AI Lead Generation & Sales Automation at Podium

Overview

A client engagement focused on using conversational AI and workflow automation to cut manual sales operations and shorten the time it takes a business to respond to and qualify an inbound prospect. The system pulls customer-facing conversations, lead intelligence, automated workflows, scheduling, and sales analytics into one experience, so a lead never sits waiting for someone to notice it.

What I built

• AI lead qualification workflows that read incoming conversations and lead data to surface intent, qualification signals, and the prospects worth a rep's time.
• Conversational sales automation covering first contact, common questions, and nurturing, with a structured handoff to a human rep once the conversation calls for one.
• Automated follow-up workflows for prospects who don't convert immediately, driven by event-based triggers and sequenced messaging rather than someone remembering to check back.
• Appointment scheduling integration that lets a qualified prospect move straight from an AI conversation into booking a consultation or service appointment.
• Pipeline and analytics interfaces giving visibility into lead sources, qualification status, conversations, appointments, and conversion activity.

Technologies

• Frontend: React, Next.js, TypeScript, responsive dashboards, real-time conversational UI
• Backend: Python, Node.js, REST APIs, PostgreSQL, Redis, background jobs and async processing, third-party messaging and scheduling integrations, Docker, cloud infrastructure
• AI: LLM APIs, conversational AI, intent detection, lead scoring, structured outputs, prompt and workflow orchestration, conversation-context management, AI-assisted personalization

Impact

The work removed a large share of the repetitive qualification effort that used to sit on the sales team, and it improved speed-to-lead by letting prospects get a substantive response immediately rather than whenever someone got to the queue. Automating the follow-up and nurturing sequences kept non-converting leads warm without manual chasing, while the scheduling integration cut the friction between an initial inquiry and a booked appointment. Centralizing conversations and pipeline state gave the team one place to see where every lead stood, so reps could spend their time on the higher-intent prospects the qualification workflows surfaced.

I delivered this alongside product managers, designers, frontend and backend engineers, AI/ML engineers, QA, platform/DevOps, and sales stakeholders.

This work was completed as part of a broader product and engineering effort. The case study focuses specifically on the systems, features, and technical areas I contributed to rather than claiming sole authorship of the complete Podium platform.