Building a Venture Scale AI Company: Observe.AI CEO Swapnil Jain (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the idea that you zeroed in on? What was the process?

Swapnil Jain: It was a pretty long process that lasted two years. Towards the last two days of my job, I started formalizing some ideas. More often than not, you pivot. I started with one idea. I had eight different ideas during that period. I’d test and idea; if it’s working, keep moving forward. If not, then pull back.

As a founder who started the company from the perspective of wanting to start a company, it was challenging. I didn’t start with a problem. It took a lot of time to figure out what I’m excited about and what I’m passionate about and where the market is. One of the ideas is in insurance space in India. I spent three months doing that. This is such a regulated industry. To do something meaningful in this space, I will have to deal with Indian regulators which I didn’t want to. I’m a builder. I’m not an operations guy.

In 2016, a lot of companies in India were coming up with operations ideas. All are heavy in logistics. I realized that I’m not into logistics either. Then I wanted to do a software-first business. Do I want to do consumer? If you want to make money, you have to focus on the US market. From this process of elimination, I realized that software is my thing. I can understand businesses, so B2B is going to be my focus.

I started spending time understanding business processes. As part of that, I was spending time in call centers in the last six months of my journey. I was able to get access to call centers through my network. I went to Manila. I spent a lot of time in the call centers there. They have a million agents in one city. It’s crazy. I spent a lot of time there in understanding the life of an agent. I would sit on the call center floors. This industry is so old. Contact center is a big part of life, but they’re not the most advanced from a software perspective. That’s where the idea triggered. We can use AI to change how contact centers work.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve been around longer. You’re much younger. AI in the call center idea has come before. The whole knowledge management and then this became a multi-channel problem. There’s email. There’s chat. What did you encounter in 2017 as the state of the union? What was your concept of taking that to the next level?

Swapnil Jain: The reality that we saw on the ground was that they were built on the old stack. A big change happened in 2012 with deep learning. Right now, people are talking about generative AI. Back then, deep learning was the name of the game. It fundamentally changed a machine’s ability to process speech. Speech processing, speech to text, speech emotion got a big boost.

Our vision was that we are going to change how humans and contact centers understand and process speech. Before us, what was happening was, there were a lot of operations going on that required understanding what was happening in conversations. They were doing it all manually.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building a Venture Scale AI Company: Observe.AI CEO Swapnil Jain
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