Just Keep Her Going
eDesk
Gareth Cummings, CEO of eDesk, joins John Horsley on The Business of Marketing to discuss AI-led customer support for online sellers. From shipping eDesk's first AI layer in 2018 to the rise of agentic commerce, Gareth shares lessons on leadership, pre-sales conversion and building Irish SaaS for global markets.
"I was living in Canada at the time. I was probably 24, 25, going through a bit of a tough time. I got a postcard from my dad. It just said: keep her going."
Gareth Cummings is CEO of eDesk, the AI-led platform that consolidates customer conversations across marketplaces, social channels and direct storefronts for more than 5,000 online brands. He trained at Trinity College Dublin, where he won the Kenneth Mullican Memorial Medal for academic distinction, and has spent more than two decades building the commercial instincts of a founder across Irish software.
His first technical role was as a web developer, where sitting in on customer meetings planted the commercial thread that would run through every subsequent job. He joined Globoforce (now Workhuman) as a systems lead in its thirty-person era, then spent five years at Sentenial before moving to Brite:Bill as Global Head of Delivery, building billing software for Comcast, T-Mobile and AT&T.
He joined eDesk in 2018 as CTO and held that role for seven years, shipping the platform's first generative AI layer in October 2018, built on eDesk's own e-commerce dataset four years before ChatGPT reframed the category. In November 2024 he stepped up to Managing Director, and in October 2025 took over as CEO.
Under his leadership eDesk handles more than two million conversations a month for over five thousand online sellers, bringing marketplace messages, social commerce enquiries and direct storefront queries into a single workbench. AI automation growth has run above 100 percent year on year, with resolution rate and post-automation CSAT now the defining metrics of the next phase of the product.
"If you answer pre-sales questions within 15 minutes, your chance of a conversion goes up by a significant amount."
“We built essentially our own LLM, on a much smaller dataset. Because we were only focused on e-commerce, our dataset was smaller, and that made it easier for us.”
eDesk shipped its first generative AI layer in October 2018, four years before ChatGPT. A narrow e-commerce dataset, where ten query categories cover 70 percent of inbound volume, gave the team enough structure to train without the computational burden faced by broader customer support platforms.
“If you answer the questions within 15 minutes, that increases your chance of a conversion by a significant amount. We see it time and time again.”
Pre-sales queries routinely account for 30 to 60 percent of inbound volume and go unanswered because most support teams are trained for post-sale problem solving. Cummings frames responsiveness here as the single highest-return behavioural change any e-commerce business can make.
“You’ll give the agent certain parameters. Only engage with things that have a review score of X. Only with brands who respond quick.”
As consumer agents begin transacting on behalf of their owners, trust stops being a soft brand attribute and starts being a filter. The brands that win in the agentic world are the ones whose support responsiveness is already measurable and consistent today.
"Sometimes you can just focus on what you can focus on. Control the controllables."
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