Triad Dev Connect

Topic Title: The Review Nobody Answered Is Costing You the Sale

Topic Description: Type "best plumber near me" into Google, and before you ever see a website, something happens: your reviews get parsed as a signal, not just the star count, but the conversation underneath it. Did the business respond? How fast? What did they say to the one-star review? Google has never published the formula, but the pattern holds up across thousands of local businesses: reply consistently, and you rank better.

Most service businesses treat reviews like a scoreboard: check it, wince, move on. But for a service business, the brand and the service are the same thing, so every unanswered complaint sitting on Google is a public record of a problem nobody fixed.

Juan Hernandez, co-founder of G8 Engineering, breaks down why review responses have become one of the strongest, least-watched signals in local search, and how AI can turn scattered customer feedback into a system that catches problems before they recur. He'll close with a live demo of VibeWaggler, a tool G8 built to read reviews the way a sharp operations manager would: hunting for patterns, not just complaints.

Speaker Bio: Juan Hernandez is co-founder of G8 Engineering, where he builds AI-powered microservices that help small and growing businesses fix what's broken and build what didn't exist before. He also teaches analytics as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University's School of Business. Over a 20-year career, Juan has led teams at Amazon, Reynolds American, and Sales Factory, where he co-founded the AI practice and grew it to a seven-figure exit. His work has touched Fortune 500 brands like Sherwin-Williams, Kohler, and Burt's Bees, but it all starts in the same place: the consumer. Whether he's leading a research study or shipping a piece of software, Juan starts by understanding what people actually need, watching for the pattern behind their behavior, and asking why. That's the habit that turns a good idea into one that works.