Ashish Nagar, an engineer by career, was working on the conversational AI team at Amazon's Alexa organization when he realized that AI had the potential to significantly increase productivity in call centers.
“Field service staff, like customer support staff, are the best human capital on the planet,” Nagar told TechCrunch. “So my idea was to make use of ambient computing – AI which you could just refer to and it's listening within the background – to enrich human work.”
In 2019, Nagar founded Level AI, which offers a set of AI-powered tools to automate various customer support tasks. For example, the platform can rating contact center agents on metrics akin to total variety of conversations and “dead spots,” providing insights for each managers and the agents themselves.
“Level AI’s software enables brands to realize insights into the heart beat of shoppers, the standard of service delivered and motion plans to enhance service performance,” said Nagar.
What else can Level AI do? Depending on how the platform is configured, it may well display cues to agents during a conversation with a customer, akin to a reminder to authenticate the client's identity.
Level AI may attempt to gauge a customer's mood and respond accordingly. For example, it may well make it clear to an worker that a customer is upset a couple of delayed delivery. It also includes coaching tools to assist managers guide employees through steps to enhance their performance in areas akin to response time.
“The key challenges within the AI-powered customer support industry include privacy and security concerns, the necessity for seamless integration with existing systems, ensuring the accuracy and reliability of AI, and managing potential fears of job losses,” said Nagar. “In addition, the continued challenge is keeping pace with rapidly evolving AI technologies while maintaining ethical standards and regulatory compliance. Level AI was built from the bottom up to deal with these concerns.”
While Nagar is clearly optimistic concerning the current and future deployment of Level AI's platform, there may be a really real downside to the decision center monitoring software.
A commentary within the Guardian reveals how Call centers often develop into “electronic panopticons” where staff are continuously monitored and where small mistakes are used to discipline and fire employees on the spot. This, along with Low wages and that psychological stress in coping with emotional customers, might be one among the explanation why turnover rates within the contact center industry are exceptionally high, on average between 30% and 45% annually.
And then there are the privacy implications of tools like Level AI. Do customers know that their statements are being analyzed by sentiment classification algorithms, and might employees expect their personal data to be deleted in some unspecified time in the future?
Nagar says it’s as much as organizations using Level AI to define their very own data retention policies. “We offer customers the pliability to regulate and manage their data,” he clarified.
And customers appear to like this flexibility.
Companies like Affirm, Penske and Carta have signed up with Level AI, in line with Nagar. The company makes money through annual contracts, that are calculated partially by the variety of agents using Level AI's platform. Nagar declined to supply revenue figures, but said he expects the corporate could surpass $50 million in annual recurring revenue in the subsequent two years.
Considering the larger contact center software market, this will not be entirely unreasonable. According to analytics firm Mordor Intelligence The sector was price $61.07 billion in 2024 and will rise to $145.20 billion by 2029, partly because of cost-cutting efforts by call center operators.
It seems that not less than some enterprise capitalists share Nagar's lofty prediction as well. Level AI closed a $39.4 million Series C funding round this month. The round was led by Adams Street Partners and likewise included participation from Cross Creek, Brightloop and two existing investors, Battery Ventures and Eniac Ventures. This brings the startup's total raised to $73.1 million.
Nagar said the fresh capital will likely be used to expand Mountain View-based Level AI's platform to recent customer segments.
“We have already seen great traction with enterprise customers and this funding will enable us to expand our solution to much more customers,” Nagar said, adding that Level AI plans so as to add not less than a dozen people to its 135-person workforce over the subsequent six months. “We proceed to innovate on this space and have already got 4 product offerings. We will proceed to speculate heavily in our people and technology to proceed this trend.”
