2483 - Automate the Busy Work, Amplify the Human Touch with YouEX AI's Tom Gersic

Engineering the AI-Driven Sales Architecture: Streamlining Workflows, Enhancing Bio-Data Scoring, and Maintaining Human Integrity with Tom Gersic In a recent episode of The Thoughtful Entrepreneur Podcast, host Josh Elledge sat down with Tom Gersic, Founder and CEO of YouEx AI https://youex.ai, to explore the rapidly shifting integration of artificial intelligence within corporate sales pipelines and inbound lead qualification engines. Tom, a veteran technology architect and automated workflow strategist, details how B2B companies, agency founders, and enterprise sales leaders can break free from fragmented software stacks and inefficient manual data entry. This conversation delivers an actionable operational guide for sales executives looking to deploy deeply embedded AI web agents, automate multi-source prospect research, score buying intent in real time, and maintain transparent human oversight to accelerate deal velocity. The Integrated AI Sales Engine: Eliminating Operational Debt and Escalating Pipeline VelocityThe primary operational drag impeding modern sales organizations is not a lack of artificial intelligence tools, but rather the severe friction caused by fragmented tech stacks. Tom Gersic explains that sales representatives routinely waste valuable selling hours manually shuffling prospect data between single-point tools, spreadsheets, LinkedIn accounts, and CRMs, acting as manual labor for the software rather than leveraging it for deal acceleration. To overcome this inefficiency, revenue leaders must shift from surface-level automation to deep, workflow-level AI integration. Embedding intelligent web agents directly into digital properties allows companies to capture detailed behavioral data across multiple prospect visits, automatically log interaction histories inside a centralized CRM, and route qualified opportunities to specialized reps without administrative delays. Maintaining buyer trust while leveraging automated outreach requires a disciplined commitment to keeping humans in the loop at every critical conversion milestone. A major risk in corporate AI adoption is the temptation to deploy fully automated, unvetted messaging agents that impersonate human reps or issue generic, robotic outreach. Strategic revenue leaders avoid over-automation by utilizing AI strictly as an intelligent co-pilot—letting automated systems handle background research, lead scoring, and preliminary draft creation while reserving final message editing, context validation, and relationship building for real sales professionals. Clear disclosure of automated interactions combined with seamless human handoffs ensures that prospective clients experience immediate value without compromising corporate authenticity or regulatory compliance. Furthermore, maximizing lifetime customer value demands extending AI search capabilities into multimedia brand assets, turning static content archives into interactive sales enablement tools. For enterprise leaders, agency founders, and media producers, deploying conversational search agents across large video or podcast libraries allows prospective clients to instantly search back catalogs by specific operational topics, technical frameworks, or guest names. Coupling intelligent media indexing with automated lead-scoring engines ensures that high-intent prospects are identified and engaged while their buying interest is at its peak. When deeply integrated web agents, automated prospect research, human-in-the-loop governance, and conversational media architectures are synthesized into a single sales ecosystem, organizations eliminate administrative friction, protect brand credibility, and predictably multiply enterprise valuation. About Tom GersicTom Gersic is the Founder and CEO of YouEx AI, a veteran software architect, and an expert in sales process automation. Drawing from extensive technical experience building integrated digital platforms and workflow engines, Tom specializes in helping B2B enterprises and sales organizations eliminate administrative complexity. He is a prominent thought leader focused on helping revenue teams deploy ethical, deeply integrated AI systems that automate lead research, streamline CRM data management, and empower sales reps to focus on high-value client relationships. About YouEx AIYouEx AI https://youex.ai is an elite sales automation technology platform engineered to help businesses streamline inbound lead capture, prospect research, and CRM data integration. The company specializes in delivering custom conversational web agents, multi-source behavioral tracking tools, intelligent lead scoring engines, and automated sales routing playbooks. Through transparent AI architectures and seamless human-in-the-loop workflows, YouEx AI enables sales teams to eliminate manual software friction, identify high-intent buyer opportunities, and maximize revenue velocity. Links Mentioned in This EpisodeYouEx AI Official Website: youex.ai http://youex.aiTom Gersic on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/tomgersic http://linkedin.com/in/tomgersic Key Episode HighlightsResolving the Fragmented Tool Dilemma: Eliminating manual data copy-pasting by integrating AI directly into core sales workflows and centralized CRM platforms. The Human-in-the-Loop Governance Model: Utilizing AI as an intelligent assistant for drafting and research while requiring human oversight to preserve authentic communication. Automated Lead Research and Intent Scoring: Leveraging AI to scan public web data, identify buying authority, and score leads in real time before rep assignment. Interactive Conversational Web Agents: Transforming static website landing pages into dynamic, multi-visit tracking hubs that capture real-time prospect intent. Conversational Search for Media Repositories: Indexing podcast libraries and multimedia assets with AI agents to allow prospective clients to instantly search back catalogs. ConclusionThe conversation with Tom Gersic reinforces that achieving sustainable sales acceleration requires an intentional balance of advanced workflow automation and authentic human relationship building. By standardizing internal data governance, eliminating manual administrative friction, and maintaining strict transparency in AI-driven communications, business leaders can transform an underperforming sales process into a highly structured, self-sustaining revenue engine. More from The Thoughtful Entrepreneur🎙️ Want to be featured on The Thoughtful Entrepreneur? 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• 0:03Speaker 00

