“What if we could read every piece of customer feedback, every single day?”

In this episode of Tech Scenes Santa Barbara, Jeff Martin sits down with Ryan Millner, Co-founder & CEO of Unwrap, to explore how AI is transforming how companies truly understand their customers.

Ryan’s journey spans early startup experience at Graphiq (acquired by Amazon) and years at Amazon helping scale Alexa’s intelligence systems — giving him firsthand insight into the power and limitations of natural language processing. That experience led to a simple but powerful idea: companies struggle to understand customer feedback at scale — what if AI could solve that?

Unwrap was built to do exactly that.

The platform ingests massive volumes of customer feedback — from support tickets, calls, surveys, and social channels — and turns it into clear, actionable insights for product, engineering, support, and executive teams. Companies like DoorDash, Stripe, and Southwest Airlines use Unwrap to stay in sync with what their customers are actually experiencing.

The conversation dives into the rise of AI-native products, the acceleration of learning loops inside organizations, and the growing gap between those building with AI and those unaware of its capabilities. Ryan also shares insights on pricing, moving upmarket, and why the bar for product excellence is rising faster than ever.

They also explore the realities of building in AI — from guardrails and data privacy to deciding when to build vs. buy — and why focusing on core competency is more important than ever in an AI-driven world.

Chapters

00:00 The Rise of AI and Customer Understanding

01:28 What Unwrap Does and Why It Matters

04:40 The Evolution of AI Interfaces and Chat

07:48 Guardrails, Data Privacy, and Enterprise Complexity

10:43 Founder Journey and the Idea Behind Unwrap

13:20 Learning Loops in the Age of AI

15:16 Why This AI Moment Is Different

17:31 Build vs Buy in an AI World

20:19 What People Still Don’t Understand About AI

26:19 Startup Lessons: Pricing and Moving Upmarket

28:37 AI Coding and the Future of Product Development

29:29 The Ever-Rising Bar for Product Excellence

Watch now to understand how AI is reshaping the feedback loop between companies and customers — and why the teams that learn fastest will win.

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