In this exclusive interview with CanadianSME Small Business Magazine, Vinay Raj, Chief Solutions Engineer at ExpertiseAI, discusses how his AI platform is transforming website engagement and driving higher conversions for businesses. With a strong background in brand management and product strategy, Vinay is helping businesses capture high-intent leads through hyper-personalized, real-time AI interactions.
Vinay Raj brings extensive experience in brand management, advertising, and product management, having worked with leading companies such as Ogilvy, DDB, and Adobe. He currently leads Solutioning and Revenue Operations at ExpertiseAI (formerly Chatsimple), where he drives strategy, execution, and customer success at the intersection of product innovation and growth.
How is Expertise.ai transforming the visitor journey for businesses with large, complex websites, and what impact have you seen on engagement and conversions?
Every visitor comes to a website with a purpose either to validate what they know or to find new information. But complex websites often leave them lost. Our AI agent proactively engages visitors, guiding them to what they need, answering questions, and helping them make informed decisions.
The results: 3x higher engagement, 2x more conversions, longer quality time on site, and lower bounce rates. Most importantly, visitors leave with a great experience and come back knowing your website has an AI that truly understands them.
Can you share key challenges that small and medium-sized businesses face with digital lead generation, and how does your AI solution address these pain points uniquely?
Traditional digital lead generation forms and static capture methods come with real problems. Visitors often leave fake details, hesitate to share information until they see value, or fill forms without being genuinely qualified. The result? Low conversions, poor-quality leads, and a fragmented website experience.
Our AIAgent changes that. Instead of passively waiting for form fills, it engages visitors in real conversations. By observing behavior, asking the right questions, and proactively nudging them, the AI uncovers true intent and pain points. This means visitors feel guided, understood, and valued like walking into a brick-and-mortar store where someone is ready to help.
The outcome is a hyper-personalized, one-to-one experience that transforms casual visits into meaningful engagements and turns leads into real opportunities.
Expertise.ai has evolved from Chatsimple what motivated this rebranding, and how does it reflect your current vision, product, and market positioning?
The decision to rebrand from Chatsimple to ExpertiseAI came from a clear vision: we wanted to build an AI that showcases a business’ true expertise to its audience.
Today, a company’s website is the central hub of its marketing efforts. Our AI is designed to augment that hub helping businesses identify the right leads, capture visitor intent and data, and deliver it back to business owners in a meaningful way. At the same time, it ensures every visitor experiences seamless engagement, where they can clearly understand a company’s expertise and make informed decisions faster.
It’s a win-win:
- For visitors: an intuitive, guided website experience that reveals products and services in a way that builds clarity and trust.
- For businesses: a powerful way to demonstrate true expertise and convert quality leads.
With this vision, we have evolved beyond a simple chat interface into a comprehensive website engagement platform powered by both voice and chat. Our positioning is clear: we serve businesses with complex products and services such as SaaS, manufacturing, fintech, education, and more.
What strategies do you recommend for SMBs looking to integrate hyper-personalization and real-time AI into their sales and marketing workflows?
We don’t replace or redefine how SMBs do their marketing, those efforts are already valuable. What we focus on is the point where all that hard work converges: the website.
When a visitor lands on a site, they represent the highest-intent audience: people actively looking to learn about the business or purchase its products and services. But with traditional, static engagement formats, that intent often fades quickly. Visitors lose interest, disengage, and leave.
Our goal is to capture that intent in the moment. With our hyper-personalized AI, every visitor is engaged in real time, guided through the experience, and kept warm while their interest is at its peak. The result: visitors stay longer, convert faster, and businesses receive highly qualified leads and customers.
To conclude, what advice would you offer to Canadian small business owners aiming to boost online growth using innovative technologies like Expertise.ai?
I don’t have specific advice, but what I would recommend is using AI to your business’ advantage. AI can accelerate and augment what you’re trying to achieve. It will not replace humans, but it can absolutely boost your efforts and outcomes.
We see ourselves as playing a small, yet very important role in this AI revolution. In a world of short attention spans, where all your hard work is focused on getting someone to notice your business, we want to help you realize that dream, where ExpertiseAI represents your business, captures those high-value leads you’ve driven through days or even months of marketing, and ensures your business thrives at its best.
