5 conversational AI startups transforming customer engagement

There are countless ways that AI can assist with customer service, sometimes by replacing workers, in other scenarios by supporting them. The following generative AI outfits are catering to this exceptionally rapidly growing market. Kaliber Labs focuses on developing AI-powered surgical software for arthroscopic surgery needs.

The AI sales tools we analyzed in this guide help sales reps automate everyday tasks and develop high-quality sales content. By leveraging AI technology, sales teams can save time, streamline processes, and drive more successful sales outcomes. With four global office locations, 304 employees, and 15 years in the industry, Lucidworks is synonymous with search excellence.

On average, these companies are currently only spending ~10% of their revenue on model costs or ~25% of their total COGS. Thus these vertical applications built on top of LLMs are already generating margins ~6X the underlying model expenses. With model costs dropping rapidly and these startups just starting to optimize their spend, we believe these attractive margins will only get better. In addition, new models are emerging with stronger reasoning capabilities that can further empower agents to execute more complex workflows. Copilots are perhaps the most obvious opportunity at the moment, but that makes them likely the most competitive playing field.

Salesforce mulls charging per AI chat as investors sweat over fewer seats

Users just have to input the topic and the platform generates a script, adds scenes and voiceovers, among other things. Founded in 2019 by Sanket Shah, and later joined by Anshul Khandelwal, InVideo initially operated a web-based video editing platform that allowed users to convert existing pieces of static content into videos. AI is used in sales to analyze customer data, predict purchasing behaviors, personalize interactions, and automate routine tasks such as lead scoring and email campaigns, enhancing efficiency and increasing revenue.

Interested customers can easily connect their environment to Meeting Insights and start benefitting from automated AI insights for their Microsoft Teams meetings. The technology is set to become an increasingly essential part of IT spending, ad spending, and cybersecurity as it develops”. Customer support is a space traditionally dominated by women, and the adoption of AI and automation is giving more of these women the opportunity to develop technical skills and progress their careers.

Beatoven.AI addressed this issue by simply leveraging GenAI to create background music for video, podcast, and game creators. Riding on the AI wave, the startup now boasts close to 1 Mn registered users worldwide, majority of them outside India. The startup has raised $1.5 Mn since its inception and counts names such as Venture Catalysts, YourNest Venture as investors.

The platform is most often used by marketing and sales professionals to help them work through their GTM processes more quickly and smoothly. CopyAI can be used to translate content for a multilingual or global audience, generate blog and social media content, and create the content and structure necessary for a successful email marketing campaign. The parts of the development process it helps with include planning, creating, testing, fixing, documenting, and even explaining.

The platform helps its clients convert text into “natural-sounding” voice overs in multiple languages and generate subtitles. The Bengaluru-based startup has raised $1.2 Mn in funding till date and is backed by the likes of ecommerce major Flipkart, Inflection Point Ventures, Entrepreneur First, Huddle, DLabs, Dexter Angels, among others. Backed by investors such as Untapped Capital, SeaChange Fund, Pack Ventures, Array Ventures, and Upsparks Capital, the Seattle-based startup has raised $1.5 Mn in funding since inception. Catering to both B2B and B2C users, Phot.AI allows customers to generate photos, create design concepts and visualise them with GenAI. It also leverages this emerging technology to help users enhance their images and turn their “PDF” documents into any format.

I hereby consent to the processing of the personal data that I have provided and declare my agreement with the data protection regulations in the privacy policy on the website. Like any new groundbreaking technology, generative AI may replace some jobs, especially in white collar professions, but overall the long term effect will likely be one of job augmentation and change. Biomatter uses its Intelligent Architecture platform to design and develop proteins for health and sustainable manufacturing. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. It also goes beyond more traditional human protein expectations and supports use cases across molecular biology, food and beverage, biotherapeutics, and agriculture projects. For a detailed list of the leading AI video providers, read eWeek’s guide to the best AI video generators.

Stick Shift Driving Academy: Boosting Traffic and Inbound Calls with Market Muse

There could still be a long-tail of different players (especially open-source) but value will accrue to the top handful of model players. It’s not only the superior technology that will determine tomorrow’s AI Giants, but also their established distribution. According to the report, the cloud kitchen industry is currently booming, especially as more customers are opting for ordering in, instead of dining out, in a world still mired in pandemic realities. Evangelina Petrakis, 21, was in high school when she posted on social media for fun — then realized a business opportunity. The first argument suggests that general AI systems will become so proficient at a wide array of tasks that they will effectively replace specialized SaaS applications that leverage AI.

