Philipp Heltewig, who was CIO of marketing company Sitecore before its sale to private equity group EQT in 2016, joined forces with Sascha Poggemann and Benjamin Mayr eight years ago to found Cognition, a customer service automation startup. The drive was what they perceived as confusion about AI’s capabilities among both consumers and C-suite executives, Heltewig says, particularly confusion about AI’s limitations.
“Big tech companies have ‘wrong’ expectations when it comes to AI,” Heltewig told TechCrunch. “In 2015, IBM claimed that its Watson platform could do it all. In 2024, that will return when “Copilot can do it all.” Neither of those things is true.”
With Cognigy, Heltewig, Poggemann and Mayr sought to fulfill a more humble promise: to help create an AI that can handle the routine, highly repetitive processes that center workers face every day.
AI for contact centers is not a new trend. According to one survey, more than half of companies have already invested in AI capabilities to support their customer service operations. According to the market research firm Markets and Markets, Revenue in Call Center Artificial Intelligence Market Only to Increase from $1.6 billion in 2022 to $4.1 billion by the end of 2027.
Aside from big tech companies, many, many startups offer AI-powered products to automate basic call center tasks. there is chatterwhich focuses on text-to-speech applications; Korea.aiwhich is developing enterprise-focused conversational AI applications; Lang, whose technology automatically tags and classifies customer conversations; and PolyAI and AI Retellingwhich are building autonomous telephone agents.
So what sets Cognigy apart from the rest? On the one hand, the platform can be deployed on-premises or in a public or private cloud (e.g. AWS). And it is scalable; Cognigy manages AI agents that can handle up to tens of thousands of customer conversations at a time.
“Cognigy provides a platform to create, operate and analyze AI agents for customer experiences in the contact center,” Heltewig said. “In addition to serving end customers, AI agents themselves shift roles to act as agent ‘co-pilots’, providing contextual assistance to human agents and automating routine tasks such as completing calls.”
Cognigy sells three main products: (1) a self-service question-and-answer chatbot that draws on an organization’s knowledge base to answer customer queries, (2) a set of tools for creating chatbot experiences, and ( 3) a panel of support agents powered by artificial intelligence to provide services. potentially useful information for agents during customer interactions.
Cognigy trains its own generative AI models to power aspects of its platform. But it also integrates third-party models, such as the recently launched GPT-4o from OpenAI, the Claude 3 from Anthropic, the Gemini from Google and the Luminous from Aleph Alpha.
The vendor-neutral, bring-your-own-model approach could be one of the reasons Cognigy has grown so strongly in recent years.
The company today has around 175 customers deploying Cognigy contact center solutions across 1,000 different brands, including Toyota and Bosch, and just this week, Cognigy closed a major Series C tranche led by French private equity group Eurazeo. Together with Insight Partners, DTCP and DN Capital, Eurazeo invested $100 million in Cognigy, bringing the total raised by Cognigy to $175 million.
With a workforce of 175 based in Düsseldorf and San Francisco, which Heltewig expects to grow to 250 by the end of the year, Cognigy plans to invest the new capital in geographic expansion in the US and in product research and development.
“Our goal is to enable the creation of more sophisticated customer service solutions and the acceleration of AI-centric technologies that generate return on investment,” Heltewig said.