Before AI could sell, it had to learn to listen.
For Garth Fasano, President and Co-Founder of Raynmaker, that lesson started in the trenches of sprawling call centers—some with more than 8,000 agents—where customer frustration and operational chaos often collided.
Years later, those early insights inspired a radical idea: what if AI could do more than answer questions? What if it could actually sell with empathy, accuracy, and speed?
In this episode of Go-To-Market with Dr. Amy Cook, Amy and Garth discuss how his journey from managing massive service operations to co-founding an AI-powered sales platform is reshaping the way businesses connect with customers.
Spoiler alert! AI might be making sales more human than ever before.
Here are interview highlights:
Amy: Before you were co-founding AI platforms and talking about full-cycle automation, you were in the trenches running massive call center operations. Tell us about that early experience.
Garth: I actually started my career in the call center world. I worked with big consulting firms like Deloitte and BCG on major transformation projects, like merging two call centers into one unified operation, sometimes integrating 8,000 agents in a single initiative.
That experience really opened my eyes to the scale and complexity of customer service. It taught me how sales, operations, and service have to work together to create a seamless customer experience.
Amy: And that’s where the seeds for Raynmaker were planted, right?
Garth: Exactly. I saw firsthand how much time and money were wasted on repetitive tasks, like answering the same questions, transferring the same calls, and dealing with leads that never convert. It became clear that if we could teach technology to handle even part of that, we’d change everything about how sales and service operate.
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Amy: How did that insight turn into Raynmaker?
Garth: When I joined Raynmaker about three years ago, AI was just starting to take over the conversation. Everyone was talking about chatbots, but we wanted to go further to create an AI that could sell.
We developed our own large language model trained on millions of real B2C sales conversations. It’s an AI voice assistant for sales that can do the entire process—answer inbound calls, qualify leads, handle objections, give price quotes, take payments, and schedule services.
Amy: That’s incredible. You’re essentially building a full-cycle sales engine powered entirely by AI.
Garth: That’s the goal. And the best part? It’s not just for enterprises. Small businesses are actually the ones benefiting first because they can move faster and implement AI at the workflow level instead of trying to bolt it onto legacy systems.
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Amy: You’ve mentioned something fascinating before—that customers actually talk differently when they’re speaking with AI. Can you explain that?
Garth: It’s one of the most surprising things we’ve learned.
When people talk to AI, they’re more honest. They don’t feel judged, so they’ll admit when something’s too expensive or when they’re just exploring options.
That gives businesses real, unfiltered feedback. You can see patterns and objections you’d never capture in traditional sales calls. It actually makes the data better and, in some ways, the process more human.
Amy: So AI is making sales more human by removing the social pressure.
Garth: Exactly. It’s a paradox, but it’s true.
