It’s all been leading up to this

The true potential of AI will be unlocked by CX companies that can disrupt long-standing industry challenges.

We’ve been lucky to work for many years in the pursuit of customer service excellence. Anand, Matt and Slava in customer experience technology, and Andy in contact centers. Our tech and our people served billions of customers and as a result, our companies became billion dollar businesses.

Through these years, we always pushed for a better future for customer experience. We’ve felt incredibly close to a new chapter for a long time. But this time, things feel different.

Most tech products and contact centers are focused on transforming the customer end experience. A great start — that’s what matters most, after all. But before these ideas can benefit the customer, they have to pass through a long cycle of delivery and adoption that often takes years. Many contact centers don’t have the tech skills or capital for change. Very few innovations hit the front line, where customers feel the impact.

Plus, companies aren’t necessarily rewarded for innovation. The business and incentive models of the client, technology provider, and contact center aren’t wholly aligned. It’s a massive challenge to keep these providers in concert to deliver the ultimate customer experience.

So what’s different now? The obvious answer is AI.

Advances in AI — and in particular, LLMs — have massive, widely recognized potential in customer service.

Digital agents promise far more than first-generation chatbots. It’s not just a handoff. It’s two agents, with complementary skills, delivering an incredible customer experience. If we put the most advanced AI together with the best human agents, we’re creating something more in sync, easier to manage, and more tightly integrated than ever before.

That means we can eliminate the separation between technology products and contact centers. We can radically focus on delivering excellent customer experience above all else. And with everything orchestrated together, we can dramatically accelerate improvements to agent and customer experience.

The cherry on top is that AI can now examine every customer interaction to determine how well the customer was served. That’s a whole new way to measure success in every interaction. We will apply this technology to a new model, where the people who provide service only get paid when the service is good.

After years of seeing trends come and go, we feel confident that we’re at a moment unlike any other. AI is moving quickly. But we know that this potential will only be realized by companies that can break through industry models that hamper innovation. And we’re excited to have the vision and support of the highest caliber partners in General Catalyst and Alorica to speed that change.

We named our company for the moment in a piece of music when players combine, and hit an intensity. That’s what we’re aiming for. For us, it’s our time to drive CX innovation to a new peak — our crescendo.

Anand, Andy, Matt and Slava.