  Welcome to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If you're committed to growing your business by serving audiences with generosity and real expertise, you're in the right place. This is a daily 15 minute show featuring leaders who believe real impact comes from generosity, not hype, which means as a listener, you're going to get the good stuff. In fact, we created podverified.com to give thoughtful leaders like you free tools to show up better on podcast stages like this one. That includes your free Pod Verified score, free Pod Verified guest training, a free media kit builder, and so much more. It's the first ecosystem of its kind built by podcasters who genuinely want to help guests

• 0:44Speaker 00

  thrive and grow in podcasting. Visit podverified.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  With us right now, it's Tom Gersic. Tom, you are the founder and CEO of UX. You're found on the web at ux.ai, and that's Y-O-U-E-X dot A-I. Tom, it's great to have you.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Oh, thanks so much for having me on, Josh. I'm really excited for the conversation today.

• 1:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. And, and you know, before we get talking about the work you're doing, and by the way, if you are interested to our friend that's listening, if you're curious in keeping up to date with what is happening at the intersection of AI and sales, please stay tuned because that's what we're going to get into. But Tom, before we do, I understand you recently had a vacation to Croatia. Tell me about that.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  It was amazing. I've always wanted to go. My last name Gersic is Croatian, but I'd never been. My grandparents immigrated here and, and, you know, so I've heard my whole life about how beautiful the country is. And really, this was the, you know, the summer we finally got to go. Such a beautiful place. I can't recommend it enough. Beautiful beaches. It's mostly beaches. Like it's beaches all along the coast, right across the Adriatic from Italy. And just, we stayed in Dubrovnik, which is where a lot of Game of Thrones is filmed, like all the giant walls and all of that. And then we went to the island of Barat, and then a little bit in Split, and we spent two weeks there and just had an amazing time with the family. So I can't recommend it enough. It's such a location. Yeah.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  Did you happen to see some sights and they're like, yeah, this is in Game of Thrones?

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%. The walled city of Dubrovnik is this place called Old Town. It's actually a walled city. There's walls. It's been used for defense over like a thousand years, you know, as it's a medieval city and it's all built out of like stone. It's like beautiful, beautiful white marble that's from the island. And so like the streets are paved in marble. The buildings are white. It's this amazing city with all on the walls and you can go for a walk around the walls. And it's the actual, it is the walls that are in Game of Thrones. And it goes all over and you can walk along the top of it. And there's like restaurants on top and there's all sorts of you can stop for a drink and take a look out over the sea. Yeah. So you absolutely do see the gates and the walls and different sites from, from the show. It's amazing.

