Monday, August 15, 2022
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Careers
  • Contact
Business News from India
  • Home
  • Business
  • Technology
  • Fashion
  • Health
  • Travel
  • Startup Stories
  • Login
No Result
View All Result
Business News from India
Home Startup Stories

Acera spends $90M to automate customer service inquiries with AI – TechCrunch

admin by admin
August 3, 2022
in Startup Stories
0
Acera spends $90M to automate customer service inquiries with AI – TechCrunch
0
SHARES
10
VIEWS
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter


Icera, a startup developing what it describes as an “AI-driven” support ticketing system, today raised Series D funding led by Goldman Sachs along with True Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Icon Ventures, Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital and others. CEO Mudhu Sudhakar said the new cash will support Iceran’s market expansion and go-to-market strategy, in addition to investing in the company’s product development, R&D, sales and marketing initiatives.

Sudhakar says he built Icera after realizing the need for “predictive AI” solutions to automate customer service, IT, sales and operations problems. Leveraging AI, the platform plugs into existing systems of record, including help desk portals to respond to incoming inquiries and questions.

Sudhakar co-founded Icera in 2017 with long-time colleague Christos Trifonas. Sudhakar most recently led teams at ServiceNow and EMC, creating startups (Caspida, Cetas, Kazeon and Sanera Systems) previously acquired by VMware and Splunk. Tryphonas, a former AT&T Bell Labs researcher, worked with Sudhakar on many of his projects before joining ISERA.

We thought. [the pandemic] It would be a problem, but the Acera technology works very well in remote areas. Customers have looked to AI and automation to increase user engagement and adoption,” Sudhakar told TechCrunch in an email interview. “With the current market downturn, we are seeing the need to reduce licensing and people costs. This has fueled interest in ISERA as we can help organizations reduce costs for IT and business services.

The way Sudhakar explains it, Aisera’s platform learns to solve problems through a combination of language-parsing AI and robotic process automation, or RPA. RPA technology tries to mimic the way people interact with software. It’s not a particularly new idea — RPA vendors, including Automation Anywhere and UiPath, say they can do this to some extent. But Sudhakar insists that ISERA’s brand of RPA is tailor-made for customer/employee service use cases.

Conspiracy

Image Credits: Conspiracy

“In some ways, Aysera competes with ServinceNow and Zendesk, but as we work with them, we also partner with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Salesforce, Atlassian and Cisco to complement those solutions,” Sudhakar said. “Aisera is unique and separate from the ontology and taxonomy for each domain and vertical industry… [We also do] Learning and training AI on customer data sets to capture speech, phrases, expressions needed for natural language processing and natural language understanding.

Related posts

Twitter mourns the death of investor Rakesh Jhunjuhunwala.

Twitter mourns the death of investor Rakesh Jhunjuhunwala.

August 15, 2022
Meta invests in Take, a Singaporean startup that helps traders sell on WhatsApp – TechCrunch

Meta invests in Take, a Singaporean startup that helps traders sell on WhatsApp – TechCrunch

August 15, 2022

When a question comes in via email, voice, ticket or chat room, Aysera analyzes it with an algorithm trained to understand language and try to understand it. The platform leverages reference sources such as ServiceNow, Salesforce, Oracle, Confluence and SharePoint to provide customer data to personalize responses to queries. After that step, Aisera creates a list of actions that must be completed to fulfill the request, which it provides to the “workflow management” engine.

Icera can retrieve articles or snippets from the company’s knowledge base that answer a customer’s question. Additionally, it can take certain actions on its own, such as resetting user passwords – that’s where RPA comes in – or request it for the relevant team. For difficult problems, Aisera can also provide teams with “next-best-step” recommendations, improving with each additional data point.

“Our technology helps companies improve their business results while limiting costs associated with help and service desk support, customer service and support. [more]” Sudhakar added. “Aisera provides solutions for IT, HR, cybersecurity, customer service, sales, marketing, legal and finance departments for both large and small organizations in the business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets.”

