That makes a lot of sense because there are people who take on a little, I guess the phrase you could use for it is something like mission creep. If the automation portion of it is driving, answering like actual technical details or more [00:12:00] human-centric type answers, that does get a little clunky. I'm gonna pivot for just a minute because we talk a lot on this show about reshoring and reindustrialization, and I think we've tried to bridge the gap on the human advantage and what that means for American manufacturing.
There's a lot of energy right now around reshoring and reindustrialization. Sometimes those are buzzwords. Sometimes there's people doing it in practice and we've seen a big movement for it and the U.S. rebuilding its industrial base after decades of offshoring. How does this moment connect with what you're seeing in marketing and how has, have you seen it out there in the marketplace?
Nelson Bruton: When I go to these trade shows, the exci, there's excitement. People are excited that the, the support that that's ta taking place in the manufacturing community. There's also the, the interesting dynamic that's taking place where, you know, manufacturers and industrial companies, they're cool. The stuff that gets made, it's awesome.
Manufacturing is so diverse and people forget about that. Until you start going to all these trade shows, you don't look, there's plastics manufacturing, there's food processing equipment, there's heavy metal machinery. There's components. Automation and robots. There's so [00:13:00] many different facets of the word manufacturing, so that excitement is starting to be communicated into the high schools at a higher pace than it ever has, like with all the STEM programs.
And so I think that's the reshoring combined with the whole industry, getting the younger crowd, Hey, you don't have to be a doctor, you don't have to be a lawyer. Go into manufacturing. There's so many cool high paying jobs. In the manufacturing space. So I think those two things are working together right now to create a lot of momentum in the industrial sector.
Matt Horine: Yeah, that's a really great point. We've had a lot of guests on the show who've talked about it being an early education as a viable, something that hasn't been a viable alternative, maybe over the era of globalization. If you look from like the eighties on, and we talked at extensively about. Boomer generation owning shops, not having heirs apparent.
How does that transition? But now we're at a place where we've recognized the national security interest that it has. One of the things that I've heard from a lot of people, both on the show and in daily practices, sometimes I can't get somebody to answer the phone or get a quick turnaround to me on a request [00:14:00] for a quote, or just to get to know their business.
We're all swamped, right? Like this is something that happens. But they turn to places like China where they basically can stand up a factory or put people in there 24 7, which is things we're not willing to do from a cultural standpoint. You can, if you build it out and you have the demand plan for it, but the.
Are American manufacturers in this moment and with a product like yours, are they rediscovering that people still buy from people and how important that is to be accessible and how does this tool make them accessible with the overall goal of bringing back more business to the United States?
Nelson Bruton: Our solution isn't something they really think about all the times, and it's an interesting challenge for me personally growing this.
We're not a huge company like a Salesforce right, or Microsoft. We have to let people know who we are and that we exist. They know that chatbots exist, right? That they know they've been around for a while. They know that chat software exists. O Lark's great. Talk to is great live chat. There's all these great live chat softwares.
Then the question is, okay, who's gonna staff it? We don't have the resources. Or even worse, they try staffing it [00:15:00] themselves. And there's a whole host of considerations that we can talk about. If you're gonna try to staff chat yourself, or if you're currently staffing chat yourself. And so from our perspective, a lot of companies, not enough companies, know that we exist and that's our, that's on us obviously to do good marketing and be where they are.
Once we go through a process and learn from us on our website or our posts or talking to me, okay, here's things you don't. You don't know what you don't know. When it comes to the different ways to implement a chat solution on a website. When I teach workshops, it's all about, Hey, if you're doing bots, here's some things to consider.
If you're staffing it yourself, here's some things to consider and here's the way we approach it to, to do it in the best possible way.
Matt Horine: I think U.S. manufacturers have a duty to differentiate with that human expertise, especially if you're in local market and you're selling within the United States.
That's expertise in service, which is famous in manufacturing businesses. They talk about service levels, meeting SLAs, all of those things. What role does that authenticity play, and how much have you seen this from global competitors? Especially from like China or India. And there's [00:16:00] this thought that they're flooding markets with automated spam or AI driven content.
And we've talked about it a lot here, using AI in an adult manner, which is not generating slop and generating images. It's not this tool to basically fill up your X feed or do those types of things, but it's bled over into some of these types of tools that aren't value added. Are you seeing a lot of that from international markets right now?
