Ada's founding story is one the Accel team has always loved. Before its launch, founders Mike Murchison and David Hariri convinced seven customer service teams to let them work as support agents. After a year of exhaustive intake, they knew that for Ada’s customer service platform to add real value, it would need to leverage AI. This was 2016 and at that time, an AI-first approach to customer service was unique—but the results were astounding. We discuss Ada's journey on this episode of Spotlight On.

“We realized if we can put AI in the hands of customer service teams, allow them to help more customers and help them resolve more – we can transform the future of customer service. And that's what we've been focused on ever since.” - Mike Murchison

Let’s back up a bit. In 2014, Mike and David had just launched a different startup. The company grew quickly, but it had a major problem: keeping up with customer service demand. Their team went from wanting to talk to our customers a lot, to avoiding customer contact. That bothered them. But these problems weren’t new. Customer service is notoriously cumbersome and hard to scale. The problems also weren’t going away, so Mike and David saw an opportunity to build a solution. Two years later, Ada was born.

Today, enterprises like Meta, Verizon, Yeti, and Square use Ada to automatically resolve customer inquiries in any language or channel. In this "Spotlight On: AI'' episode, Mike discusses the early reactions to Ada’s customer service AI approach, challenges they’ve faced due to recent demand, advice for other founders on how to use technology to deliver real value, and the impact AI will have on the customer service workforce.

#vc #venturecapital #founder #entrepreneurs #tech #CEO #artificialintelligence #customerservice #customerexperience #ai #startups #venturecapital

Access the episode on Spotlight On: https://www.accel.com/spotlighton/ada...

Season 1:
Season 1 focuses on AI. In this season, we’re bringing together a range of company leaders across different industries and stages to discuss how they’re navigating the current AI revolution. Learn from 12 leaders applying AI in all parts of the ecosystem. They have enabled new industries and profoundly influenced productivity, creativity, and the global economy. Several founders of AI-native companies we spoke to, such as  @AssemblyAI ,  @ironcladapp ,  @Scale_AI , and  @synthesia-io  embarked on their AI journey years before the current cycle. They were the crazy ones, the early visionaries, the risk-takers, who patiently built early AI products.

Spotlight On:
Spotlight On examines the technology shaping our world. Highlighting a new topic each season, company builders at all stages of company growth will share their learnings, challenges, and breakthroughs.

Accel:
Accel is a global venture capital firm that is the first partner to exceptional teams everywhere, from inception through all phases of private company growth. Atlassian, Bumble, CrowdStrike, Fiverr, Flipkart, Freshworks, Qualtrics, Scale, Segment, Slack, Spotify, Squarespace, Tenable, and UiPath are among the companies Accel has backed over the past 40+ years. We help ambitious entrepreneurs build iconic global businesses.

Host: Ben Fletcher, Partner at @AccelVC
Featuring: Mike Murchison, CEO and Co-Founder of Ada

Conversation highlights:
00:00 - Intro
04:00 - The core learnings from Mike’s experience working as a customer service agent, and how they approached AI in the early days
07:32 - Why Ada made an early decision to bring AI capabilities in-house, and how they built a strong technical team
14:09 - How the rapid development of ChatGPT and LLMs impacted Ada
25:00 - Advice on how to make a lasting impact with an AI product, beyond the hype

Connect With Us:
Website: https://www.accel.com/
Linkedin:   / accel-vc  
Twitter:   / accel  

Ada’s Mike Murchison | AI is Revolutionizing Customer Service | Spotlight On: AI | S1E3 | AccelVC
   / @accelvc