adaa Toronto-based customer service automation startup, has been around long enough to predate the use of large language models in its solutions, but today the company is announcing a new set of generative AI-powered tools with the goal of take that automation to another level.
The company’s co-founder and CEO, Mike Murchison, says his company’s mission since its launch in 2016 is to give every customer a great experience, something that isn’t the case now with long wait times, horrible music on hold. and too much bad information. He hopes generative AI will help him move his customers closer to that ideal.
“In short, with Ada, you can build once, deploy anywhere across any messaging channel, voice, [whatever]and that bot is deployed everywhere. The initial build time for the bot is essentially zero because we’re generating responses on the fly based on your insights across your company,” Murchison told TechCrunch.
This is a difficult task, especially with the hallucination problem inherent in large language models where you make up words or actions if you don’t know what to do with the information in the knowledge base.
“One of the most difficult problems to solve right now with the generative AI application at runtime is the security problem. How do you make sure that [the bot is] give you a real answer and one that is safe, accurate and relevant? How do you really do that? she asked her.
He says that those problems are not really part of an LLM problem. “It turns out that there is a lot of complexity, a lot of IP that we built around our entire AI pipeline that has allowed us to [give an answer] with trust. It’s a big, big reason why our customers are so excited about this,” she said.
He further claims that the number of times he needs to hand off more complex tasks to a human is drastically reduced with this product, but Ada integrates with customer service software like Zendesk and Salesforce for when the need arises.
“In that situation, where there is a gap, we seamlessly transition to a human. And that’s been a big part of Ada’s growth, actually; in the last five years in particular [we have seen] how effectively we’ve complemented the agent desktops in this space, Zendesk and Salesforce in particular,” Murchison explained.
Today, the company has more than 300 customers using the platform, including Meta, Verizon, and Shopify. The company, which launched in 2016, has raised more than $190 million, including a $130 million Series C in 2021.