One red-hot class within the generative AI house is buyer assist, which isn’t stunning, actually, when you think about the tech’s potential to chop contact middle prices whereas rising scale. Critics argue that generative AI-powered buyer assist tech might depress wages, result in layoffs and finally ship a extra error-prone end-user expertise. Proponents, however, say that generative AI will increase — not exchange — staff, whereas enabling them to concentrate on extra significant duties.
Jesse Zhang is within the proponents camp. After all, he’s somewhat biased. Together with Ashwin Sreenivas, Zhang co-founded Decagon, a generative AI platform to automate varied elements of buyer assist channels.
Zhang is effectively conscious of how stiff the competitors is available in the market for AI-powered buyer assist, which spans not solely tech giants like Google and Amazon however startups akin to Parloa, Retell AI and Cognigy (which lately raised $100 million). By one estimate, the sector could possibly be price $2.89 billion by 2032, up from $308.4 million in 2022.
However Zhang thinks that each Decagon’s engineering experience and go-to-market method give it a bonus. “When we first started, the prevailing advice we received was to not pursue the customer support space, because it was too crowded,” Zhang advised TechCrunch. “Ultimately, the thing that worked for us was to aggressively prioritize what customers wanted and maintain laser focus on what customers would get value from. That’s the difference between a real business and a flashy AI demo.”
Each Zhang and Sreenivas have technical backgrounds, having labored at each startups and bigger tech orgs. Zhang was a software program engineer at Google earlier than turning into a dealer at Citadel, the market-making agency, and founding Lowkey, a social gaming platform that was acquired by Pokémon Go maker Niantic in 2021. Sreenivas was a deployment strategist at Palantir earlier than co-founding pc imaginative and prescient startup Helia, which he bought to unicorn Scale AI in 2020.
Decagon, which sells primarily to enterprises and “high-growth” startups, develops what quantity to buyer assist chatbots. The bots, pushed by first- and third-party AI fashions, are fine-tunable, able to ingesting a companies’ data bases and historic buyer conversations to realize better contextual understanding of points.
“As we started building, we realized that ‘human-like bots’ entails a lot, since human agents are capable of complex reasoning, taking actions and analyzing conversations after the fact,” Zhang mentioned. “From talking to customers, it’s clear that while everyone wants greater operational efficiency, it cannot come at the expense of customer experience — no one likes chatbots.”
So how aren’t Decagon’s bots like conventional chatbots? Nicely, Zhang says they study from previous conversations and suggestions. Maybe extra importantly, they’ll combine with different apps to take actions on behalf of the buyer or agent, like processing a refund, categorizing an incoming message or serving to write a assist article.
On the again finish, corporations get analytics and management over Decagon’s bots and their conversations.
“Human agents are able to analyze conversations to notice trends and find improvements,” Zhang mentioned. “Our AI-powered analytics dashboard automatically reviews and tags customer conversations to identify themes, flag anomalies and suggest additions to their knowledge base to better address customer inquiries.”
Now, generative AI has a repute for being, effectively, lower than good — and, in some instances, ethically compromised. What would Zhang say to corporations cautious that Decagon’s bots will inform somebody to eat glue or write an article filled with plagiarized content material, or that Decagon will practice its in-house fashions on their information?
Mainly, he says, don’t fear. “Providing customers with the necessary guardrails and monitoring for their AI agents has been important,” he mentioned. “We optimize our models for our customers, but we do this in a way which ensures that it is impossible for any data to be inadvertently exposed to another customer. For instance, a model that generates an answer for customer A would never have any exposure to data from customer B.”
Decagon’s tech — whereas topic to the identical limitations as each different generative AI-powered app on the market — has been attracting name-brand shoppers as of late, like Eventbrite, Bilt and Substack, serving to Decagon to achieve break-even. Notable traders have climbed aboard the enterprise, too, together with Field CEO Aaron Levie, Airtable CEO Howie Liu and Lattice CEO Jack Altman.
To this point, Decagon has raised $35 million throughout seed and Sequence A rounds that had participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Accel (which led the Sequence A), A* and entrepreneur Elad Gil. Zhang says that the money is being put towards product growth and increasing Decagon’s San Francisco-based workforce.
“A key challenge is that customers equate AI agents to previous generation chatbots, which don’t actually get the job done,” Zhang mentioned. “The customer support market is saturated with older chatbots, which have eroded lost consumer trust. New solutions from this generation must cut through the noise of the incumbents.”
