Building Practical AI Products That Actually Save Time & Generate Revenue ~ Laurent Cohen

LINK THRU SOCIAL PODCAST EPISODE 40 — BUILDING PRACTICAL AI PRODUCTS THAT ACTUALLY SAVE TIME & GENERATE REVENUE Guest: Laurent Cohen, Founder and CTO, GetOblic (getoblic.com) Host: Paul Wright EDITED TRANSCRIPT SPONSOR MESSAGE — TICKETPORTX: Introducing TicketPortX multi-day events. Hosting a festival, seminar, conference, tournament, or event series. No more manually sending tickets 24 hours later. No more scrambling to issue comps and catch up with attendees. With TicketPortX, everything happens in real time. Sell tickets for multiple events on one page. Create ticket packages across different dates. Manage entire event series from a single storefront. And spend less money marketing multiple links and event pages. One platform, one link, endless possibilities. TicketPortX, powering your brand, your events, and your growth. PAUL WRIGHT (HOST): And welcome back to the Link Thru Social Podcast. Well, we have a special guest for us today, Laurentt Cohen. And Laurent is the founder and CTO of GetOblic, a voice first AI platform, helping local businesses never miss a customer call. With over 20 years of entrepreneurial and technical leadership across Europe and the United States, he now builds AI tools that handle real phone conversations, books appointments, and captures leads automatically. Laurent, welcome to the program. LAURENT COHEN: Thank you for having me, Paul. I'm very happy and looking forward to the discussion today. PAUL WRIGHT: Oh, it's our pleasure to have you. before we get into things here, perhaps you can share with our audience a little bit about your background. LAURENT COHEN: I just turned 55 yesterday. PAUL WRIGHT: Oh we're the same we're the same age, Laurent. That's amazing. LAURENT COHEN: Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, are you happy? PAUL WRIGHT: I am I'm I'm very happy. I'm living the life. LAURENT COHEN: Perfect. so I was born and raised in France, moved to America in 2002. I was 30 because I had the American dream, and I've been working previously for 10 years in the environmental and cosmetics business, and I decided to dive into the tech business right after the 1998 bubble. Yeah, so this is this was a huge shift between what happened before, which was basically people dreaming about what the internet is gonna be, and the reality of what the internet became. the beginning of Google, you know, social media in 2007, Amazon really exploding in 2011. So I've been through this and it really forged me. learned a lot. that believe it or not, in 2026 it's still relevant. Take something like SEO. when I started my new venture last year, SEO is really one of the foundations of my background, technical background. but I was doubting that it was still relevant in the AI era. well, it's more than relevant, it's still alive and kicking. And everybody that's today starting anything related to digital should not dismiss SEO. And I've been doing many ventures, you know, going from e-commerce to social, and with quite good success. Nice, thank God. And now as everyone, I believe that he's in the digital realm. when AI came out, I mean conversational AI, because AI has been around for a few years now, but when conversational AI came out, I was still amazed, and I'm like a kid. I mean, every single morning when I open my computer and I use AI, I'm amazed by what it can do. And I would add that going through all the digital experience for the past 25 years, I think the biggest shift in the AI era is that as big as were all those discoveries we had from web, e-commerce, social media, we were still always running after the technology. Yeah, meaning that you know, you see your first website, you see your first e-commerce website, or your first video streaming, then you we were starting to dream about what we could do with it. And most of the time, technology was not ready it. Well, that's the biggest shift with AI. find me one person that dreams of something today that is not existing or that is not being able to be developed in a short time with very low expenses. that doesn't exist. And if it exists, wait another month and it will come out. So that's the life I'm living the dream that I've been living expecting for 25 years, being able to achieve everything I have in my head with minimum spendings and just courage and ambition. PAUL WRIGHT: It's you're you're absolutely right. now that we've acknowledged that we're the same age, I've had a similar journey as far as the advancements of technology over the years through the different phases. And it's absolutely a fascinating time, 2026. And I can't even in my own head imagine what 2027 and 2028 are going to be because we are moving so quickly now, and it's extremely exciting times. I definitely agree with you. Now, if you were starting from zero today, how would you build a profitable using AI as your foundation? Because this is what a lot of up-and-coming entrepreneurs are facing now. So, how would you do that? LAURENT COHEN: First of all, I always start from zero. This is who I am. I'm a bootstrapper at heart. and I've been through experience where making money has made me, I wouldn't say lazy, but put me in a position that doesn't push me to challenge myself. So every single project that I launch, I like to be the kid I was 25 years ago. I bootstrap, I try to keep my expenses again at a minimum, and use my really elbow grease and mine and set and putting the hours because this is where I blossom, this is where I'm creative, this is where I found the ideas that are gonna make my company relevant. So now, in the AI era, that's probably 20 hours discussion, and we have 20 minutes. So let's try to get to the point and find really the biggest point that could help your community right now. First of all, get rid of the noise. What I'm calling the noise is opening social media. I'd say mostly X, probably a little bit of LinkedIn, Instagram, but a lot of on X, where you have all those people showing you the shiny new AI object. we've all been through the do you