Oscar founded V88 with his father, Mark Brooks, in 2020 as a full-service Glide agency. Since then, they’ve helped hundreds of clients find solutions for their businesses and built over 300 apps. “Often, that might be 5, 6, or even 10 apps for a single customer. Because once the business gets into Glide and sees what it can do, it quickly tends to trickle its way into various parts of the company,” he explained.
Their agency has also become a specialist in building apps powered by Glide AI. They use it to solve problems for businesses, increase their efficiency and productivity, and help them scale in ways that wouldn’t have been possible before. AI has been the perfect tool for making their apps even more effective in producing these outcomes.
We sat down with Oscar to talk about custom business solutions and the power of AI. Read the interview to learn how he has observed AI's impact in real life.
What are you using Glide AI for?
We first started to use Glide AI internally in our agency to speed up our processes and see where and how it was most powerful. Now, pretty much every solution that we create has some form of AI functionality.
A lot of what we're doing with Glide is building processes that work exactly how the customer wants them to, exactly how that business is run. AI fits this goal perfectly, helping us streamline processes, save time, improve accuracy, and analyze data.
When figuring out how to add AI to an app, we ask our clients, which elements of this process are you still finding frustrating? What doesn’t need to be done by a person? Let's identify all of the elements of this app or this process that are largely manual and repetitive, and let's focus on replacing them with AI first.
What impact do those AI features have on your clients’ businesses?
“You're giving people more of their time back every day, and they're spending that time doing the things that they're good at. The impact can be massive.”
We use AI to take out some of the human elements and replace them with automated processes. The outcome for business owners is their team is able be more productive. AI handles the boring tasks that would otherwise just drain their time so your team can actually focus on the role that they were brought in to do. That can impact morale positively as well.
If you're using something like Glide AI, it is going to save you likely 10% of every single employee's time if you implement it correctly. Just imagine you have 100 employees, and AI is saving them 10% of their time on daily processes. If you multiply that up across a 12-month period, across all of their salaries, can you imagine the monetary value that that has? It's obscene.
Why do you find Glide AI so uniquely effective?
Everybody's talking about AI, but I think one of the main limiting factors is—you can prompt it and receive an output, but how do you actually integrate it into an app? What Glide has done, which nobody else has done yet, is how Glide AI is baked into the product and even into the tables. It is truly game-changing.
You don't need to create an integration with OpenAI or with another large language model. It’s there for you as part of the Glide subscription. You can go straight into your Tables, do a generate text function, and immediately start using AI on your data. That's what's so different about it, and that's what makes it so, so powerful.
Can you give us some examples of how you’ve improved your client’s businesses with AI?
At V88, we build some of the largest and sort of most complex Glide apps. We really pushed boundaries with the product. We've done some really, really cool AI features recently for clients.
Build-360: AI that delivers better customer service with less time required
Build-360 is a construction company based in Calgary, Canada. It's growing very, very quickly, and the founder, Robin, is extremely innovative and forward-thinking. He knows exactly how the business operates and how to run a construction company, but he doesn't know how to replace his processes with software.
What we’ve done is build a solution that allows him to take a construction project all the way from inception, where you have a lead, through the process of estimating the project, planning for that project, quoting, receiving an order, and ultimately delivering the project itself. So it's an end-to-end solution.
They're a growing business, and there are so many moving parts. You have a team of 10 or 20 people building a house, and they're all inputting data into different systems. To manage this process, you have to check WhatsApp, spreadsheets, Procore, Company Cam, and all these other tools. All of a sudden, that data is all in one place inside a Glide environment.
We've used AI in a couple of different places in that application. Primarily, we're using it to create email updates for customers for his high-value construction projects.
We created a Glide AI function that allows him to click a singular button. Then, the AI looks at all of the project tasks, timelines, materials that have been ordered, and deliveries that are due, and it summarizes the entire project in an email body in the app. It even reaches out to a weather API and pulls in the forecast to say; it looks like we have a nice sunny week ahead. He can then view that body of text, customize it, and just hit send and release an email to the customer.
When you're running a construction company, you have customers who have invested a lot of money into a project. It's a very high-pressure operation where the customer needs a lot of peace of mind. They were having to go into every single granular piece of detail for a project every week for every project and update every single customer. The AI has saved hours and hours of time on updates.
"We have to do 10 or 15 updates a week and just one field manager who is out there on the job sites. Manually, it could take over half an hour to put together an update. With the AI, it only takes 2-3 minutes. The amount of time that it saves every single week is just incredible." - Robin Hahn, Build-360
Being able to accurately and frequently update his customers on time is golden in a business where customers expect a lot and want to know the details of what's happening. Now, he has delighted customers because they receive an accurate, precise update on exactly where they are with the project.
Why should businesses use a Glide Expert to implement AI?
I get asked this question all the time. I think it usually comes down to one of the following things: You can clearly see the value in Glide and how it can solve many of your problems, but you don't have the time to build it yourself, or you don't have the skillset in-house to understand how to apply it where it will be most effective.
With an Expert, you can focus on running your business while we work to build software that works exactly how your business works. And our relationships with customers are usually ongoing. We build one solution and then help them evolve it as they grow and find new needs we can address.
If you want to figure out Glide AI on your own, it is really easy to implement, but connecting with an Expert who knows where and how to use it best makes it even faster and more impressive. You get our experience and expertise combined with the speed at which we can integrate AI in a Glide environment. We have the experience to architect your app to ensure it's scalable so you can add features in the future without having to re-engineer anything.
“Suddenly you're deploying AI-powered features in an hour or less, sometimes minutes. It's ridiculous. ”
It's still a far, far more cost-effective option to hire a Glide developer than it is a traditional developer. It's still excellent value for money, whether you're only paying for the Glide license or whether you're also paying someone to build it for you. Experts are also really, really fast. For a single solution, our average timeframe is 7 to 25 days of development. I would compare a 25-day project for us to a minimum of 3-6 months for a traditional developer.