Nelson Bruton: Not too much, to be honest with you. I'm not. We're not. We don't see a lot of that. And this came up in a conversation the other day in terms of spam that comes through our chat. When we have chat on a website for a customer. We don't see a lot of spam. We see some here and there, but we filter it out for our customer.
But it's not a, I wouldn't say it's any epidemic and it hasn't, we haven't seen an increase.
Matt Horine: That's good news. That's good news. So you hear rumors of that, or maybe it's just the system that they're using, but. I wanna pivot a little bit here and talk about it because we've had guests on the show talking where AI act and where this type of automation actually works.
And you said the key to it is to use AI to support human teams and not replace them, which is a recurring theme that you're hearing in all sectors of the market right now. Not just manufacturing, but you hear [00:17:00] about it in the software engineer employment environment. Now that. Is it AI or is it being outsourced?
There's a mixed bag of questions there, but what are some of the best use cases you've seen where AI adds the real value and uplifts the human team?
Nelson Bruton: Certainly the content creation space is where AI has played the biggest role for people who, like myself, struggle with the initial creative of writing something AI is great.
It speeds up the process. 'cause I can get that initial draft, okay, gimme that initial draft, I can, and then I can go clean it up and put my verbiage in it, my language into it to make it true to my brand or true to the audience that I'm communicating with. I think there's a caution point. You've used the word slop if people are using AI and not going through and revising it to the standards of their company.
Sending it to somebody else, and that other person doesn't revise it. It's AI slop. So I think you gotta look at it as a initial draft when you're creating something with ai, and then make sure you pay attention to the details within that initial draft to really make it your own and make sure it makes sense.
Matt Horine: Yeah, you've seen too many people fall for it where you, yeah. They hook common things that you see as like [00:18:00] M dashes, but when I get something and I see that and it's a hundred percent filled with M dashes, it's wait a minute, which it's could be an important message. It's something that I want to do, or it's something that I created myself.
Those are kinds of things that. Stand out as flags. It's, that's a really niche thing, right? To say the M dash, but that's not in all cases. But you talked a lot about the authenticity of it,
Nelson Bruton: and I think AI from a, there's so many companies like, like Clay, that software companies that are using AI for list building and pending lists from a marketing perspective.
So AI's really big in the marketing world. There's a whole other AI in the manufacturing space when you're talking about the, the welding automation and everything. So. I can't speak with any expertise of how AI is shaping the manufacturing on the shop floor, but certainly that's, it's evolving. I went to Automate in Chicago and a huge show, and even at fabtech, the robotics section gets bigger and bigger every year.
So AI is absolutely being put into these computers that are driving these robots for more accuracy, [00:19:00] precision, and speed. And so it's a AI's amazing, it's not going anywhere, right? Embrace it and use it to solve problems in your company. I think that's been
Matt Horine: the overarching theme, is that if you embrace it, it's not something to really be scared of.
We had a guest on a couple weeks ago who said, it's not that smart. It's basically doing a lot of the things that take up your time and volume and doing it in a way that is 100% aligned with your organization if you put the inputs in correctly. Turning now a little bit to some of the manufacturing marketing missteps where this might draw in a little bit more of your experience overall, but we've had this conversation a lot how manufacturers still market with kind of the equipment list approach, or if you think of a product rep or something along those line, here's what we do instead of here's why it matters.
So why is that mindset so pervasive in the industrial sector? And would love to get your take on that because it's worked,
Nelson Bruton: right? Right. Because it's worked. A lot of these manufacturers have been around for 70, 80, a hundred years. It's worked is the easy answer. [00:20:00] But with everything changes with time and circumstance and they know that they, the digital age is well upon them.
So they have to start doing. And there's some companies that are really advanced in their marketing. I, I think that they've relied a lot of my customers, uh, are the OEM manufacturer and they sell through dealers or distributors, and so resellers, whatever you want, whatever they call 'em, right?
Manufacturers, reps, and they sell some direct. By, by and large they sell to the dealers and distributors, and historically the dealers and distributors drive the business. The manufacturer just makes, so there's been a huge shift over the past 15 years of the OEMs realizing, okay, we can drive demand. We, it's, let's build our brand, let's drive our marketing.