know Claude Code? This is amazing, this is the next thing you should do. try this app. And there's always a new shiny object. But put aside that all of this is advertising, this is not advice. most of us, and as tech savvy as we are, do not need anything more than what existed a year ago. Right. you know, people are bashing ChatGPT now. Well, believe me, you can work with ChatGPT and you'll be safe. You know, you want a Gemini account, Gemini is great. No, you really want Cloud, you think that it looks smarter. And that's actually funny, Paul, because I'm sure that you saw that everybody that's not knowledgeable with AI, when you put the word AI on the table, say, oh yeah, Claude is great, right? Yeah, okay. Now I know that you don't use AI because that's not, I'm and I'm not bashing Claude by the way. No. I'm just saying what cloud is good for is probably 0.5% of what people need in a marketplace. so you know what? Put the noise aside, open the LLM of your choice because you're comfortable with it, you know, and start digging into it, you know. Yes, share with it, you know, put your heart into it, test because one of the things that will make you a successful tech entrepreneur is not your skills, it's your courage and not being able to afraid to fail. Yes, it's all about doing something and basically doing control Z. You know, that's how I would sum up what tech is, you know. And if you're afraid of diving and trying stuff and failing, this is not a game for you. No, so absolutely go so that would be the first thing I would say. then as far as what you should be careful with is we all know what LLMs do. you ask a question and they tell you're the best, this is beautiful, it's gonna be the greatest product in the world. assess and understand that by what it's made of, an LLM is mediocre at best. It's just it's just really the average of everything else as that has been done in the world. So don't count on LLM for anything creative. And you're gonna let's say someone I was talking with someone a few days ago that is not really savvy, but we won't try stuff, and I was trying to encourage him. And he said, Okay, I'm gonna open a company, I'm gonna look out for a name for the company, I'm gonna ask actually ChatGPT, and he obviously came out with 50 names and said your idea is the most best idea in the world, you're gonna be successful. And this is the name I would suggest to you because blah. And I told him this is tech literally not the question you ask ChatGPT. You know, don't ask him to be creative for you, don't believe everything he says, it says, she says. just keep the creativity human, please. You know, yes, and use LLM to apply your work as you would do with an employee. So that I would think that's are things that are reasonable for any people on the marketplace, but believe me, as today people still don't do that. if I would give a suggestion also, and it's very technical, but I've been applying it successfully when working with AI. If you start discussion a thread, you know, and if you keep asking questions along the thread, take the time to always reframe with the LLM a few things that are very important. What I do is use best practice, you know. don't give me other ideas because you know I did that, right? And you shouldn't add this. No, I don't want this. Do what I say and stop there. Yeah, and the other thing I do is at the end of the thread, you know, when things get heavy after hours, you know, and slow down and it starts hallucinating. Now I know the little hints that tell me the thread become useless. What I do is I say, we stop here and I always try to stop earlier when we reach a certain milestone. And I'll literally say to the LLM on the thread, we've reached a milestone. Write me in detail what the milestone is about everything with the cheap. It if it needs to include code, include code. If it needs to include figures, tables, include tables. Okay, do it, send me the PDF. I download the PDF, which is actually different from that loading the whole thread PDF. No, it's really resume, you know, and I accumulate those PDFs in a folder because I'm very organized. Yeah, and next morning I have the same subject that I want to tackle all next month. I go back and I don't say we've talked about last month on the thread. I say we're resuming work on project XYZ today. We are gonna do a new session in order to ensure continuation. Here is the last milestone we worked on. And I if I have 10, I upload 10. If I had three, I upload three. You cannot you cannot upload more than 10 in one message, but usually uploading three, five, six milestones is perfect. Boom, you give it the information. Again, I would assume that anybody is working properly with LM knows that, but you know, I again I know people that don't. Yeah, and I and I'm organized, I got my folders, I've got my sessions, I got everything, and because continuity is the biggest problem you're gonna have using any LLM, and this is why people because we people have been bashing also wrappers, but a good rapper on which is a software basically using LLM and combining agents is all about that, ensuring that the brain and the information ensure continuity. Because if you decide to work with AI, you think that AI is ChatGPT, but you it's just a little portion of that, it's all the conversational, it's putting everything in order, but you need automation, you need data. Data is the most important thing we need today. So you need you need to bring that. Chat's not gonna bring you data, you know, right. chatting with LLM and everything. So there's so much to be said, and let me stop here. PAUL WRIGHT: No, you're you're you're absolutely right, and I totally agree with you now. how is voice first fundamentally different from you know the traditional automation tools and chatbots that have been around for a very long time? How is that different? LAURENT COHEN: I would tell you that the thing I like the less about the marketplace on voice AI is people trying to sell a voice that is human-like. Basically trying to put the user experience in a place where people would not