• Lightricks first gained notoriety with its social-media-friendly image editing app, Facetune.
• IBM, the world’s largest industrial research organization, runs an AI supercomputer known as Watson.
• Using the captured data, Genius Sports develops analytics platforms for online betting and advertising.
• To score each conversational AI platform for this category, we analyzed user feedback on review sites and considered the types of support offered by each company.

A company that was once worth 20x revenue in 2021 — ARR, if you will — might now be worth 7x or less. We also checked for pricing transparency and the availability of free demos and trials to allow potential buyers to test out the platform before making a purchase decision. Korea.ai offers optional enhanced support at an additional cost – $2,000 per month for the standard plan and a custom quote for the enterprise conversational ai saas plan. The Conversational AI application pattern is a significant evolution in how applications are experienced and in how they are built and deployed. As part of its growth strategy, Rocketlane has appointed Rao Adavikolanu as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Rao, previously the CMO of San Francisco-based Pilot.com, brings significant expertise to drive Rocketlane’s market presence and strategic initiatives.

Perplexity AI is an AI search engine with an interface that resembles other leading chatbots and LLMs, but with a greater focus on personalization and conversational accessibility. In Perplexity’s output, a detailed response and explanation is presented; several sources and relevant images are included in these results, as well as related queries that can support users who want to continue their research. In essence, this tool combines the best of a traditional search engine with an AI model’s power and conversational capabilities. Aimi.fm provides users with a generative AI music player that generates endless loops of music in different genres for listeners.

Cognigy.AI: Best for contact center automation

It’s the original developer of the transformer neural network architecture — now supporting generative AI apps like ChatGPT — as well as breakthrough conversational AI models, notably Gemini. Google’s Bangalore-based research facility is applying AI to tackle real-world problems in healthcare, agriculture and education and creating more inclusive language models. The app’s proactive mentorship, empathetic support, and unique case management approach ensures that users receive the guidance they need when they need it. In a strategic move, Aktana recently acquired Tact.ai’s Field Engagement and Conversational AI Technology, expanding its capabilities.

Founded in 2001, it now has more than 4000 employees globally, and operates in 16 locations, including the US, UK, Ukraine, India, Singapore, and Australia, and maintains dual headquarters in Mumbai and New York City. They have raised a total of $685 million in funding over 5 rounds, the last of which was in January 2022. In January, Prismatic raised a $22 million Series B round of funding, which Five Elms Capital led. Learn to Win offers a mobile-first enterprise SaaS training platform with modules of up to five minutes, pre-made web templates for instructors and confidence and accuracy measures to improve coaching.

Finally, the acquisitions they have made are filling gaps in areas that are forward-looking from the point of view of what will become increasingly important for Uniphore’s customers, he says. These acquisitions—and the ones that Uniphore will make in the coming days—will play their role in taking the company to its next big milestones. Overall, Uniphore is beginning to demonstrate that its technologies can be deployed reliably at very large enterprises, he says. I don’t get to do that every day, but I live for those well-crafted stories, written simply, sans jargon.

Salesforce is a leading provider of customer relationship management (CRM) SaaS solutions. The company’s AI-powered platform, Einstein, delivers personalized insights and automates tasks, enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions and enhance customer experiences. Databricks is a data and AI SaaS platform that helps organizations unlock the full potential of their data. The company’s offerings include tools for data engineering, machine learning, and real-time analytics, enabling businesses to derive valuable insights from their data. Tech products built and distributed on the cloud make it easier for people and businesses to access advanced software since these products aren’t often resource-intensive and can run on consumer-grade devices, including mobile phones. SaaS has been responsible for the rapid expansion of software and digital services throughout Latin America, which has led to notable investments from foreign tech companies and venture capital groups.

AI voice applications are emerging in many industries including auto dealerships, retail, restaurants, and home services. A large portion — or even a majority — of inbound sales calls are missed as they happen outside of business hours, and in these cases, AI is primed to pick up the slack. AI voice applications in sales tend to be incredibly high ROI use cases because the AI is essentially picking up lost revenue for these businesses, and can thus offer a really compelling value proposition. Some of these efforts are focused on modern web frameworks while others work with brittle legacy engineering stacks (i.e., COBALT, PEARL, etc.) where fluent engineers are becoming obsolete over time.

