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173. Bull, Bear & Beyond – Freelancer: executive interview
7 Plays9 days ago
In this interview, Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer, discusses the transformative potential of agentic AI, a technology designed to automate repetitive workflows such as customer support and sales. He explains that agentic AI represents the next major wave of business transformation after web and app development, delivering hyper-realistic, multilingual interactions available 24/7 and enabling businesses of all sizes to deploy AI agents for tasks traditionally handled by humans. Freelancer is both integrating agentic AI into its own platform and offering businesses access to 80 million freelancers to build AI solutions. Matt emphasises that AI will elevate freelancer skills rather than replace them, creating new opportunities and boosting productivity across industries. He notes that implementing agentic AI is highly accessible, with costs comparable to building a website or app, and predicts widespread adoption within two to three years. The interview concludes with Barrie demonstrating an AI agent for Edison Group, created in less than 10 minutes.
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About ‘Bull, Bear & Beyond’
Bull, Bear & Beyond': features candid conversations with senior executives and from our own team of experts from across industries, exploring strategy, innovation, and the opportunities shaping their markets and 60-second pieces are a compressed summary of content designed to convey our message in a single, easily shareable hit.
About Edison:
Edison is a content-led IR business. We believe quality investment content should inform all investors, not just brokers. Our mission: engage and build bigger, better-informed investor audiences for our clients.
Edison covers 50+ investment trusts, read about them here: https://www.edisongroup.com/equities/investment-companies/
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Transcript
Introduction to Freelancer with Matt Barry
00:00:07
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Edison TV. I'm Dan Ridsdale and today I'm in Sydney, Australia and I'm talking to Matt Barry, founder and chief executive officer of Freelancer. Freelancer run the world's largest crowdsourcing marketplace and are listed on the ASX.
What is Agentic AI?
00:00:23
Speaker
Today we're talking specifically about agentic AI.
00:00:27
Speaker
Matt, many thanks for hosting me today. Thanks for having me. So today we're going to talk specifically about agentic AI. Can we start with the basics and and can you explain exactly what it is and how it differs from after jial traditional AI or the... or the assistance that we have on our AI platform?
00:00:46
Speaker
Sure. It's harnessing AI to basically fill out um effectively workflows that humans would normally do. So that might be answering a phone call and doing customer support and um ideally repetitive workflows. And I know every business in the world has these repetitive workflows and effectively using AI to automate that and do it in a very personalized way, a hyper-realistic way, 24 7, any language, um ah with ah with a level of empathy and a umful level of um depth to the conversations and and the workflows that um no human could really practically achieve when they're on KPIs of a certain number of tickets and phone calls to do the day. And um certainly we're we're we're starting deploy it on our platform and we're seeing some pretty amazing results.
Agentic AI's Global Business Impact
00:01:32
Speaker
Interesting. And how profound, how transformative is this technology? and And where specifically do you expect it to bring a significant change? And and even, you know, you think it's going to be threatened?
00:01:44
Speaker
Well, there's there's lot a lot of hype in the space. You kind of have to get, you know, away from the hype and into kind of where the practicality is. So I was very specific when I said earlier, looking at um workflows. And, you know, So far from, you know, the Sam Altman cry that, you know, 40% of the world's people are going to be unemployed because they all take their jobs. That's not where we're looking. Where we're looking specifically are those mundane, repetitive, repeatable workflow jobs where effectively it's the next generation of of automation where, you know, and and I think really the the the starting point we're going to see is at ah at scale is um doing customer support and um some parts of the sales process, you know, like lead generation and, you and so forth. We're also starting to see it apply ah in things like happy calls. So for example, someone someone needs to um come out and repair a bit of equipment. um You then have to follow up to see whether the service was was was adequate or not, do a custom short customer survey, and even booking the time for the servicemen to in the first place. But you know that's where practically I see it um well will go. And and it will ah will be deployed at scale. So every business in the world, small businesses, large businesses, you name it, is probably in the next two to three years going to have their phones answered by AI who will yeah know do customer support any time of day, any language, take orders, process cards, process bookings, um yeah yeah put something in a calendar and so forth. And um the pretty amazing thing is it's very, very accessible. Fascinating.
