“Big tech companies have ‘mis-set’ expectations when it comes to AI,” Heltewig told TechCrunch.
According to one survey, over half of businesses have already invested in AI capabilities to support their customer service operations.
Per market research firm Markets and Markets, revenue in the market for call center AI alone is set to climb from $1.6 billion in 2022 to $4.1 billion by year-end 2027.
And it’s scalable; Cognigy manages AI agents that can handle up to tens of thousands of customer conversations at once.
Image Credits: Cognigy“Cognigy provides a platform to build, operate and analyze AI agents for customer experiences in the contact center,” Heltewig said.
Only a few years ago, one of the hottest topics in enterprise software was ‘robotic process automation’ (RPA).
The rise of generative AI, however, may just be the missing key to building these kinds of systems.
“Last year, generative AI happened and I realized that it unlocks some software scenarios that were impossible before,” Surpatanu said.
You have to combine it with more traditional software if you want to squeeze the best out of it,” he said.
Generative AI, Surpatanu argues, can bring a degree of adaptability to context and an understanding of the user’s intent to these systems that wasn’t really possible before and something that RPA often struggles with.
Like many immigrants, the New York City skyline was one of the first sights young brothers Edi and Etrit Demaj took in when they arrived in the U.S. over 20 years ago.
“The first building that we saw was the Empire State Building,” Etrit recalls.
The Demaj family soon settled in Detroit, where the brothers completed their education and started various companies, including their latest, Kode Labs, which integrates and automates various systems in commercial buildings — including the Empire State Building.
When the Demaj brothers founded Kode in 2017, they sought to bring building management into the cloud era.
The brothers liken it to an OS that integrates building systems like a computer OS integrates various circuit boards.
As Walmart works to remain competitive, it’s taking a more piecemeal approach to automation, through partnerships with a range of different robotics firms.
On Thursday, the mega-retailer announced a partnership with Fox Robotics, which brings 19 of the Austin-based startup’s robotic forklifts to its distribution centers.
Today’s news follows a 16-month pilot, which found Walmart trialing the technology in Distribution Center 6020.
DC 6020 is the place where Walmart began trials with Symbotic’s package sortation and retrieval technologies.
Following that successful trial, Walmart announced plans to roll out the technology to all 42 of its Regional Distribution Centers — that was nearly double the original target of 25.
Sprinto, a security compliance and risk platform, has raised a $20 million Series B round to build more automation into its compliance management platform and widen its customer base to include the wide gamut of companies that operate digitally but aren’t tech-first.
Sprinto is working to automate this aspect of security compliance management, which involves vendor risk management, vulnerability assessment, access control, evidence collection and other filing tasks.
Sprinto uses a mix of AI, GPTs and its own internal large language model to offer efficiencies in compliance management.
The market for automated compliance management solutions already has players such as Vanta and Drata, which Sprinto considers its key competitors.
However, Redekar said Sprinto primarily focuses on automating the entire compliance management process and helping businesses build trust.
The no-code development platform previously focused its outreach on robotics firms.
They were like, ‘we’re not a robotics company — we do food processing, we do PLC automation, we do boats, we’re not robots.’”Further complicating messaging was the fact that — while the company is simply named “Viam” — its various social media platforms are “Viam Robotics,” owing to the fact that it was unable to secure the four-letter word.
Viam’s large office overlooking New York City’s Lincoln Center has a lab space, where members of the local robotics community are invited in to use its platform to develop automation applications.
“When people ask me what I do and what [Viam’s software] does, I usually use an example from their life.
We are a platform that lives at the intersection of real-world hardware and real-world software and the cloud and machine learning.
A few years later, Levie’s original idea was becoming commoditized, and he switched gears to enterprise content management in the cloud.
Traditional enterprise content management, whether on prem or in the cloud, has involved storing, managing, securing and governing unstructured content.
Today, the industry is changing once more, and Box is again working to position itself on the forefront of that shift.
Levie has always had a knack for seeing where the puck is going, and his company is embracing the software shift toward AI and workflow automation.
Last year, Box bought Crooze, a small company that specializes in workflow automation and metadata management with integrations into Box, making it a logical acquisition target.
Nanonets, which primarily targets the financial services sector, says its AI platform aims to improve the efficiency of these processes and make them cost-effective.
The company’s AI platform uses machine learning architectures to analyze unstructured data from uploaded documents and extract useful information.
Nanonets is not alone in the global market for AI-based workflow automation.
Consistent revenue growth is one reason investors have been investing in AI startups despite the slowdown in global markets.
AI startups in the U.S. receive the most investments, followed by companies in China, U.K., Israel and India.
Chris Power, founder and CEO of industrial automation startup Hadrian, is a student of history.
“Never before in history has a declining empire beaten a rising empire, ever,” he said in a recent interview.
He had been running small e-commerce businesses and had been head of sales and marketing at an enterprise software company in Australia.
Construct Capital, WCM, Bracket Capital, Shrug Capital, Lux Capital, A16Z, Founders Fund, S&A, Silent Ventures, Cubit Capital, Caffeinated and other existing investors also participatedc.
Power said some customers expressed interest in alternate models, like having Hadrian build a dedicated facility to ensure committed factory capacity.
When it launched in 2019, Dusty’s FieldPrinter added a clever new dimension to the world of construction automation.
The little robot is smaller than the first gen, thus allowing it to better move around obstacles.
The 23-pound robot sports a wider print head and a bevy of on-board sensors for improved navigation.
Today’s news also marks the arrival of FieldPrint Platform, which is centered around BIM-to-field — that’s effectively bringing digital information into real-world construction sites.
“Our new FieldPrint Platform supports the seamless flow of data from the design phase, to the field, and back to the trailer,” cofounder and CEO Tessa Lau notes.