distinguish that it is AI. I'm not saying that the AI should be robotic, but I'm saying I'm I'm pro disclosing that you use AI in any work. I should I believe that you can write an article using AI, but you should mention it. And I believe that when a voice AI is talking with someone, you need you see with Gallic, we have other people calling our voice AI, they don't distinguish it, but we like to disclose it. Yes, so that's one thing because you're gonna go again on X and you're gonna see all those kids building voice AI trying to sell it, and their the point of sale is saying my voice AI is perfect, you cannot distinguish it. Right that for me is not voice AI. For me, voice AI is how the AI is capable of distinguishing the emotion of the person she's talking to. Yes, and it changes dramatically the game. let's say you use AI for customer service, you have someone calling it and that's upset because the credit card information has been stolen and it's panicking and it's under stress, under stress. Right. Right now, you have humans that are dealing with that well or not, because someone that's spending eight hours on the phone does not react as well at 7 p.m. than it does at 7 a.m. but AI doesn't have that problem. 24-7. it can understand the language of the person it's talking to and navigate from multiple languages at the same time, and again, understanding very well the emotion and reacting as it should to this emotion, you know, keeping calm or being more strict or directing. And I think for me, that's the most beautiful thing about voice AI, and that's also why I started voice AI, because I had a call a year and a half ago, and the experience was so beautiful for me that I said, okay, there's something that has to be done there. But you know, you know what, Paul? At the end of the day, this is not about voice AI. this is about how addressing the biggest pain point for anyone today working in the AI marketplace, which is trust. As a new technology, we all know 100% that 10 years from now, every answering machine will be a voice AI. every article will be corrected by AI, every video will be edited by AI. That's one thing, you know. Like we knew when e-commerce came that every store is gonna get e-commerce. You know, maybe it doesn't apply for metaverse, but it applied for everything else. Exactly. so we know that, right? So you can tell and the technology, again, like I said when we started our discussion, the technology is perfectly mature. We don't have to wait five years to take that, it's perfectly working now. So, how do we go in 2026 to where we should be in 2036? It's all about trust. And the trust is a very human thing, it's not you don't resolve this trust problem with robots. This is why, for instance, that at GetOblic, we do not do voice AI for outbound calls. Oh, okay, you know, reaching out with voice AI for a call is exactly what voice AI is supposed to solve. Let me explain that to you. You have a small business, yeah. let's say you have a salon or a clinic or a tattoo parlor. You know, you work with your hand and with customer coming in your practice all day long. You're busy, you've been building your business on the one thing trust. The clients trust you. They know you do a good job, they know when they have a problem they can rely on you. This is how any business in the world that is successful works. Trust. Okay, so people are working now, they have to answer the phone because it's potentially a client calling, right? We all know that 70% of those calls are not clients. Who they are as people doing outbound calls trying to sell you something, yeah. Voice AI, maybe, or something else. Well, voice AI, first of all, is here. You know what? Take care of your customers. We're gonna sort your calls, you know, we're gonna make sure that only the important call gets to you. So all the noise, all the noise gets on the side. We take care of the appointments. If someone wants to talk to you, we get you a fallback and you get the call. So now what you get from voice AI, you get time instead of spending what 45 minutes per day on the phone, those four minutes, 45 minutes get back to you. Then you have your nights and weekends, you know. If your business is something you built for the past 25 years, you take it at heart. You know, you answer the call, but you want to be with your family, you want to sleep, maybe, you want to rest, you know, yeah, you want to watch a game on TV, you know. But you know that if you don't answer that call that is ringing right now, two things can happen. You can miss the customer because it goes to the competition, because we live in the minute era, you know, people don't wait anymore. Yeah, you know, or you can pick up the phone and find out that it's someone sending you something and then you get upset. You know, yes, this is not how you do it. So, this is how voice AI works, okay? But it can be applied to any other business. Now, how do we solve that problem? Because now you understand that we have a voice AI that can do outbound called Oblig, that can call people trying to sell it, but we're not gonna sell something with something we're fighting against. It doesn't make sense, yeah. So, this is where I'm gonna go zoom out and tell you what I think about AI. people that are scared about AI say AI is gonna just destroy jobs. no, it's not gonna change the marketplace. Take now what it what it takes for AI to be successful, it takes humans for the last mile. You need someone, we have 33 million small businesses in the US, I don't know how many hundreds of million all over the world that need all of them to be equipped with AI. And now when I say equipped with AI, it can go from learning what an automation is, you know, what a workflow is. Salon doesn't know what is a workflow, he never heard that word, but still it's it's useful for him, you know. So they need a human, and that human is not about knowing what AI is it being the last mile, the last link. on the chain that created trust between the AI builders and the business. You see, so that it took us time to understood understand