When the Phone Rings, Revenue Is on the Line

By Kristine Derksen, Director of Marketing & Communications, North Forge™️

Manik Sharma, Founder & CEO of CxTrack, is building a Canadian-made revenue engine designed to help businesses simplify and scale their sales operations, all from Winnipeg.

For years, businesses have been told that artificial intelligence will transform the way they work. The promises are enormous: greater productivity, lower costs, better customer service and fewer hours spent on repetitive tasks.

But for the owner of a landscaping company standing on a job site when the phone rings, the AI revolution is considerably less abstract.

The question is much simpler.

Who is going to answer the phone?

That deceptively ordinary problem sits at the heart of CxTrack, a Canadian AI automation company currently advancing through North Forge's Founders Program.

The company is building technology around a basic economic reality: for a small or medium-sized business, a missed phone call isn't merely an inconvenience. It can mean a missed customer, a missed appointment and, ultimately, missed revenue.

CxTrack describes itself as a hybrid AI automation company, combining its own platform with customized development. Its AI Voice Agents can answer calls around the clock, qualify leads, book appointments, route urgent calls and automatically record information. Beyond voice, the company builds customized CRM systems and offers workflow automation, chatbots, document processing and analytics.

The technology may be sophisticated.

The problem it is trying to solve isn't.

The economics of an unanswered phone

Small business owners have always faced a peculiar constraint: success creates more work.

More customers mean more calls. More calls mean more scheduling, follow-up, administration and record-keeping. Eventually, a growing business reaches a point where the owner has two choices: hire more people to manage the work or accept that some opportunities will slip through the cracks.

CxTrack is betting there is a third option.

Its philosophy isn't to automate people out of a business. It is to reconsider where people are most valuable within it.

For founder Manik Sharma, the problem is straightforward. Businesses lose opportunities when they don't answer their phones, fail to follow up with customers or become overwhelmed by tedious manual workflows.

"We automate what should be automated, allowing businesses to spend more time where it counts," Sharma said. "The human is still in the loop; we just change where the human is in the loop."

That distinction matters.

There is an understandable temptation in today's AI economy to begin with the technology and then search for something to do with it. CxTrack is taking the opposite approach. It looks for costly friction inside a business first, then determines whether AI is actually the appropriate tool.

Sharma's answer to what makes CxTrack different is remarkably restrained for the founder of an AI company.

"We only use AI where it makes sense."

That's less glamorous than promising to reinvent every industry.

It may also be considerably more useful.

Meet Mama Bear

One of the clearest examples of CxTrack's technology at work isn't in a laboratory or corporate office.

It's at a landscaping company.

PapaBear and Sons uses CxTrack's technology while owner Phil is on the road or working at job sites with his team. Rather than stopping what he's doing every time the business phone rings, or letting the call disappear into voicemail, an AI Voice Agent answers.

Phil named her Mama Bear.

Mama Bear can answer common questions, collect customer information, access client history, take messages and book appointments. The system can also send reminders and follow-ups. After a call, Phil receives a text summary and can access the transcript and audio.

There is something instructive about this example because it cuts through much of the noise surrounding artificial intelligence.

The customer doesn't particularly need "AI."

He needs his phone answered while he's working.

He needs customers looked after.

And he needs to know what happened without abandoning the job in front of him.

Technology becomes economically meaningful when people stop admiring what it can do and, eventually, stop thinking about it altogether. The real value appears when something frustrating simply disappears.

For CxTrack, that is increasingly becoming a business.

The company says its AI Voice Agent answers calls in under two seconds, operates 24/7 and supports more than 20 languages. It is designed for service-based businesses where missed calls and repetitive processes can become constraints on growth.

From an idea to a company

CxTrack's own growth story began relatively recently.

Sharma was watching advances in voice AI when he saw what he believed was a practical business application. At the same time, he noticed a broader problem emerging: business owners were being inundated with promises about AI but often lacked trusted expertise to determine what would actually benefit their companies.