• 3:07Speaker 00

  They don't, they don't keep the restaurants kind of like authentic to the age, right? They don't have a, hopefully they don't have a McDonald's up there, but they, you know.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  No, McDonald's is not authentic to the medieval times, but authentic to Croatian cuisine, for sure. And a lot of restaurants, like we never had to wait. And there's a lot of tourism there because of Game of Thrones and all that. But like, there are so many restaurants, you could, you walk right in and, you know, you'd always find a place because there are so many restaurants throughout that area. Just amazing food too. So great service, everything.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  Excellent. Excellent. All right. Thank you so much for sharing that. I am inspired. I'm definitely, you want to hit up some, some Google images and, and, and take a look at, or unless you shared some photos on your, your social media or whatever, I could go look at that. But it sounds awesome. Hey, Tom, let's talk about your superpower. And I'm hoping maybe you can just kind of start with a kind of a quick 101 or kind of a state of the union of where we are right now with AI-enabled tools and sales. There's a lot of sales that is just very labor intensive. It's very time consuming. And then there are things that, you know, just kind of maybe a little bit more high

• 4:21Speaker 00

  touch and also time consuming. So where are we today?

• 4:26Speaker 01

  A great question. I'll just say, I'll start with saying like, our goal is really to help salespeople do more of what they're really good at and what people are really good at and salespeople are really good at, building relationships, building trust, meeting with people, talking with people. The thing that just takes a ton of time is all the busy work. You know, people don't like updating a CRM. People don't like all the data entry. They don't like all of that kind of a thing. And so what we're really trying to do is to automate a lot of that. And if you think about AI right now for sales, I would say, there's kind of two perspectives on it that I would say, one is that there's a million tools out there. And the people who are really kind of trying to be on the cutting edge of AI and sales

• 5:07Speaker 01

  as they're selling are typically stitching together eight to 10 different tools. They've got probably ChatGPT and/or Claude and/or Gemini, probably a little bit of all three. They're using a variety of different tools to get email addresses and to send emails and spreadsheets and they're copying data from place to place. And so in a lot of ways, it's the people are doing the work for the AI. They're copying data from place to place. They're swivel sharing, and they're not getting the full value out of deeply embedding AI into workflows. And if you look at where people are getting a lot of value out of deeply embedding AI into workflow, the people that are way ahead of the game are engineers, right? So when you really think about like coding and, you know, the people are using Claude

• 5:52Speaker 01

  code and Codex and Cursor and all of these tools for vibe coding, those are the, that's the kind of industry right now, or, you know, the group of, you know, people, roles that are getting that deeply embedded. Like what does it look like when you're really getting deeply embedded into your workflow? And that means that it's not just the tools that people are using to generate the code. It's also the code reviews. It's also as they push code into, you know, a source code repository. It's running additional things off of there. Agents are going and improving the code. And all of these things are really deeply embedding into workflow. That's what's missing right now in sales. Right now you have a bunch of point solutions. People are stitching together. They're coming up with their own workflows and it's not really getting that value that you would have out of a deeply embedded workflow

• 6:37Speaker 01

  for sales. That's what we're trying to solve for. And what we're, our thesis to say, rather than yet another sales point solution, have an AI workflow that starts from the very beginning from a lead and say, okay, you can have a lead from a website. What's the best way to make a website less like just a brochure and more interactive, more conversational, really help people to understand what you're offering? And is, you know, start to use AI for that. And then also have AI review your email, have AI do all these types of things so that you're not spending time updating CRM. You're getting that much more value out of a CRM by having it already have all the information you need and then giving you information back, giving you analysis, telling you, okay,

• 7:20Speaker 01

  this is what you should be following up on. These are the leads that you haven't followed up on. Do you want me to send an email? Things like that are the things that AI can do. And then, once you have the meeting, it's on you to sell, right? Like, you know, you have a meeting with somebody. That's what you're really trying to do is to get on a call and really try to, you know, build trust, build a relationship and have that ultimately that sale. So that's the goal. And that's what we're really trying to do is to embed deeply into, embed AI deeply into a sales workflow by making sellers that much better at what they do. And I think what the industry is missing right now is this notion around, oh, is AI replacing sellers? Is AI replacing engineers? Is AI? And in some cases it is, and it's always a mistake, you know?

