Bootstrapping First, then Raising Money to Build a $10M+ Generative AI Startup: Anthony Scodary, Co-Founder of Gridspace (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: They want the problem solved, and if the problem is solved by a machine; that’s perfect. Here comes the sensitive question. What does this do to the workforce? What does this do to the bottom line? What are the human resource and financial metrics of your solutions in the call center?

Anthony Scodary: One of our biggest customers gets millions of claims a year. For example, someone who has just been in a car accident calls in. That is a very sensitive situation and a good use for a human covering the call. If all of your budget and everyone’s time is spent in menial tasks like reading disclosures, talking about late fees, or helping with password resets, the time and mental energy of your well-trained workforce is being wasted when they could be providing better support for these more humanistic problems.

If you look at the history of automation, when more menial things, get automated, generally that opens up the opportunity for people to be working on the more humanistic problems. In the customer support space, that means complex problem solving. Instead of someone needing to be on hold for twenty minutes to talk to someone about their issue; if it’s a significant issue, you identify that, you get them to a person who’s an expert who can actually empathize and take their time with them.

So, it’s an opportunity to better utilize that workforce to provide specialized customer service instead of having them just do menial jobs. Generally, the reason call center agents don’t like their job is because it’s unstimulated and they’re doing the same thing over and over again. Only occasionally, they’ll have a call that’s very rewarding where they get to help someone with something complex that has a lot of emotional weight to it.

For me, the whole point of automation is that we have a limited amount of labor capital and redistribute it to places where the people can actually help. People want to feel useful and do something where they feel appreciated. In general, when you’re just the gatekeeper between a password reset system and a telephone, it’s a very soul sucking work.

Sramana Mitra: What is the distribution between those two kinds of works – the very heavily automatable solutions versus calls versus the richer interactions.

Anthony Scodary: It’s hard to say, it really depends on the sector. For example, we do outbound calls on payment reminders, which is completely automatable. People probably shouldn’t be doing that. Honestly, the majority of the calls that are of value should be covered by people. It’s just that the thing that’s keeping them from getting to it are these menial calls.

There’re two other use cases. One, where there’s currently a machine, that’s bad. On our YouTube account, we do IVR critiques, where we call into like Delta Airlines or FedEx and their IVR is just terrible. Then, we rebuild it with Grace in ten minutes, and it’ll be dramatically better. We show how you can take a bad machine and turn it into a good machine.

The other opportunity is the calls that you can’t do. In some of our healthcare use cases, they would love to be doing more patient discharge surveys or annual wellness visit pre-calls. Typically, it is done by physician’s assistants or nurse practitioners. These people are too busy doing clinical work to do those calls. They don’t have extra call center resources to spend on these calls. So, currently what we’re doing is we’re automating a call that they wish they had the resources to do.

So between replacing bad machines, taking people away from the menial aspects of call center jobs, and then doing calls that you wish you had the resources to do in the first place, this is really a big labor force win and that’s been the feedback that we’ve gotten.

I think a lot of times the myopic view of automation is that there are a hundred people who are employed and now there’s fifty people who are employed and then fifty robots. That’s not how automation works, right? If you look at highly automated sectors of the economy, like agriculture, where at one point, 70% of Americans worked on farms and now it’s less than 1%. In general, the people who work on farms now are engineers. They are business people. They have very complex jobs versus subsistence farmers where, you’re barely getting enough food to survive. That sector has become very automated, but that one drove a large amount of automation or urbanization and specialization and helped in creating new sectors that didn’t exist before. It also made the job more interesting for the people who remained in the sector.

That’s the history of automation, right? You don’t automate the fun, interesting parts that humans are good at. You are to automate, the more menial or mechanistic stuff. You see that in manufacturing and agriculture, but for knowledge work like call centers, you just haven’t gotten to see that same benefit. I think there’s a big opportunity there.

Sramana Mitra: Great.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping First, then Raising Money to Build a $10M+ Generative AI Startup: Anthony Scodary, Co-Founder of Gridspace
1 2 3 4 5 6 7