This article was based on the interview with Arto Minasyan, Co-Founder & President at Krisp.ai by Greg Kihlström, Marketing Technology keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
The current discourse around Artificial Intelligence feels a bit like a gold rush, complete with breathless prospectors, dubious maps to untold riches, and a healthy amount of snake oil. As a marketing leader, you are constantly bombarded with claims of revolutionary technology that will solve every problem you’ve ever had, and a few you didn’t know you had. Separating the genuine breakthroughs from the polished demos is a full-time job in itself. The noise can be deafening, and the pressure to “do something with AI” is immense. Yet, the real conversation, the one that matters for long-term success, isn’t just about the technology. It’s about the strategic architecture that supports it.
The most successful AI companies—and the enterprises that successfully leverage their technology—aren’t just winning because they have the best algorithms. They are winning because they make smarter decisions about how to fund innovation, how to structure teams for a globalized world, and how to cultivate a culture that can actually execute on a visionary idea. It’s the foundational work that allows the technological marvels to flourish. We recently had a conversation with Arto Minasyan, Co-Founder and President of Krisp.ai, a company that has navigated this complex landscape to become a leader in voice AI. His journey offers a masterclass not in hype, but in the pragmatic, strategic choices that underpin sustainable, world-class growth.
From Practical Application to a Revolution in Communication
Before we can talk about strategy, we have to ground ourselves in the reality of what the technology can and will do. In the realm of voice AI, the possibilities are often framed in futuristic, almost sci-fi terms. Arto’s perspective is far more grounded, focusing on the immediate and tangible challenges that exist today, particularly in the distinction between human-to-human and human-to-computer interactions. He sees a clear, multi-year roadmap where the technology methodically solves real-world friction points, ultimately leading to a more profound transformation.
The near-term impact, as Arto sees it, is centered on augmenting human capability, especially in high-stakes environments like customer support and global business. This isn’t about replacing people, but about making them exponentially more effective.
“I think AI both can elevate the human agent. So human agent becomes much more effective, much more productive and can serve the customer more easily, with more effectiveness. And also I think voice bots will come to call center… I think we’ll have much better customer experience and customer support with Voice AI in next five years.”
For marketing leaders, this is the crux of the matter. The promise of AI in customer experience isn’t a vague notion of “personalization at scale.” It’s the concrete ability to provide a customer service agent with real-time translation during a call with an international customer. It’s eliminating background noise so a complex support issue can be resolved without frustration. It’s providing an agent with CRM insights surfaced by AI at the exact moment they’re needed. These are not future-state dreams; they are measurable improvements in efficiency, customer satisfaction, and, ultimately, brand loyalty. Arto’s five-year horizon suggests a steady, iterative improvement rather than a single, dramatic event—a perspective that allows for pragmatic planning and investment.
The Ultimate Validation: Selling an Idea Before It Exists
One of the greatest challenges for any leader, whether at a startup or within a sprawling enterprise, is securing the resources for a new initiative. The default process often involves extensive research, detailed project plans, and a gantt chart that stretches into next year, all before a single customer has validated the idea. This approach is slow, expensive, and de-risks very little. Arto champions a radically different, and far more effective, method: start selling early. It’s a principle that forces a direct confrontation with the market and provides the most potent form of validation—a signed contract.
This isn’t about being deceptive; it’s about validating demand. By creating a compelling vision for a product, even one that only exists as a design file, you can determine if you’re solving a real, painful problem that someone is willing to pay to fix.
“In my other company, we basically started promoting a product which don’t exist. It was just an idea. We just did like a sketch in Figma and started promoting to customers and sold like more than $100,000… to like 30 customers. So it was very good validation, but it’s a product market fit. Now we need to go and build it. And then I present this to VCs, everyone gets excited.”
