How Penbrothers is using AI for collections and prospect research
Nicolas Bivero is CEO and Co-Founder of Penbrothers, which helps international businesses build dedicated offshore teams in the Philippines and provides recruitment, HR, payroll, compliance, and operational support. Bivero discusses using AI for collections reconciliation and prospect research, the shift toward customer discovery through AI assistants, and why human judgment still matters.
AI can help Penbrothers pull together scattered information for reporting and prospect research, but decisions still need human judgment. Bivero also sees visibility in AI assistant answers as an increasingly important way for customers to find businesses.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
Penbrothers started in 2014 when my co-founder and good friend, Gui, needed to scale his startup but struggled to find the right talent quickly. We knew the Philippines had incredible talent, and I thought, if large multinationals could build successful teams here, why couldn’t startups and smaller businesses do the same? We started with a handful of hires, and that eventually grew into Penbrothers.
What makes us different is that we’ve never believed offshoring should just be about cutting costs or filling seats. We’re focused on building long-term, dedicated teams that genuinely become part of our clients’ businesses. Our clients manage their people directly, while we take care of recruitment, HR, compliance, and employee support. We’re equally invested in the people we hire because happy, supported employees build better businesses. Ultimately, our mission is to help companies grow while creating meaningful careers for Filipinos without requiring them to leave their country.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Currently, a lot of our new business comes from existing clients or people that already know about us referring us to other potential clients. This is obviously very good because it highlights and emphasizes the quality of our service. Otherwise, we would not be recommended.
That being said, for us to grow more and grow broader, we want to have different sources of lead generation (for example, standard outbound, inbound, partnerships, and other ways of getting the clients).
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
There are always things that we’re trying to have done with AI. Some of them are very good, and some of them haven’t worked out quite the way we wanted. Some of them we have had to fine-tune.
One example that comes to mind is simple reconciliation of collections. This is not just what comes into our bank accounts, but also taking into consideration dashboards, emails, messages, and other inputs that are unstructured and coming from different sources. It also involves how to put it all together and then create a summary and a dashboard of that.
This is something that we’re doing across the organization so as to free up time from time-consuming reporting and data gathering, allowing our people to have more time for more important tasks or higher-value tasks.
Another example would be, before a call with a prospect, to automatically generate a very good summary of who they are, what they do, where they are, and how we can help them using AI and using a lot of different data points
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
More and more customers are actually finding us through the AI models. They ask whichever AI they’re using about companies like us, be it ChatGPT, be it Claude, be it Gemini. You need to show up in those AI answers, otherwise they won’t find you.
The optimization of our web page for how we become part of those AI searches is different than before. It’s not SEO anymore. It’s already AEO.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
I would advise them to really look at the opportunities that AI and AI tools give you. At the same time, they should be very conscious about not losing themselves in the AI and make sure that there’s always a human in the loop. AI by itself doesn’t necessarily take the right decisions or know which decision to take. It still needs a human to discern what the right decision is and how to approach it, but AI can help a lot.
I think on something else, I would always recommend that any company be patient. Currently, there is a lot of change happening, and nobody really knows what the outcomes will be
Thank you to Nicolas Bivero and the team at Penbrothers for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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