Engineer Ashish Nagar was working on the conversational AI team within Amazon's Alexa organization when he realized AI had the potential to significantly improve contact center productivity.
“Frontline workers like customer service workers are the largest source of human capital in the world,” Nagar told TechCrunch, “so my idea was to augment the work of humans with ambient computing, an AI that you can just talk to and it can listen in the background.”
In 2019, Nagar founded Level AI, which offers a suite of AI-powered tools that automate a variety of customer service tasks. The platform scores contact center agents based on metrics such as total conversations and “no answers,” for example, and provides insights to both managers and agents.
“Level AI's software enables brands to gain insights into customer trends, the quality of service provided and action plans to improve service performance,” Nagar said.
So what else can Level AI do? Depending on how you configure the platform, it can display hints to agents during customer conversations, such as reminders to authenticate a customer's identity.
Level AI can also sense customer sentiment and attempt to respond appropriately — for example, highlighting to an agent that a customer is upset about a late delivery — and there are coaching tools designed to help managers walk agents through steps to improve performance in areas like response times.
Image credit: Level AI
“Key challenges in the AI-powered customer service industry include concerns about data privacy and security, the need for seamless integration with existing systems, ensuring AI is accurate and trustworthy, and addressing concerns about potential job losses,” Nagar says. “Additionally, there's the ever-present challenge of keeping up with rapidly evolving AI technology and maintaining ethical standards and regulatory compliance. Level AI is built from the ground up to address these concerns.”
Nagar is understandably optimistic about the current and future developments of Level AI's platform. But there's a very real dark side to call center monitoring software.
An editorial in The Guardian revealed that call centres have often turned into “electronic surveillance machines” where staff are constantly monitored and can be fired on the spot for even the smallest of mistakes. This, combined with low pay and the mental strain of dealing with emotional customers, may be one of the reasons why the contact centre industry has a sky-high turnover rate, averaging 30% to 45% per year.
Additionally, tools like Level AI have privacy implications: Do customers know that what they say is being analyzed by sentiment classification algorithms? And can employees expect their personal data to be deleted at some point?
Nagar said organizations that use Level AI will need to define their own data retention policies. “We offer flexibility for customers to control and manage their data,” he said.
And customers seem to love this flexibility.
Level AI has signed companies like Affirm, Penske and Carta, and the company makes money through annual contracts that are calculated based on the number of agents using the platform, according to Nagar. Nagar declined to disclose revenue figures but said the company believes it could surpass $50 million in annual recurring revenue within the next two years or so.
That's not entirely unreasonable when you look at the larger market for contact center software: According to analytics firm Mordor Intelligence, the sector will be worth $61.07 billion in 2024 and could rise to $145.2 billion by 2029, driven by contact center operators looking to cut costs.
At least some venture capitalists seem to agree with Nagar's big prediction: Level AI closed a $39.4 million Series C funding round this month led by Adams Street Partners, with participation from Cross Creek, Brightloop, and two existing investors, Battery Ventures and Eniac Ventures, bringing the startup's total funding to $73.1 million.
Nagar said the new funding will be used to expand Mountain View-based Level AI's platform to new customers.
“We have already seen very strong support from enterprise customers and this funding will enable us to bring our solutions to even more customers,” Nagar said, adding that Level AI plans to add at least 12 employees to its 135 staff over the next six months. “We already offer four products and are continuing to innovate in the space, and we will continue to invest heavily in people and technology to continue this trend.”