Freelancer's Integration of Agentic AI
00:03:13
Speaker
And then just digging into what freelancers do specifically with agentic AI, how are you integrating this into your into your platform?
00:03:21
Speaker
um while there Well, there's two really parts of that question. The first is that we are the we are the site that you go to to get AI deployed for your business. So just like you come to freelancer.com to get a website built, or you come to freelancer.com to get an app built, you now come to get your AI development done. So web development, app development, AI development, freehands.com is the place. There's 80 million people on the site who can get all that built for you for any budget, yeah whether you're a small business, large enterprise, replacing a call center, you name it.
00:03:47
Speaker
The second thing is we are deploying it our site. so So we do have it live currently. We have Agentec.ai, across various different modalities. So what I mean by that is we have it in live chat, so text-based chat, doing customer support, doing sales, doing operational support, administrative functions, et cetera.
00:04:05
Speaker
We also have it doing voice, so doing outbound calls, receiving inbound calls. And we have in in in alpha, doing streaming video. And and in the future, in the next few years, you'll start seeing some pretty amazing demos of real-time, high-quality video conferencing where you'll have AI doing those functions.
AI Tools Enhancing Freelancer Skills
00:04:26
Speaker
And freelancer, you're really at the intersection of automation and I guess the freelance economy. And you've talked previously about how AI is going to enable your freelancers to move up the stack.
00:04:37
Speaker
ah How do you see this playing out in terms of um the freelance economy and and and and how that evolves for your freelancers? Well, it's a phenomenal tailwind because right now all the skills in the marketplace are are going up quite dramatically. So if you were an average copywriter previously as a freelancer, now using GPT and Claude and the other various tooling out there, you can be exceptional copywriter.
00:04:56
Speaker
If you were an average illustrator before, now with the assistance of Midjourney and Nana Banana and the like, you can now be an exceptional illustrator or at Photoshop or or yeah know other areas of graphic design. This is starting to happen in programming.
00:05:11
Speaker
It will happen in all white collar job areas, so whether it's interior design, architecture, civil construction, yeah schematic layout of of electronic circuits, you name it. So effectively what it's doing is it's really lifting the skills across the board of all the freelancers. I think it's akin to 30 or 40 years ago, you might come to work in the morning and there was no computer on your desk.
00:05:34
Speaker
And then all of a sudden you come to work in the morning and there is a computer at your desk. right So obviously productivity goes up dramatically. There yeah is some dislocation, there's some change in job functions. But overall now, yeah if you think about the explosion of the internet and the explosion of computing, there are so many more jobs out there in the world now than there ever were before, but your ability to deliver work with using a computer, just like it is with AI, is now you know a many fold up in terms of productivity, in terms of output, in terms of value for money. And where is this heading in the long term, you think? Do you do you think that ah the agents will eventually replace what freelancers are doing or or multiply what
Transformation of Job Roles by AI
00:06:10
Speaker
they do? I think like all technologies, it just creates more work. That's certainly what we're seeing at Freelancers. So with our own internal deployment Now, um yeah our entire customer support team, we've said to them about a year ago, 12 months from now, you won you probably won't be doing tier one support. You'll be doing tier two support and tier three when yeah know things get complex or tricky with with customers. But the initial reach outs and the initial um support is done by AI. And in fact, what we found in our support organization now is that our traditional CX specialists are now becoming managers of the AI. They're spending a lot of their time curating the transcripts and modifying effectively the prompts, which are the workflows for the agents, because our businesses change over time and so does the macro environment. So you have to constantly tweak and tune, just like your website content needs to be constantly updated, yeah or your app needs to be constantly updated, your AI also needs to be constantly up updated, and that's very, very dynamic. So our support team basically become managers, they become higher skilled, they're now deploying agents we could never deploy before. So for example, it would never be economically viable for us with 25,000 new signups a day to have um an induction specialist for a freelancer.
00:07:20
Speaker
So, hi, Mohammed. I see you've joined from laho of Pakistan. You're a web developer. I've looked through your portfolio. You've got some great things in there, but in your description, you say that you've got Flutter experience. I don't really see any examples. Why don't you upload something to your portfolio?
00:07:33
Speaker
ah By the way, I've seen a few spelling and mistakes in your description. You should fix that up. And would you like me to walk around the site with you and explain how everything works? That would never be able be viable for us, but now you can deploy these agents um and and and run them for for almost next to nothing or free. um or in the case of voice, a few cents per minute.
00:07:50
Speaker
ah And that would never be possible previously. So we're actually creating more activity on um the platform as result of this across not just support, but also operations and sales and so forth. In addition, when the AI is very good at escalating things to a human, so just like you might call someone up at a call center and they go, okay, let me put through to manager or a specialist in that particular area. The AI passes off to the humans who are doing now tier two support.
00:08:15
Speaker
and they're dealing with more complex situations and so forth. But because the AI is so product productive, what we're actually finding now is there are so many more escalations happening to humans as ever before, because we're providing much more effective customer service. So we've actually created more work for the general support team than than than less work, so which which is which is great all around because yeah customers are obviously more engaged with our business. so And on top of that, we have an engineering team doing the AI development and this, that, the other. So it's actually created a lot more work for us than than than it than it's actually taken away.
Accessibility and Cost-effectiveness of AI
00:08:44
Speaker
And how accessible is this technology? And and specifically, if you're to help somebody implement an agent, what what do you actually need to do? It's actually very, very simple. um So as I said before, ah i mean there's been a couple of different ways of technology that have come through that have transformed business. So 1994, 1995, the internet went mainstream. I'm old enough to remember those years. I don't know if you can remember those years. yeah yeah It was literally 1994. The geeks had email addresses. 1995, your grandmother had an email address.
00:09:12
Speaker
Everyone online and businesses wanted to reach customers through the internet. So they built that did web development and they built websites and so forth. And today, A website can be quite simple or it could be very, very complex. It really depends what you what you want it to do. But that led to a huge boom in that web development industry. Then the smartphone revolution came along and you had iPhones and you had Android. And then businesses realize want to reach customers on the go and set that to a boom in app development.
00:09:38
Speaker
And again, you come to freelance to get that done. And that can range from a few hundred dollars to thousands of dollars plus, depending on on how complex you want that done. And now this is really the third big wave of business transformation, which is AI development. So web development, app development, AI development, um where you get effectively AI either through chat or through phone calls or through ultimately very soon streaming video, doing functions that you would normally have a team of humans do, but it will do it 24 by 7 any time of day with a higher level of quality ah and and surprisingly ah very much higher level of empathy because when when people are are doing support and they're answering the phone all day, they get tired towards the end of the day, etc. AI never gets tired. it's got infinite empathy and will be happily speaking to you for as long as you want to speak to them on the phone. So the budget for this is quite simple.
00:10:27
Speaker
The same price it roughly costs you to to a website or an app Here's the same price. It now costs you get an app. Now, as I said before, that means different things for different sized customers. But really, from a few thousand dollars upwards, you can get AI doing certain things. And I can give you a bit of demo of how easy it is.
00:10:40
Speaker
And who will it be calling? So um obviously, it's going to be running off a ah database of prospects. so um So which company is the AI calling?
00:10:54
Speaker
Uh, in terms of targets, uh, let's say freelancer,
Agentic AI Demo and Deployment
00:10:57
Speaker
I guess. Yep. Okay. Freelancer. And I'll say, it will be calling me Matt Barry.
00:11:07
Speaker
Okay. Okay. Let's do a demo. So this is very rough and ready. I've obviously only sat down for a couple of minutes here and done this. So it won't be 100%, but it will give you an idea now.