this. But now we're creating a network of licensees that are basically the AI guys locally. And they are the link between the businesses and ourselves to go about voice AI, but not only. Now we have a whole panel of tools that we're providing for small businesses. And also that came for another reason by the way. And this is very interesting because I'm not talking about myself, I'm talking about AI in general. When we started voice AI and we started to have clients very early on what happened was very clear because as you can anyone can buy voice AI and be ready in two minutes on GetOblic, people wanted still to call us. Yes. So now again we need human right we don't want the voice AI to answer okay we have customer service you know we answer the calls. And now those people trust us because voice AI works for them and suddenly we're not the voice AI guy. We became the AI guy. Yes. Not because we wanted to but because okay you do voice AI. Voice AI is AI right you can do that for me. You know I've heard that we can post every day on Instagram and I don't have time can you help us with that? Or I've heard that we can connect to a CRM can you do that? Of course I can do that. No and then we extend it because we become the AI guy. But still me and my partner because we are only two at the company and we do very well we cannot no multiplicity we cannot be everywhere at the same time with everyone and answering every call and we have work to do. So creating a network of licensee is literally creating a network of solopreneur small businesses that's going to make money putting AI out there. That's something that AI can do. Okay I'm I'm gonna be quite harsh but I believe that everyone that's going to be really losing their work with AI kind of deserves it. The white collar that spent 50% of his time at a coffee machine trying to find a way to climb the company ladder. Yes way before AI and way before tech, I was not having the utmost respect for those people. I don't think they're productive and I don't think they should be happy by the end of the day. Yeah with all the respect for everybody in the world. So if they lost their work because they really do not really work yeah that's not I don't take it on me you know that's not personal. But if someone can become an entrepreneur and be by itself doing something that's creating growth because that's why AI does create growth yeah in a in a company because remember what I say with voice AI you have one hour available more on the day so that's potentially one to two clients no that's money yeah that's all for the best PAUL WRIGHT: no absolutely sir now we have to wrap things up but your website is getoblic.com — G-E-T-O-B-L-I-C will include the links in our description when they go there Laurent just maybe viewers and listeners know what they're gonna see there and contact you if they would thank LAURENT COHEN: first of all thanks for having me Paul and you now you know by now that I'm a I'm a talker so PAUL WRIGHT: oh I love and I want to have you back believe me LAURENT COHEN: thank you Paul thank you and since I'm a talker and I'm I also like to share and help people because I've been very helped early on so if anyone has a question and wants to discuss anything with me it's very easy you go at the footer of GetOblic.com any of the social media we are and we're I think about everywhere you just send me a message or obviously email or call or I'd be more than happy to help anyone so that's one thing. now about GetOblic if you have a small business because what differentiates GetOblic from other voice AI companies because we have a directory we have 1.8 million businesses that are listed and each of those businesses has a voice AI agent that is fully working for free. And the idea is that if you have a small business first if you're listed already on GetOblic you can listen and talk and interact with your voice agent and if you like it you pay for the subscription which is $99 per month and this voice AI will be available on a dedicated line that's going to be dedicated to you where you can send your calls on your website on your Instagram on your WhatsApp everywhere. If your business is not listed you go again on GetOblic and you say add your business it takes 30 seconds for your GetOblic page to be created and your voice AI agent to be trained. So once it's done you click on a button and again you discuss with your voice agent that knows your company we're not talking about a demo we're talking about full voice agent working. Okay. So that's what people can do on GetOblic. PAUL WRIGHT: Absolutely amazing well I encourage all our listeners and viewers to visit getoblic.com and once again Laurent thank you very much for joining us and I will be following up with you. PAUL WRIGHT: We'd love to have you on again soon because this technology is moving so fast and we're this is one of the reasons we're doing the Link Thru Social podcast to help entrepreneurs and professionals stay abreast to everything all the new changes that are happening on an hourly basis not a yearly basis now it's an hourly basis so lauren thanks thank you very much for being on our show thank you all right well the link through social podcast will be back right after this short break SPONSOR MESSAGE — SMART POST APP: tired of stressing over what to post on social media meet smart post app your all-in-one solution to create schedule and grow your content effortlessly in just a few taps you can generate engaging posts stay consistent and keep your audience coming back for more no more guessing no more burnout just smarter content faster whether you're a business owner creator or entrepreneur Smart Post App offers both premium and pro plans in addition we have new features that have been recently added that include instantly viewing public links to your posts on any network weekly view allowing you to plan hour by hour account groups group your accounts to save time and simplify your workflow and a desktop version which offers a simpler way to stay consistent. 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