• 8:04Speaker 01

  And the companies that have gone and done that have backtracked and they've rehired people. And because ultimately AI is a technology, like any technology, you know, when we had the launch of the computer, people had the same concerns, like I was going to put people out of work. And ultimately, when you look at kind of the broad strokes and macroeconomic effect of computers, it didn't put people out of work. It, you know, it broadened the economy. It created jobs. It created more effort and more work. And AI will do the same thing. It's a technology. The more people are using it, the more value they get out of it, the faster they are getting that sort of use and value out of workflow with AI, the quicker we get, you know, that much more done. And ultimately, the companies that are

• 8:47Speaker 01

  hiring sellers that use AI are the ones that are going to be getting ahead that much faster. And that's what we're trying to enable.

• 8:55Speaker 00

  So Tom, I'd love to get your take on maybe a couple of other best practices for leveraging AI effectively if you are responsible for sales for your organization, particularly if you're a founder that's doing that work. But before we do, I'm hoping maybe you can give us a couple of worst practices. Because I think that there are some ways that, you know, I've been seeing some, especially on the marketing side, you know, I've just been seeing some, you know, lazy AI-enabled marketing and it's, it's pretty off-putting. And I have to tell you that then, when we get to sales, which is, you know,

• 9:37Speaker 00

  particularly for those of us who are a little bit higher touch in, in that effort, you know, my fear would be, you know, that sales impersonates me poorly and then damages a relationship where I would feel kind of like, ew, why, man, you know, it's like, Tom, I thought we had something here and now it's just all your bots trying to impersonate you. That's obviously not you. Like, that would be my fear, like that that would happen.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  I think it's important when you're using AI in sales to declare that it's AI. And to make it or to have a human in the loop so that it's not. If you're generating a draft and then you're reviewing it and sending it, then that's that's different. Right. But I think especially as we start to think globally. One, it's a best practice, but two, it's a regulatory requirement. As you start to look at things like the EU AI Act that does start to require AI based generated materials, whether it be, you know, email or text or, um, you know, video or, or, you know, audio or any, really any media. We're starting to see a regulatory framework, especially coming out of the EU around requiring

• 10:49Speaker 01

  some sort of declaration that this is AI, you know, or it has to be obvious that it is. So I think impersonation, um, is, is, is not really what the gold standard should be. It should be a ability to say, okay, we have a chap on the website. It's clearly not a person, you know, and we're not trying to claim that it's a person. It's, it's, it's clearly an AI, but it's based around enabling somebody to get that much more information out of what they're trying to research or how they're trying to engage. And then make it clear where there's a handoff. You know, um, if you want to have a handoff be a scheduled meeting, have the AI be able to say, I can set up time with Josh, you know, but are you available tomorrow at 3:00 PM?

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Because he is that kind of a thing is something that then you have a clear handoff to a real person. And then the other thing, you know, as you're generating, you know, an email or whatever, a lot of it is like, there's so many tells, right? Like if you, if you see an M dash in an email or, you know, or a whole bunch of M dashes, or you see like just the, the whole, like compare this with that. Or, you know, a lot of talk about like, oh, these are the people that will win, you know, like that AI keep says these like same phrases again and again and again. But I think also like one of the things we've really built in is to say, you know, we can generate an email, we can have a ready to send, you should, you should review it. And, and at some point you can have it automated, but you know, we, we'd like to be truthful

• 12:13Speaker 01

  and trustworthy about what we're sending and not have it try to impersonate a person, but have it ultimately be something that is, um, uh, you know, compliant with regulatory frameworks, but is, is also clear with people what, what they're getting.

