Buyer assist is among the extra apparent areas for enterprises to deploy AI options — however executed incorrectly, it will possibly backfire in an enormous method, as we discovered from the assorted Chevrolet automotive dealerships that selected to make use of a model of OpenAI‘s GPT solely to have prospects start tricking it into giving them reductions on vehicles all the way down to $1.
However Ask-AI is taking a distinct method, launching a brand new mannequin agnostic enterprise AI assistant as a Chrome extension at present referred to as ASK that’s designed to empower human buyer assist brokers by presenting them with real-time contextual knowledge concerning the buyer they’re interacting with within the second, solutions to frequent questions, and information about their firm’s choices and options — all proper at their fingertips.
Based to empower human brokers and workers with AI
Based in Tel Aviv, Israel in 2021 by entrepreneur Alon Talmor, and co-located with a significant workplace in Toronto, Canada, the 40-person-strong agency can also be saying at present it has raised $11 million in Collection A funding led by Leaders Fund and backed by seed traders together with Vertex Ventures, State of Thoughts Ventures, GTMFund, and others. In complete, counting its earlier seed spherical, Ask-AI has raised greater than $20 million.
“We imagine there’s going to be an enormous marketplace for sidekicks and co-pilots on the intersection of what you [the enterprise user] are doing proper now — let’s say a repetitive activity resembling answering e mail, answering a buyer assist ticket, or simply doing all of your day job in your CRM [customer relationship management software] — and with firm knowledge and AI,” Talmor informed VentureBeat in an unique interview prematurely of the bulletins.
ASK is AI on the aspect each time it’s wanted
Talmor described how the brand new ASK sidekick works: as a Chrome browser extension that seems a sidebar and “opens mechanically, relying on what you do,” to offer apps and data related to no matter work you’re doing at that second.
ASK “not solely make[s] you do what you do sooner — offering solutions for emails and tickets — but in addition doing it higher and extra successfully.”
For instance, Talmor famous that for customer support and assist personnel, ASK gives a “360 view of what we all know” about each given buyer who has interacted with the enterprise prior and is looking for assist from an agent.
The knowledge ASK gives contains “all of the related previous interactions and highlights about what’s fascinating about this buyer — is their renewal arising? Are they a churn threat?”
As well as, ASK can carry out “actions round generative AI, as an example, answering with the tone of the corporate,” by way of e mail or buyer chat drafts, “answering questionnaires, performing a assist audit, there’s all kinds of functions we will actually craft very quick and add to this [ASK] sidekick platform to convey worth.”
Importantly, the ASK AI sidekick doesn’t act by itself: It’s as much as every human buyer assist agent to simply accept or use the data and responses it gives, counting on their coaching and judgment to keep away from the form of errors and lofty guarantees of totally automated buyer assist chatbots.
Excessive-security, high-accuracy, low hallucination charge
Talmor additionally emphasised Ask-AI’s dedication to lowering hallucinations and embodying his firm’s values of making “very excessive accuracy, high-security options.”
He stated Ask-AI does this and differentiates itself from different rivals within the buyer assist chatbot house by performing “actual pre-processing and summarizing of the [customer] firm knowledge” together with understanding distinctive inside firm jargon.
Ask-AI additionally helps a variety of main AI fashions for powering its choices, together with OpenAI’s GPT-3.5/4, Google Gemini, Meta’s open-source Llama and its variants resembling Alpaca.
AI merchandise that hook up with and digest knowledge from present apps — no switchover wanted
A serious benefit of the complete Ask-AI providing — which additionally features a glanceable, information-rich real-time dashboard referred to as “MosAIc” — is that it may be linked to greater than 50 different standard enterprise functions in frequent use, together with Salesforce, Zendesk, Confluence, and Slack, digesting and analyzing the information from these sources — albeit with the enterprise buyer’s permission.
This implies Ask-AI’s prospects don’t want to think about switching or abandoning enterprise software program they already depend on, and pay for, and that works nicely for his or her enterprise wants.
As an alternative, Ask-AI’s sidekick and dashboard merely prolong and improve the information already being created and saved by these different third-party apps and instruments.
Discussing Ask-AI’s MosAIc dashboard, Talmor informed VentureBeat that “you may visually see what are the recurring points and issues not solely in your buyer tickets but in addition in, for instance, Slack conversations internally…there’s plenty of chatter in firm channels and also you wish to seize that to lift effectiveness within the firm.”
Ask-AI believes the results of utilizing each merchandise — its dashboard and ASK sidekick — is a dramatic enhancement in effectivity throughout varied departments, from buyer assist to gross sales, by offering key insights and actionable options in actual time.
Although initially focusing on buyer assist brokers with its ASK sidekick, Ask-AI additionally seeks to offer worth to different enterprise workers, resembling analysts and executives, who could discover super worth from the dashboard.
This end-to-end answer has proven tangible outcomes throughout Ask-AI’s various clientele, which incorporates names like Monday.com, Callrail, and Yotpo, attaining metrics resembling a 20% discount in time-to-resolution for assist tickets.
Prior success with enterprise-grade AI
Talmor’s earlier AI enterprise BlueTail was acquired by Salesforce, Ask-AI has been on a mission to combine generative AI into the material of enterprise operations.
Talmor has a doctoral diploma in pure language processing, and his crew contains different skilled professionals and teachers together with Professor Jonathan Berant, Josh Solomon, Dafna Lavran, and Eyal Medar.
With its new funding, the corporate plans to double in measurement over this 12 months.
Ask-AI’s current funding and progressive method to integrating generative AI into enterprise workflows could assist it stand out amongst an more and more crowded house of recent enterprise-grade generative AI choices.