This is a powerful lesson for enterprise marketing leaders trying to get a new MarTech integration or a new AI-powered customer program off the ground. Instead of asking for a multi-million dollar budget to build a complete solution, what if you piloted the concept with a key group of customers? Could you sell them on the vision and secure their commitment to a pilot program? This shifts the internal conversation from “here’s how much this will cost” to “here is the revenue and buy-in we have already secured.” It’s a move that transforms a speculative budget request into a data-backed investment in a proven opportunity, making it far more compelling to the C-suite.
The Nuanced Reality of Building a Global, World-Class Team
In our post-2020 world, the prevailing wisdom often suggests that teams can and should be fully distributed. The promise of tapping into a global talent pool is alluring, and for many functions, it’s a highly effective model. However, when it comes to the delicate, high-energy work of creating something entirely new, Arto offers a more nuanced and insightful perspective. He argues for a strategic approach to co-location, believing that the initial spark of innovation is best kindled when a team is physically together.
This isn’t a rejection of remote work, but a more sophisticated understanding of its application. The goal is to match the team structure to the stage of the project, using physical proximity to maximize creative energy during ideation and distributed efficiency to scale and iterate once the foundation is set.
“My advice still would be if you’re building a new product, it’s much better to gather all the people in one place so you get the energy, the efficiency, and like this daily communication between team members… Then a product is ready and you are just doing iterations with less speed, then I think bringing people outside of the physical location is realistic.”
This model has direct applications for marketing leaders. When launching a major re-brand, developing a new flagship campaign, or architecting a complex new customer journey, the “all hands on deck in one room” approach can be invaluable. The spontaneous whiteboard sessions, the casual conversations over lunch, the sheer energetic momentum—these are difficult to replicate over video calls. Once that core strategy and creative platform are locked in, the execution, iteration, and optimization can be managed far more effectively by a distributed team. It’s about being intentional, recognizing that different types of work benefit from different environments.
The Prerequisite for Innovation: An Idea Meritocracy
Ultimately, technology and strategy are only as good as the ideas that fuel them. In many organizations, great ideas are lost because they come from the wrong person, are voiced in the wrong meeting, or don’t align with the senior-most leader’s preconceived notions. Building a truly innovative organization requires a cultural commitment to what can be called an idea meritocracy—an environment where the quality of an argument triumphs over the title of the person making it.
This is simple in theory but incredibly difficult in practice. It requires leaders to actively solicit dissenting opinions, to create formal and informal channels for new ideas to surface, and to model a culture where being proven wrong is seen not as a failure, but as a collective win for the organization.
“In our company, all the best arguments always win. It doesn’t depend who is in the room. Like, I’m a junior who just joined the company or the founder of the company. If she or he has the best idea, that should be prioritized and basically become the priority for the team and for the company.”
For a marketing leader, this means ensuring the junior analyst who spots a critical flaw in the attribution model has the psychological safety and the platform to voice their concern. It means the creative director is genuinely open to a campaign concept that comes from the PR team. As Arto points out, the people closest to the technology and the customers—the engineers, product managers, designers, and customer-facing teams—often have the best insights. A leader’s primary role is not to have all the answers, but to build a system that ensures the best answers, regardless of their source, rise to the top.
The journey to becoming an AI-powered enterprise is less a technological sprint and more a strategic marathon. As Arto Minasyan’s experience demonstrates, lasting success is built not on the shifting sands of hype, but on the solid bedrock of sound business principles. It requires a clear-eyed, practical vision for technology’s role, a bias for market validation over internal deliberation, a nuanced approach to team structure, and an unwavering commitment to letting the best ideas win. These are the foundational elements that separate the fleetingly fashionable from the enduringly successful.
As marketing leaders, our challenge is not merely to adopt AI, but to build organizations that are capable of harnessing its power. This means fostering a culture of experimentation, championing a pragmatic approach to ROI, and designing teams that are as agile and intelligent as the technology they seek to deploy. The AI revolution will not be won by those who simply buy the most advanced tools, but by those who build the most advanced organizations.
