“If they’re not going to give you a seat at the table, go build your own dang table.”

Melissa Solis
CEO
Inbenta
… on leadership, AI, and forging your own path, via the Women Disrupting Tech podcast.

Melissa Solis knows something about building from scratch.

She co-founded GIACT Systems, a North Texas-based payments and identity-fraud platform, with her brother Merlin on just $300 in startup capital. Over 16 years, they grew it to more than 1,000 customers—including some of the largest companies in the world—before selling to Refinitiv (now part of London Stock Exchange Group, or LSEG) in 2020. Solis describes that arc as going “from the call center floor to a $610M exit.”

She now leads Inbenta, an enterprise AI customer-experience platform that uses conversational AI, intelligent search, and automation to help large companies handle customer and employee interactions at scale across chat, voice, and omnichannel support.

On Episode 139 of Women Disrupting Tech, Solis gets into why so many AI deployments fail, and it’s not the models. Research from Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and TSIA, she notes, puts the failure or stall rate for AI deployments at 70% to 85%. Some estimates run even higher. “Why is that? It’s because companies are just selling something to a customer and not really being their partner and trying to solve the problem,” she said.

The fix, she says, is a culture of genuine customer care. “We owned GIACT for 16 years, and we just didn’t lose customers,” she said. “It’s about revenue, but you’ve really got to care about that customer, and you’ve got to want them to be a customer for life.”

It’s part of the philosophy that shapes how she leads. Solis credits her mother with a principle she carried into every company she’s built: “Always have an attitude of gratitude. Nobody owes you anything.” At GIACT, she said, “the one principle that I wanted to make sure of was to create a work environment where people wanted to be there. … I realized if your employees feel valued and cared for, they will take care of your customers.”

As she wrote on LinkedIn today: “True success isn’t just about the code you ship. It’s about the culture you curate and the gratitude you show the people standing next to you.”

Solis is also a self-described “huge fan of higher education” who has sent “many, many children to college.” But she sees AI as a great equalizer that extends opportunity beyond traditional pathways and changes how people can be successful. “If you’re willing to put the time in, you can go online, and without walking inside an institution of education, you can become the next AI leader of a company and make millions of dollars,” she said. “It is leveling the playing field.”

For anyone holding out for an invitation, she has a different message. “Go get your opportunity,” she said. “And that’s how we’re going to change the world.”

Listen to the full episode here.

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