• 12:27Speaker 00

  So the high level features for UX.ai is where does that? Help me understand, or give me maybe just like a case study of like, you know, where this fits in, what it's going to be doing for us. Cause I know also too, of course, you know, this integrates with Zapier's MCP integration, which basically means it's going to integrate with about everything else in our systems. But outside of that, can you help us just understand where this fits in? And I should say, um, you know, looking at your pricing on your website, I mean, this is just, it's a SaaS platform. It's priced as a SaaS, um, it's very accessible right now. Okay. So the, the workflow.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Workflow starts from a lead coming into a system. You, the, our goal is to say, we want to bring web leads more directly into a sales process. I think there's a lot currently over the history of websites, it's been this sort of like marketing function, and then you have like a sales function handoff to say, okay, we can actually bring that directly into a sales platform by using AI. Make it that much faster to get a web lead. Then you have, if you have a person who's engaged with your website, who set up a meeting with you via your website, via an agent, you have a lot of things. You have first off, the information that they asked about in the chat. We're logging the entire chat history that they've asked. And that's not just that one visit, but if they've come back multiple times to your website and had multiple chats with that agent, you know, every single one of those

• 13:54Speaker 01

  in our CRM. We also know every single page you've scrolled on, clicked on, everything like that also logged. So you have information in, in rich detail directly in the CRM, not hidden away in Google Analytics or some other marketing platform. It's right in your CRM. All of the data is there, but we also summarize it so we can make it easy to just look, okay, this person's interested in this. We also have, once it's logged in the CRM, every single lead gets researched. That's a multi-phase research. It goes out and, and searches LinkedIn data, Google data. It searches your employer's website to see, are you the CEO? Are you an executive who has purchasing authority? Or are you just an intern who's doing research for somebody else?

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Like what is the level that you're, you know, interacting with when you jump on a call? So that you know. And then we have agents that will then score that lead, make it clear, you know, uh, what that kind of overall scoring is, is it a hot lead? Is it a cold lead? Is it a important, you know, uh, high intent, high, you know, uh, purchasing authority buyer? And then send that to the right person. So you have an AI based routing system that doesn't just, we have, we can do round robin where it just assigns like a normal workflow. But we also have an AI based routing system where each individual salesperson on your team can describe what they are good at. If you have one person who's more technical and you have one person who maybe has a legal background and you have another person who has, you know, whatever, they can put that

• 15:19Speaker 01

  in there and then the AI can look and say, okay, this is somebody who needs more tech, you know, the CTO at this company is interested. Let's, let's pair them up with this technical research person, then they can have a better conversation. So it's a, it's a, uh, our goal is to say, okay, we have a lead to opportunity. We're trying to be a really, really efficient CRM that allows people to get leads converted to opportunities and to track their opportunities and move that into revenue and, and ultimately use AI along the way.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  And so for our friend that's been listening here, your website, U Y O U E X dot AI. And when they go to the website, what would you recommend they do?

• 16:00Speaker 01

  I would say, um, you know, we just published a really great video that kind of gives a walkthrough of how to set up the web agent. I would take a look at the videos page and start to look through, you know, a little bit of that. We're going to start posting more videos, uh, and now that we've, um, you know, sort of started to do a little bit of that video. Also, you know, just, uh, take a look at the, um, book a demo link because you can interact with the agent right there. It will connect you, you know, to, to us to, to set up a demo and we can walk you through how it works. And, um, there's a free trial as well. So if you are interested in doing a free trial, that's an unlimited free trial. You can start a two week trial, put it on your website, see how you like it. It works just as if you're paying it. We're not limiting it anyway. So you can, uh, you can use a free trial as well.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  And then, um, set up a demo or get in touch with me and I'm more than happy to discuss it as well.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  Tom Gersic, founder and CEO of UX AI, found on the web at UX.ai. Tom, it's been a great conversation. Thank you for joining us.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks so much, Josh. Really enjoyed it.

• 17:07Speaker 00

  Thanks for listening to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If your goal is to grow your business, increase revenue and build authority without gimmicks, this show is designed for you. Each episode gives you practical insight from leaders who have turned trust and credibility into real business results. If you value short, thoughtful conversations that respect your time, make sure you're subscribed. We publish daily 15 minute episodes focused on growth that actually compounds. And if you're interested in being a guest or you want to turn podcast appearances into measurable business growth, visit podverified.com. You can start for free with your pod verified score along with free podcast guest training and a free media kit builder.

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