Darwin AI gives small LatAm companies AI-powered sales assistant

AssemblyAI is a unique generative AI company that focuses on speech AI modeling, specifically for transforming speech to text after important conversations and recordings, like calls, video meetings, and podcasts. The tool includes several enterprise-ready ChatGPT features, including strong sentiment analysis capabilities and PII redaction. Most recently, the company released Universal-1, a multilingual speech recognition model that apparently surpasses Whisper-3 in performance accuracy and speed.

Hootsuite, which has millions of users and over 200,000 paying customers, is expanding into a space that has brought success to the likes of Canadian customer support software startup Ada. Earlier this year, Ada announced a $130 million USD Series C round that brought its valuation to $1.2 billion after it saw a record year of growth for its AI chatbot amid COVID-19. The Heyday and Sparkcentral acquisitions stand out in Hootsuite’s history as they represent new use cases for the social media management company, which has historically focused on selling and marketing on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Through its legacy of high-performance GPU development, tech conglomerate Nvidia entered the deep learning space. Its high-powered AI chips — responsible for training and the deployment of deep learning models at scale — are used in everything from self-driving cars to medical imaging equipment.

The Rise of Conversational AI Applications

“GenieTalk.ai generates revenue every time our APIs are triggered, and it’s a SAAS model in which the customer can use the chatbot by just embedding a small script into their services and customers can purchase this as a plan or pay as you go service. OGenie generates revenue via selling the elite membership priced at Rs 999 and flight bookings,” explains Ankit. Depending on your AI assistant’s use case, it might interact with one or more of these aforementioned systems. Applications at this layer also have user interfaces that your users will actually see and interact with.

The core value proposition of Conversational AI applications will result in a quantum jump in the application user experience. The user experience will instead be one where the human specifies the end state or goal—the outcome—that is to be achieved and any constraints, all while using a conversational interface as is appropriate. The job of decomposing the high-level workflow into subtasks, executing those subtasks, and directing the detailed subtask interactions will be delegated to an AI component we refer to as the AI Orchestrator. The rise of multimodal models and AI Agents is leading the next wave of innovation in AI, and dramatically expanding AI’s potential applications to far broader use cases than early text-based models achieved.

Glean is a generative AI enterprise search company that relies on deep-learning models to understand natural language queries in the context of organizational, departmental, and individual user characteristics. Glean connects to a variety of enterprise apps and platforms, making it easier to set up and maintain access to various business information sources. With its focus on AI privacy and governance, small businesses and enterprises alike are investing in this solution for enterprise knowledge management. Anthropic’s Claude platform is similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, with its large language model and content generation focus. First released widely in March 2023, Claude is viewed as a more customizable platform with a more friendly and human-like chatbot experience. Since its initial start, Claude has evolved into an enterprise-level AI assistant with high-level conversational AI capabilities, a large context window, and an API that allows users to build custom instances of Claude into their products.

The company began its India-based operations in 2004, and has since expanded to four engineering development centers throughout the country. ServiceNow offers a cloud-based platform for IT management and digital workflow automation. It aims to help a wide variety of companies use its generative AI to mitigate cybersecurity risks, automate, structure and manage their operations. Recognizing the complexities of cloud migration initiatives, RTS excels in providing best-in-class managed cloud delivery services.

Lightricks first gained notoriety with its social-media-friendly image editing app, Facetune. It has since expanded Facetune and its other apps with cutting-edge AI, making it possible to conceptualize, generate, and edit new content and avatars for videos, photos, and art projects, all from one AI-driven platform. Most recently, two of Inflection’s co-founders—Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan—have left the company to work in a new AI division at Microsoft. In light of this change, the company announced a new CEO and plans to focus more heavily on offering an AI studio business so more users can access and customize their models. Brown pointed to one Authenticx client that had implemented a new chat function to streamline customer service and reduce incoming calls. By applying conversational data, Brown explained, they were able to determine that users got stuck because they simply couldn’t figure out how to navigate the chat.

