Landon Ray, Founder and CEO of Ontraport, reveals how his platform serves thousands of clients by integrating AI into every business process—from lead enrichment to support ticket routing—while maintaining strict brand safety by never letting AI communicate directly with customers. With over 20 years of experience building enterprise-grade automation tools for small businesses, Ray explains why prompt engineering matters less than creating repeatable, scalable AI-powered workflows that actually move the needle. Discover how AI is transforming CRM, marketing automation, and sales pipeline management at scale, processing billions of messages annually while eliminating manual busywork that's plagued businesses for decades.
Founder & Chief Executive Officer | Ontraport
Landon Ray founded Ontraport over 20 years ago to provide enterprise-grade business automation, CRM, and marketing tools at accessible price points for small to mid-market companies. Under his leadership, Ontraport has grown to serve thousands of clients worldwide, processing billions of emails and SMS messages annually while pioneering practical AI integration into business process automation.
Business Process Automation Innovator | Ontraport
Ray transformed the business software landscape by creating a unified platform that combines relational database architecture with drag-and-drop tools for non-technical business owners. He was among the first platform CEOs to integrate AI deeply into core business functions, including lead management, customer support routing, sales call transcription and analysis, and automated response drafting—all while maintaining strict brand safety protocols.
Enterprise Software Architect | Small Business Sector
Ray designed Ontraport as a comprehensive alternative to complex enterprise systems like Salesforce, delivering five integrated tools: marketing automation, sales pipeline management, payment processing, dynamic content management (CMS), and unified support inbox. His platform enables businesses to create bespoke, scalable processes without requiring IT teams or multi-year implementation cycles, democratizing sophisticated automation capabilities previously available only to large enterprises.
AI Process Automation | How to use AI to create repeatable business workflows instead of relying on conversational prompts or one-off interactions.
Brand Safety Risks | Why deploying AI to communicate directly with customers can cost you your reputation and what to do instead.
Data Enrichment Systems | Using AI to clean, parse, and expand customer data from basic information into comprehensive profiles automatically.
Support Ticket Triage | How AI categorizes inbound messages and routes them to the right team without human intervention.
Sales Pipeline Intelligence | AI-generated call summaries, deal analysis, and closing likelihood predictions that eliminate manual CRM updates.
Email Response Drafting | Leveraging AI to write context-aware customer replies while keeping humans in control of what gets sent.
00:00 - 03:28 | Why Prompt Engineering Matters Less Than You Think
03:29 - 06:55 | AI as a New Business Tool Beyond If-Then Logic
06:56 - 10:22 | Designing Repeatable AI Processes at Scale
10:23 - 13:49 | Lead Management and Data Enrichment with AI
13:50 - 17:16 | Why AI Should Never Talk Directly to Your Customers
17:17 - 20:43 | Automating Support Tickets and Email Routing with AI
20:44 - 24:10 | AI-Powered Sales Call Transcription and Pipeline Updates
24:11 - 27:37 | Drafting Customer Responses Without Losing Brand Control
27:38 - 31:04 | Real-World AI Applications Across Business Processes
31:05 - 34:37 | Ontraport's Mission and Enterprise Tools for Small Business
"I think that as these models get better and better, they're understanding more and more about what you're trying to say and getting the words just right becomes less and less important."
"We're thinking about how to use AI as a new tool in the toolbox of a business owner who wants to streamline their work."
"AI came around, we got this new tool, which is like this aware thing that can kind of understand what you mean and take a bunch of information and make a real decision about it without having to go through that whole complicated process."
"We don't have our AI talking to our audience directly because the cost of a bad answer is too high for us."
"We don't want AI lying to our customers, sending them down the wrong path, making up features that we don't have, or failing to mention features that we do have."
"I think prompt design is important, but we think about it more as hone it once, get it so that it's doing a pretty good job of giving you reusable results, and then put that thing to work as a tool in your business."
"If you're still having sales reps do work like that, that's well, you know how hard that was to get them to do it anyway, but now they don't have to."
"We're helping people be more efficient, so we draft the reply and make it real easy for our team to go ahead and send it."
"There's nothing about these prompts that have secret words—it literally is just telling the thing what to do and organizing the information."
"Our sort of mission for twenty years now has been to provide enterprise grade flexibility and scalability and customizability, but at a price point that makes sense for the small to mid market."
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