Aysera claims to do a lot. Unfortunately, without access to internal data, it’s hard to know how well the product will perform in practice. The platform supposedly knows more than 70 languages, but does it understand all those languages ​​well? What happens when Icera makes a mistake solving queries (for example, fetching the wrong support text)? It is vague; We’ve reached out to the company for more information.

If we take a step back to examine the larger industry, it’s clear that there is a huge demand for AI technologies for customer service. In the year A 2021 survey from ManageEngine (Zoho’s IT division) found that 59% of executives in the US are implementing AI – such as through chatbots – to enhance customer service in some way. Realistic or not, AI is seen by many as a path to greater efficiency (ie, handling more customer requests with fewer resources) and more personalization (ie, disincentives).

Conspiracy

Image Credits: Conspiracy

It’s No Panacea – Findings are mixed on whether customers prefer even basic chatbots to human agents. But the buzz around AI has led to the rise of startups like Lang.AI, which automatically tags customer conversations to solve service issues. Last year, Zendesk acquired Cleverly, whose product platform offers a series of AI-powered capabilities, including automatically tagging requests for revenue services to assign workflows. There’s also Ultimate.ai, a data-ingesting, bot-building platform; Ushur, which provides services for businesses to create AI-based communication flows; and Tidio, a collection of live chat apps and AI-powered chatbots.

Competition aside, Sudhakar believes that Icera, with more than 100 customers and nearly 80 million users, has good room for growth. Current subscribers include companies such as Zoom, Chegg, McAfee and Autodesk, as well as federal, state, military and defense agencies.

“We’re in a somewhat recession-proof industry where our cloud-native and AI-native technology can handle budgets better than others. AI and automation are key pillars to beat inflation,” Sudhakar said. Up to 300% – between 80% and 90% total profit. . . . As the tech industry faces uncertainty and some economic headwinds, Acer’s business is booming.

So far, Icera, which employs about 250 people, has raised $180 million in capital.



Source link

Previous Post

Closures planned from Van Wyck Expressway (I-678) to Belt Parkway – QNS.com

Next Post

Slingshot acquires Numerica’s space tracking business and UK spatial data firm Seradata

Next Post
Slingshot acquires Numerica’s space tracking business and UK spatial data firm Seradata

Slingshot acquires Numerica's space tracking business and UK spatial data firm Seradata

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

19 − eight =

RECOMMENDED NEWS

Seeking your thoughts on a recent story about a mental health crisis: Letter from the Editor

Seeking your thoughts on a recent story about a mental health crisis: Letter from the Editor

2 days ago
From Grace to Physique to Zanada, Olivia’s fashion legacy lives on

From Grace to Physique to Zanada, Olivia’s fashion legacy lives on

6 days ago
Fashion Police Team Review |  TechRaptor

Fashion Police Team Review | TechRaptor

2 days ago
Fashion designer Zac Posen is engaged to ballet dancer Harrison Ball

Fashion designer Zac Posen is engaged to ballet dancer Harrison Ball

5 days ago

FOLLOW US

  • 86.7k Followers

BROWSE BY CATEGORIES

  • Business
  • Fashion
  • Health
  • Startup Stories
  • Technology
  • Travel
  • Uncategorized

BROWSE BY TOPICS

2018 League Anurag Mehta Balinese Culture Bali United Budget Travel Champions League Chopper Bike Doctor Terawan Istana Negara Madhuri Madan Market Stories National Exam Nita mehta Subhi Bhatra Visit Bali

POPULAR NEWS

  • The coolest coat of Berlin Fashion Week?  Sneaker pool

    The coolest coat of Berlin Fashion Week? Sneaker pool

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • 2022 Trip Advisor Sales Already Hit All-Time Highs

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • The individual business owner pleads guilty to tax evasion USAO-WDMO

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Do North Coworking announces the inaugural cohort for the Forest Products Accelerator

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Acera spends $90M to automate customer service inquiries with AI – TechCrunch

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Careers
  • Contact
WhatsApp +91 980-980-9922

© 2022 .BusinessPress - India's Preminum Business News Portal .BusinessPress.

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Travel
  • Business
  • Health
  • Technology
  • Fashion
  • Startup Stories

© 2022 .BusinessPress - India's Preminum Business News Portal .BusinessPress.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In