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, AI was imperative. This was 2016 and at that time, an AI-first approach to customer service was unique—but the results were astounding. We discuss their 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. 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 build an AI product that outlasts the hype
Host: Ben Fletcher, Partner at Accel
Featuring: Mike Murchison, CEO and Co-Founder of Ada
Learn more at Accel.com/podcast-episodes/Ada
Explore more episodes from this season:
- Episode 01: AssemblyAI's Dylan Fox on building an AI company during a period of radical change
- Episode 02: Roblox’s Daniel Sturman on Building Great Teams in the AI Era
- Episode 03: Ada’s Mike Murchison on how AI is revolutionizing customer service
- Episode 04: Merge’s Shensi Ding on powering the next generation of AI SaaS companies
- Episode 05: Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang on the most powerful technological advancement of our time
- Episode 06: Bard’s Jack Krawczyk on the birth of Google’s AI chatbot and the creative potential that lies ahead
- Episode 07: Synthesia’s Victor Riparbelli on creating an environment to harness AI benefits and reduce harms
- Episode 08: Ironcald's Cai GoGwilt on a decade of anticipating the transformative power of AI
- Episode 09: Checkr’s Daniel Yanisse on tackling bias in people and AI
- Episode 10: Cinder’s Glen Wise on trust and safety threats and holding AI accountable
- Episode 11: Transcend’s Kate Parker on putting data back into the hands of users in an AI-driven world
- Episode 12: Arm’s Rene Haas on building the brain of artificial intelligence
Learn more about Accel's relationship with Ada:
