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Nick Carlile on the AI generation of lead nurturing

By Nick Carlile

Director of New Business Development - Lifestyle Charity

An emerging luminary in the field of lead-generating AI, Nick Carlile and his business partners have developed an AI-powered sales assistant to help businesses generate, nurture, and qualify leads.

Having begun his career as a quantity surveyor for 12 years, the Yorkshireman grew a successful property business that saw him buy, sell, and refurbish nearly 500 properties as well as a hotel portfolio before the pandemic hit the market.

Now, as Director of New Business Development at Lifestyle Clarity, Nick’s metamorphic professional progression is synonymous with the AI space in which he now specialises.

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Can you talk us through the lead-generating AI tools you use and develop?

We work with a multitude of businesses across multiple sectors where we put an AI assistant, or chatbot, on their website, to answer questions about products and services.
We also qualify and nurture leads at scale to allow the sales teams within various businesses to make more sales; after all – Sales fixes everything!
It's our own tech that we've developed but we plug into other systems like large language models and we’ve used other bits of software to join it up and make it into a product.

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How would you describe lead-generating AI to someone unfamiliar with the concept?

Obviously, AI is the hot topic, and it’s massively overwhelming. There’s something like 10,000 tools that have made it onto the register of AI tools but there are also tens of thousands being developed.

AI is a lever that makes everything easier, including lead generation and management. It’s not trying to replace people; it’s trying to make the people that are there more efficient. It’s quicker, it’s cheaper, there’s less wastage, and it never forgets.

We work with a company that buys houses in the UK. They generate about 5,000 leads every month but only do about 100 deals because they haven’t got the human resource to wade through all the enquiries. We put those leads into our AI, it does a lot of the grunt work, qualifies the enquiries, and books in calls for them at a convenient time.

How do you see the future of AI coexisting with humanity?

It is a bit scary: even as someone in this space, it’s still a bit daunting. There’s a massive amount of uncertainty about just how powerful it could be, and the scary bit is the speed at which it’s changing. But it is here, and it is happening.

Some jobs will get replaced, but lots of jobs will also become more efficient. Simply put, people using AI will outperform people who are not.

There’s also a whole series of jobs that will be created and needed. Prompt Engineer – someone that specialises in getting the best out of AI like Chat GPT – is now one of the most highly paid and sought-after jobs that didn’t exist a year ago.

"There’s something like 10,000 tools that have made it onto the register of AI tools but there are also tens of thousands being developed."

How do you stay ahead of the game with the evolution of AI?

It’s challenging, but we’ve given people a product that has a multitude of applications. We’re trying to keep up with the speed at which it’s changing. We have a product that is really valuable to businesses right now, and that will evolve.

We’ve started with putting AI into the sales process. I also believe that people will generally, in a lot of environments, want to still have some human connection in that sales process.

The first time we built our AI chatbot, it took us a week. Now we can build it and have it deployed in five minutes because we’ve trained an AI to build it. That has driven down the cost to make it affordable to every business.

What do you foresee in the immediate future for both your business and the AI remit in which you’re working?

We’re at the point where we’ve got a stable product that we can scale. Instead of taking a week to build one for someone, we can now do it in five minutes, so that brings the price point massively down, makes it more accessible, and we can bring on more users.

In the AI space, you’ve obviously got big players like Google and Facebook that we all know about, but very few had heard of Chat GPT OpenAI a year ago and I think there are going to be other new mega players that we’ve not yet even heard of, and I think that’s going to happen super quickly.

"People using AI will outperform people who are not."

Nick Carlile - Director of New Business Development

What do you enjoy doing outside of the business?

I have four children. We live by the beach, so I enjoy running there and trying to stay healthy.

Who or what has influenced your thought processes?

When I got my first job at 16, I was introduced to personal development, which for building company was unheard of. They brought in a personal development guy who introduced me to that whole world, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

I’ve read hundreds of books and I listen to loads of podcasts. I like hearing different perspectives and views alongside the comfort and familiarity of one host. A lot of people talk about Diary of a CEO podcast, and I find that really good. I also like Rob Moore’s Disruptors podcast and I like Jay Shetty, he’s more spiritual but from a practical point of view.

Nick Carlile leaning on brick wall