Early adopters are drawn to AIaaS because it has many benefits and is a rapidly expanding industry. Its shortcomings show that there’s still room for improvement, but despite potential roadblocks to its development, AIaaS is predicted to be just as significant as other as-a-service products. Organizations can execute AI at a reasonable cost using the AIaaS delivery model without having to develop or maintain a single AI project.

The investment, led by South Korea’s Atinum Investment, brings SleekFlow’s total funding to $15 million. However, profitability depends on various factors including market demand, competition, product quality, and effective business strategies. Google, Microsoft, and IBM are often recognized for their advanced AI capabilities, but smaller companies like NVIDIA and Salesforce also excel in certain AI domains.

It enables brands to have truly engaging interactions and has already secured several high-profile brands as customers including; BDO, Peppercorn Insurance and The Cyber Helpline. SOUNDRAW is a generative AI solution for music composition that can be tailored to different genres, instruments, and other musical variables. The company also offers a music generation API to support business users who want to incorporate custom music into their products.

• Just nine months after launching, FeedHive exceeded $65,000 in revenue and had more than 3,000 and 600 paid plan users.
• So Schiaffino and Sculli began developing Darwin AI’s system that connects with a company’s customer relationship management tool and evaluates possible sales leads and escalates the ones most likely to buy to a human salesperson.
• These SaaS startups are increasing access to digital services and advancing software throughout Latin America.
• Spot AI’s platform includes a range of features, including audience segmentation, customer tracking, and real-time analytics, making it a powerful tool for businesses looking to optimize their marketing and sales strategies.
• The key takeaway is that assessing your needs before choosing AI sales software for your business is essential.

With over 20 years of experience, Five9 focuses on transforming contact centers into customer engagement hubs. The company’s suite includes digital engagement, analytics, workforce optimization, and AI-driven automation, enhancing agent productivity and delivering concrete business outcomes. Owing to the pandemic, the inability to have one-on-one conversations with customers led businesses to adapt artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud-based customer engagement platforms for seamless customer experience.

Colossyan is a leading competitor in the AI video generation space because its product includes several ways for users to create high-quality corporate training videos with no actors or scripting necessary. Customization is a core part of this solution, and the AI assistant is a helpful resource for users who want support in content creation. PolyAI, a London-based company that has built a platform for conversational artificial intelligence, announced it has raised $12 million in Series A funding. Sands Capital Ventures, Amadeus Capital Partners, Passion Capital, and Entrepreneur First also participated in this round. Amadeus Capital Partners and Passion Capital were the lead investors in PolyAI’s $2.4 million seed round back in 2017. Darwin AI, a Brazil-based AI startup, is developing a conversational AI assistant for small businesses across Latin America that want to get into AI but don’t have an IT staff.

It also recently launched its invoicing features, which generate and track invoices and quotes. These SaaS startups are increasing access to digital services and advancing software throughout Latin America. ORAI is an AI speech coach designed to help working professionals upskill their oratory performance in order to deliver better workplace presentations and speeches, increasing the likelihood of career advancement. Hosting more than 300,000 users, the app provides daily five-minute lessons, real-time feedback and improvement tracking with insights.

“The Rocketlane team has a great opportunity to replace legacy PSA software with their AI roadmap and great user experience. The company has executed this vision with rapid adoption and has solidified its industry-leading position. We are excited to reinforce our commitment to them,” said Vikram Vaidyanathan, Managing Director, Matrix India. With the new investment, Rocketlane ChatGPT App plans to integrate advanced AI features into its platform. These include conversational AI that can analyze client meetings to gauge customer satisfaction and predict future engagement. Finally, we analyzed the percent of revenue these Vertical AI companies are spending on model costs to address the concern that many of these applications are simply thin wrappers.

By utilizing this AI agent, customers gain more valuable data-driven insights, while customer success and technical teams are freed to focus on strategic initiatives instead of handling numerous custom data requests. Ironclad offers AI contract management software for industries and use cases ranging from legal and procurement to marketing, sales, IT, HR, and finance. The platform is designed to help users manage the entire contract lifecycle, providing tools for designing, editing, and reporting on the results of different contracts and terms. Ironclad AI is a subset of the larger Ironclad platform that includes intelligent contract analysis and management tools for automated approvals, flagging, and other support, which frees up human employees for more complicated tasks and strategy work.