And if we're sending more opportunities to our dealers and distributors, great. If they're generating some great, they're expected to 'cause they should be hungry distributors. But the shift to the OEMs saying, okay, we're gonna start doing marketing for ourselves. We're gonna take a responsibility for driving demand for our products, and then sending those opportunities to the dealers and distributors.
That's been a huge trend over the past 10 to [00:21:00] 15 years that we've watched. And it's great.
Matt Horine: It's a great trend because I think that having a happy distributor is very important. I've been in numerous cases where I have happy ones and I have unhappy ones, and it's all about that demand generation and lead gen.
How can smaller and mid-size manufacturers start modernizing without huge budgets? Because, uh, you made a great point. The OEMs have kind of. Open their eyes to this and driving the demand on the wholesale or side and how they work their channels. A lot of our listeners and most of American businesses are what we would consider to the small and midsize manufacturers, and they're scared of the marketing budget.
They always say it's like last thought. They think that they can drive demand on their own just by the nature of who they are, which in a lot of cases they do. But what's a good starting point for them?
Nelson Bruton: Know what you have. How much traffic do you have coming to your website each month? Google Analytics should tell you this.
I use a tool called clear web stats.com. Clear web stats.com. You can put your URL in there and it'll estimate your daily unique visitors. It's accurate, probably 80% of the time, 85% of the time. So if you don't have Google Analytics, you can put your URL into [00:22:00] clear web stats.com, get your daily visitors, multiply times 30.
There's your monthly. You're getting anywhere over 1500 visitors a month to your website. You should offer chat as a communication option to them speaking about what we do. You should offer live chat to them. You can go through iterations, right? Test different things. Put O Olark on there. Put a talk to twk.to, it's another chat software.
Live Chat Inc. Is a software. They're all about the same. Put something on your site to offer another option for communication to your visitor because your visitors have preferences like me. Funny enough, I hate using chat. I like to pick up the phone and call and talk to somebody. That's my preference for communication.
Not everybody does nowadays. Some people like to fill out a contact form with all the details they know they need, continue working on what they were working on, and wait for somebody to get back to 'em. And then there are more people than ever prefer chat if it's done correctly. They prefer chat as their communication option, so.
Really simply offering, make your phone number easy to find. Make sure your contact forms are working and have a chat. That way you have three options for communication for your visitor. [00:23:00] Now, that's the conversion part that makes sure you capture as many opportunities from the people going to your site as possible.
Now, you gotta get people to your site, search engine optimization, SEO, the old term now, because now there's a EO, right? You gotta optimize for a EI or for ai. AI engine optimization. And so all the language models, the grs, the Chat GPTs, you wanna make sure that when they're, when people are asking them questions, that your company shows up in those results somehow, some way.
So there's a whole nother strategy behind that of showing up in those language models. And then of course, the email marketing and the social media and the content marketing. There's a lot that goes into a marketing stack nowadays for companies, so that's why it is very challenging, especially for the small and mid-size.
And what I typically recommend. You build on it over time and find a really good agency or consultant that can work alongside of you, because those small, mid-size manufacturers, they're not gonna be able to build out a marketing team of 3, 5, 7 people handle everything plus the events and trade show marketing, [00:24:00] right?
It's a lot of work. Start small. You wanna get people to your site. You wanna convert the people that get to your site.
Matt Horine: That's a really good point, is converting what's probably already there. There's the known knowns and known unknown factor here, and most business owners would tell you that they are most scared of own unknowns.
Like I, I missed an opportunity that I should have known about versus, I didn't even know about that and I may have missed it, but now I can go figure it out.
Nelson Bruton: And here's the power. Over 20 year, 22 years doing this, when we've put our chat team on a website, we've seen anywhere from a 50% to 150% increase in sales inquiries.
From the traffic that's already going there. You're getting the calls, you're getting the contact forms, but if you don't have chat, you're missing the chat conversations for the people who prefer that method of communication. So can't emphasize strongly enough to test chat on your site if you're getting traffic already.
Matt Horine: Makes a lot of sense. Mostly the conversion of that. People leave a lot on the table. Looking ahead a little bit, and we've talked a lot about, you know, this human-centric elements, ai. I think the word comes down to is trust, and I think where people are trying to [00:25:00] find ways to trust a little bit more automation with having the balance of the human side.
