AI Taking Over Sales & Customer Support! Interview with Mason Levy @ Swivl

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Alexander Ferguson 0:00
artificial intelligence machine learning, these emerging technologies are changing the way we live, work and do business in the world for the better. How is AI actually being applied in business today though, in this episode of UpTech Report, I interview Mason Levy was swivl, whose aim is to simplify AI training by turning customer data into machine learning ready models, where as they call it, a human in the loop AI concepts. Mason, thank you so much for joining me, man.

Mason Levy 0:31
Thanks for having me again.

Alexander Ferguson 0:33
You got it? Yeah. So in 30 seconds, define how does your product help a business and who can best utilize it right now?

Mason Levy 0:42
Yeah, ultimately, we typically sell into customer success teams, and help automate the customer interactions through natural language understanding. So, you know, chat bots and voice bots on the phone.

Alexander Ferguson 0:54
And as far as the best type of people out there, how they start pulling in what’s a good use case for them of immediately like, you often suggest, this is the first thing that really can help them with. Yeah, I

Mason Levy 1:05
mean, I think onboarding onto a SASS platform, or E commerce product recommendations, we’re really good at those. And those are really great starting points to get started for us. It allows somebody to get their hands dirty with something that immediately provides value. And then, you know, we can kind of branch off into other avenues of automation with that business, as they kind of learned the system a little bit better.

Alexander Ferguson 1:27
How would you say is your product is is different from other ones in the market.

Mason Levy 1:32
I think our core competency is really in the feedback loop. So you know, a lot of the products that are out on the market, allow for a model to be built, or for you to start to interact with their customers, but they’re not learning they’re not getting smarter. And so we’ve kind of really doubled and tripled down on that feedback loop. So you know, when the model is incompetent, escalate to a human, learn from that human to human interaction, and ultimately see the success of that model continue to increase over time.

Alexander Ferguson 1:57
Technology’s awesome when it works. And when it doesn’t, then people like, This is annoying, stupid machine. And that’s I find interesting that the human in the loop concept can help kind of carry over and carry that a bit more. But let’s let’s talk more about the actual technology behind your platform. How are you utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning and other technologies?

Mason Levy 2:19
Yes, I mean, ultimately, we sit on top of natural language understanding models in order to, you know, determine intents within the user examples or utterances as as you might want to call them as well as entities and then routing them properly to, you know, automate the response the business process, or escalate to the appropriate team. So in some cases, we’re not actually automating a response, or just actually identifying the intent and figuring out should this go to the finance department? Or should it go to the customer success team,

Alexander Ferguson 2:50
those who are trying to actually build than their own product and stuff out there using natural language processing and other things, any suggestions you would give to them on issues, they may run into choosing or creating their own bass? For type of technology?

Mason Levy 3:05
Yeah, I mean, I think the hardest part is getting started, I think a lot of entrepreneurs, especially in the natural language, area, will spend a lot of time you know, building and the best way to get feedback is put it out there and get live action, and then have some system that allows for that feedback loop to be closed. Again, something like swivel really helps with that, we can plug in to a lot of different channels, whether that be slack, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, Skype, etc. And I think like the biggest hurdle is like, don’t be scared to put it out in the world and let somebody give you some feedback there.

Alexander Ferguson 3:40
How many companies you guys helping right now with your product?

Mason Levy 3:44
We have 32 customers on the platform, everything from you know, a three person team up to 100 people within a single large enterprise using it. So we’re really excited about where we’re at right now.

Alexander Ferguson 3:56
Where do you see yourself in five years or swivels gonna be?

Mason Levy 4:01
Yeah, we really look for that Uber isation of data labeling, right. And so I would love to walk into a coffee shop for a meeting and see somebody sitting down waiting for somebody else to meet with them, using this mobile application to labelled data for some large enterprise down the road. What kind

Alexander Ferguson 4:17
of hurdles then do you see in order to get to that point that you got to overcome and work through?

Mason Levy 4:23
Yeah, I mean, I think any startup has 1000 hurdles, you know, we’re actively finding product market fit right now. And so, you know, some of the biggest things that we talk about internally is, you know, how do you sell a product that is pretty complicated. You need to have buy in from multiple organizational units, whether that be a customer success, or sales and marketing team, as well as the technical team, that’s going to be the ones that are helping implement. And so those are some of the headaches that we think about, you know, obviously startups I always like to say the best entrepreneurs know how to let fires burn. There’s more fires than any of us could put out in one day. and some of them will just have to sit there and let burn for a little while.

Alexander Ferguson 5:04
So how are you always staying on top and keep innovating as obviously the the marketplace is changing, and people are adapting with competition, but your customers, how are you constantly innovating?

Mason Levy 5:16
Yeah, I think, you know, going back to the kind of what our core competency is, is about the feedback loop, we’re always looking for feedback. You know, very critical feedback is great, how can we get better? Where did we fail? And then, you know, we do a lot of, we spend a lot of time researching what’s on the market, talking to people at the large corporations like Microsoft and Amazon and Google about what they’re up to, and how we could partner with them to be successful. And so, you know, constantly learning and being educated about what’s happening, and talking to people that are, you know, innovating in similar regions and kind of looking at, you know, what’s happening in autonomous driving, and where that piece of the market is going so that we can take bits and pieces of it and say, hey, look, that hasn’t really been applied to this unstructured type of data yet. So how do we apply that?

Alexander Ferguson 6:02
So if somebody wanted to come and work with you, of varying size of company, what are they looking at, then expense wise to be able to utilize your your platform?

Mason Levy 6:11
Yeah, the beauty of our system is that you can get started for free. We offer free live chat, this allows for the data to come in and be in our training queue. As soon as you want to turn on the training. Our first labs model starts at about $250. And then as we scale with the volume, as well as the number of seats, you know, our enterprise models start around $5,000 a month. So we really have a price point that fits about just about everybody’s needs.

Alexander Ferguson 6:36
Awesome. Thank you again for joining us today for For more information, where can people go and what’s kind of the next step that you would recommend that they take?

Mason Levy 6:43
Look at us at a tricycle COMM As I kind of mentioned, you can go in and sign up for live chat to kind of get into the tool and look at it or reach out to me at mason@trisul.com Happy to do a full demo, show you some of the use cases that have been successful and the ROI that our customers are already seeing using the product. Look forward to chatting with anybody that’s interested.

Alexander Ferguson 7:02
Awesome, thanks. Appreciate it. Of

Mason Levy 7:06
course have a good one man.

Alexander Ferguson 7:07
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