Then something happened that every entrepreneur hopes for.

Potential customers began waiting for the product to be released.

That's an important moment in the life of a startup. Ideas are plentiful. Customers waiting for you to finish building one are considerably rarer.

CxTrack entered North Forge's Pathfinder stage in March 2025, advanced through Base Camp and was admitted into Ascent in February 2026.

Sharma is candid about the difference between having an idea and building a company around it.

Before North Forge, he says, "The idea was there, but the execution was missing."

Today, Sharma says CxTrack is growing month over month. But getting there required some of the decidedly unglamorous work upon which successful startups are built: validating assumptions, speaking with customers, defending the business model and accepting criticism.

North Forge, he says, provided the early accountability to keep doing that work.

"Most people who want to start a business don't want to talk to potential customers or get that feedback," Sharma said of the process.

But they should.

Technology startups fail for all sorts of complicated reasons, but one of the simplest is building something nobody actually wants. Customer discovery forces founders to confront that possibility before spending years and substantial amounts of money discovering it the hard way.

For CxTrack, those conversations helped turn a technological possibility into a commercial proposition.

They also helped change the founder building it.

Building confidence along with the company

For Sharma, the entrepreneurial journey came with another challenge.

He was a non-technical founder building a highly technical company.

That can be an uncomfortable position in a sector overflowing with engineers, AI researchers and rapidly changing technology. Sharma describes experiencing the familiar sense of imposter syndrome that can accompany it.

Having people in his corner, he says, "meant everything."

He points specifically to North Forge Entrepreneur in Residence Julia Slanina as instrumental in helping him examine the business from multiple perspectives, challenge assumptions and validate decisions. He also credits North Forge Senior Program

Manager Grace Gyolai with helping him navigate the people, resources and opportunities available to entrepreneurs.

The value of an incubator is sometimes measured in introductions, workshops or investment.

But Sharma offers a more interesting measure.

When asked to complete the sentence, "North Forge gave us ______," his answer was simple.

"The confidence to be in the room."

It's a short answer that says something larger about the distance between having an idea and believing you belong at the table building a company around it.

And that confidence is increasingly backed by evidence.

CxTrack has progressed from customer discovery to paying clients, reseller relationships and active discussions for customized CRM builds and AI audits. Its validation work has included more than 100 owner interviews and engagement with 116 businesses, uncovering recurring problems such as digital clutter, manual follow-ups and missed revenue opportunities.

The company has also been expanding its technical capacity, building a team with expertise spanning financial services, software architecture, full-stack development, IoT and AI automation.

For Sharma, however, one accomplishment appears to matter more than the numbers.

"Creating something that people use on a daily basis," he said. "Being able to show real results, real savings and revenue generated."

For a founder who began with an idea but felt the execution was missing, there is something fitting about that measure of success.

The idea matters.

But someone using it every day matters more.

AI's real test

There will be no shortage of grand predictions about artificial intelligence over the next decade.

Some will undoubtedly prove correct. Many won't.

But the companies most likely to endure may not be those making the loudest claims about AI. They may be the ones solving decidedly ordinary problems that businesses are already willing to pay to make disappear.

CxTrack is pursuing exactly that kind of opportunity.

Its ambition extends beyond answering phones. The company is exploring customized CRM systems, workflow automation and, eventually, deeper integration with hardware and wearables. Sharma believes this technology could give business owners access to new streams of audio and video information to help them make better decisions.

But beneath all of that technology is an old-fashioned proposition.

Help a business make more money.

Help it waste less time.

Help its people focus on the work humans are actually needed to do.

CxTrack reduces that mission to one sentence: business owners should be able to "stop chasing missed calls and start closing more deals."

In an industry obsessed with what artificial intelligence might someday become, there is something refreshing about a company focused on what it can accomplish at 10:17 on a Tuesday morning, when a landscaper is standing on a job site and his next customer calls.

The phone rings.

Mama Bear answers.

And the work keeps moving.