00:11:20
Speaker
How do I get this on? Do I just hold up here? Is that what I do? I'll just start moving around. yeah you want audio come through? Yeah, just hold it basically. OK. So we're now about to do a demo.
00:11:37
Speaker
Stan Risdale here, Head of Research at Edison Investment Research. i Hope you're having a good day so far. I'm reaching out because we work with over 400 listed businesses globally, helping them boost their visibility with investors through high impact research and digital targeting.
00:11:53
Speaker
I'd love to set up a quick 15 minute call to learn about your priorities at Freelancer. and share some insights on how we can help you reach new investors and global markets. What does your schedule look like this week for a quick chat, maybe tomorrow or later in the week? Do you cover ASX listed companies?
00:12:14
Speaker
Absolutely, Matt. We work with a wide range of ASX listed companies from early stage growth stories to established names. Our team's got deep experience in the Australian market and we're really focused on helping businesses like freelancers stand out to both local and global investors. Would you have a window, say, tomorrow afternoon or later this week for a quick 15-minute call? I can work around whatever suits you best.
00:12:35
Speaker
And so which markets would I better reach investors in? Would you better get me to the US and in front of a bunch of US investors that could invest in my company? Great question, Matt. a Yes, that's exactly what we do.
00:12:46
Speaker
We've got strong reach into the US and Europe as well as Asia, so we can help get freelancer in front of a much broader pool of institutional and retail investors well beyond just Australia.
00:12:57
Speaker
Our research and digital targeting are designed to put your story in front of the right people wherever they are. US investors are always looking for compelling ASX opportunities.
00:13:07
Speaker
and we know how to get their attention. How about we lock in a quick call to dive into your goals and see how we can tailor our approach for you? What's your availability like tomorrow or Wednesday? um How late can you do Wednesday?
00:13:21
Speaker
I can do as late as 5pm Sydney time on Wednesday, Matt. Would 4.30pm or 5pm work for you? If you prefer a different time, just let me know what suits you best. I could probably do 4.30pm.
00:13:33
Speaker
Perfect. Let's lock in 4.30 p.m. this Wednesday. I'll send a calendar invite to make it easy. On the call, we'll chat about your current investor outreach, your goals for freelancer, and I'll share some examples of how we've helped other ASX-listed companies expand their investor base, especially in the U.S. Sound good? And is there anyone else from your team you'd like to join the call?
00:13:52
Speaker
um I think Brent would like to join. Is that okay if he if he hops on? Absolutely, Matt. Brent's more than welcome to join. The more the merrier. I'll make sure the invite goes out to both of you. So just to recap, we're set for 4.30 p.m. this Wednesday, and we'll focus on how Edison can help freelancer reach new investors, especially in the U.S. s After our chat, we'll outline some next steps tailored to your goals.
00:14:16
Speaker
Thanks for your time, Matt. I'm genuinely excited to see what we can achieve together. Thank you. That's so very good. Not bad. yeah So obviously that only took me a few seconds to um whip together. So you can see there that yeah a lot a lot comes down to kind of you know feeding in the prompts and kind of yeah the the sort of information you want to, ah the the workflow that you want to perform. But I just basically cut and paste a bunch of things from your website, put in a link and typed in your email address and off you yeah That's actually very good.
00:14:46
Speaker
For somebody who's looking to deploy ah an agent on their own for their own business, how how would you start? Just go to freelancer.com slash AI. We've got demos available on the site. You can give it a go or just go post a project. It's free to do so.
00:15:00
Speaker
Very simple to type in into description. We have AI personalizing and helping you fill in your project description. So even if you've got a few bullet points, we can We can yeah know develop a brief from that and hit post and within a few seconds, you'll have free answers around the world wanting to help you.
00:15:15
Speaker
And if you want even more help, you can click the up a recruiter upgrade and one of my team is a human. We'll reach out and give you a call and talk through what your requirements are. Perfect. I can certainly think of a few projects in our business that we could we could use you for. Matt, many thanks for having me today.
00:15:30
Speaker
Wonderful.