Where do you see AI and human interaction heading over the next five years? It's moving fast now. Five years is a long window, but will we see more of the human first type tech? Platforms or has it become more and more automated?
Nelson Bruton: I think the human first is gonna be a differentiator in, in, in the future more than ever.
Even today, companies have low hanging fruit. I can't tell you how many companies, like when I do my prospecting and I call into a company, I'll often push one for sales, right? Because if I can get a sales guy interested, Hey, give us a chance, we'll double your quote requests, no risk. Sales guy's gonna say, oh, you need to talk to a marketing person.
So I get in to a lot of companies by calling the sales guy as my prospecting. I can't tell you how many times I push one for sales and it goes to voicemail. It pains me. G, what if I was an actual prospect who push ones for sales? How often is that happening during the day? So if a human is answering the phone, that push one for sales to voicemail probably isn't happening as often.
'cause that human's gonna do the intake, the top level qualification. Find out who they are, where they are. And so if that [00:26:00] person doesn't leave a voicemail and their prospect, you just missed opportunities. Cumin first is gonna be a differentiator in business it already is today, but it's gonna continue to be more of a differentiator.
That being said, there's gonna be so many opportunities for AI to help companies improve. I have a really good friend of mine who has a company that does a AI consulting. So companies that have large amounts of data across multiple entities, and they're communicating because they work together. They have a huge data lake, but they don't know what to do with it.
Right? So those comp, there's AI companies are gonna be able to come in here and say, okay, we have these use cases that seems similar to what you're dealing with. Have you thought of this? And really having the people that are gonna under understand how to. Use AI to solve. Certain problems within business or that's gonna be a huge increase in the future in terms of consulting.
Just 20 years ago, internet marketing consultants was a huge rise. You know what I mean? So this is the AI's, the next wave of business optimization, I think
Matt Horine: makes a lot of sense. And there's also one fundamental truth in a freebie for everybody who's listening [00:27:00] today, update your phone tree if it hasn't routed the the sales number, pressing one for the sales guy.
Make sure that number is active and being monitored, which is. I've been there
Nelson Bruton: and do a secret customer call your own company. Push one for sales, and if it goes to voicemail, go yell at somebody.
Matt Horine: Just a couple of closing thoughts. If there's one takeaway for manufacturing leaders listening today, what would it be to them about, one, keeping the human element in this next area of industrial growth, and what should they do today to get on the train?
Nelson Bruton: Yeah. I like to always say when I'm talking to people, think of your website like a trade show booth. So at your trade, when you go to these trade shows, hundreds, if not thousands of people pass by your booth during that week that you're there. And people are stopping to have conversations with your company, and a lot of those conversations are gonna turn into opportunities.
If you had, if you went into a trade show and didn't have any of your people in the booth, a trade show would produce far less opportunities. Don't let that happen on your website. Every week, you have hundreds, if not thousands of people going to your website, put a chat on your website to offer a conversation.
And watch what happens. Watch the enormous increase in [00:28:00] sales opportunities come in and it's a really easy task to deploy a chat nowadays. It's not hard at all.
Matt Horine: Yeah, that's the one great thing about it. It has become easier over time and companies like yours are making it easier. Where can our listeners follow your work and learn more about manufacturing chats?
Nelson Bruton: Manufacturing chats.com. Yeah, find me on LinkedIn, Nelson Bruton Manufacturing chats. I don't think there's many of me out there.
Matt Horine: Well love it. That's straight to it and straight to the website. Drive it straight there. I'd be able to catch it. Nelson, thank you so much for your time today. It was really interesting and looking forward to seeing. If we can get some listeners over to manufacturing chats.
Nelson Bruton: Awesome. Thanks Matt. Appreciate you, man.
Matt Horine: The future of U.S. manufacturing isn't about choosing between people and technology. It's about using each where it matters most. And as we've heard today, efficiency means nothing without connection. And automation means little without the discernment. To stay ahead of the curve and to help plan your strategy, please check out our [00:26:00] website at www.veryableops.com and under the resources section titled Trump 2.0, where you can see the framework around upcoming policies and how it will impact you and your business. If you're on socials, give us a follow on LinkedIn, X, formerly Twitter, and Instagram. And if you're enjoying the podcast, please feel free to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube, and leave us a rating and don't forget to subscribe. Thank you again for joining us and learning more about how you can make your way.