Data-driven creative for sensitive verticals

With big privacy changes, creative has become even more important with verticals like health and wellness and finance. Learn how to make data the backbone of your campaigns.

Conversational AI platform provider Yellow.ai today announced the close of an over $78.15 million series C round led by WestBridge Capital with participation from Sapphire Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, bringing the company’s total funding to more than $102.15 million. Yellow.ai says it will use the funds to build on its existing technology and establish a presence in the U.S., adding 70 employees to its workforce of over 500.

With digitalization on the rise, customer experience has become a major competitive advantage for companies. There’s been a corresponding rise in the adoption of virtual agents as organizations look to more effectively handle greater call volumes with existing teams. According to analysts, some enterprises that embraced chatbots for customer service next deployed them internally, not only to automate customer interactions but to flag HR problems and potential sales opportunities.

Yellow.ai CEO Raghu Ravinutala grew up in South India and worked his way up as an engineer for tech companies that include Broadcom and Texas Instruments. In 2015, he cofounded Yellow.ai with Jaya Kishore Reddy, Raghu Kumar, Rashid Khan, and Anik Das. A chance discussion with friends about poor customer experiences became the germ for an idea to create a conversational AI-driven platform.

“Every year, over 400 billion calls are made for customer support globally, and out of those, less than 0.1% have any kind of automation solution implemented,” Ravinutala told VentureBeat via email. “Over the next 10 years, the scope for implementing AI-powered automation solutions across channels is huge, and as a company we aim to capitalize on the opportunity, with a focus on high quality customer experience. Any enterprise that has over 100,000 customers or over 20,000 calls per month coming to their call center can benefit by deploying a voice bot.”

AI-powered conversations

Yellow.ai’s natural language understanding engine, which trains on billions of sales, marketing, and employee engagement conversations each month, leverages intent to guide customers to convert. Using its AI-powered virtual assistants, Yellow.ai says companies can resolve queries in over 100 languages and across more than 35 text and voice channels. The platform tracks trends and analyzes sentiment to help brands understand customer needs, offering resolutions to support user experiences and handing off to live agents when necessary.

“Yellow.ai’s platform allows brands to engage with their customers wherever they are, through conversational virtual assistants … for faster conversions [and] lasting loyalty,” Ravinutala added. “AI can’t replace humans, but automation helps self-serve 70% of queries and seamlessly loop in live agents when needed … it is not just a live agent handover;  it is an active learning loop across bots and humans.”

Yellow.ai claims it already has live deployments for voice bots across over 700 companies (up from 200 pre-pandemic) in telecom, banking, finance, insurance, and governments — including Amazon, Biogen, and Sephora. Revenue is up 4 times compared with last year, with roughly 40% coming from global clients and 60% from customers based in India.

“The pandemic brought unprecedented times for every organizations, and no one was ready for a lockdown and elongated work-from-home scenarios. Enterprises had to quickly adapt to ensure business continuity while minimizing redundancy across geographies, establishments, and teams,” Ravinutala said. “Our growth is driven by continuous product innovation [and the] latest implementations, such as deepening multilingual voice bot capabilities, expanding enterprise integrations, and launching a developer marketplace for virtual assistants. We have been rapidly expanding our footprint across the U.S., Europe, Latin America, Middle East, and Asia-Pacific regions.”

Ravinutala said pizza chain Dominos moved 100% of its customer service to “Dom,” an omnichannel AI assistant Yellow.ai developed for India. Waste Connections, a waste management company in the U.S. and Canada, deployed a Yellow.ai chatbot called Trina during the early stages of the pandemic. And Bajaj Finserv, a bank based in India, used Yellow.ai to turn its insurance division’s customer support into an upselling stream that it said brought in $100 million in three years.

“Yellow.ai has broken out of the crowded virtual assistant market with its automation-first, human-assisted model to deliver a higher customer satisfaction and incremental revenue growth to its enterprise clients,” Ravinutala continued. “With our rapid client and revenue expansion across the world, we’re geared to becoming the global leader in the customer experience automation space and are bullish on building our product, partnerships, teams, and community to truly democratize AI in the near future.”

Yellow.ai, which is based in Bangalore, plans to open a San Francisco, California-based headquarters and regional offices in the coming months.

Data-driven creative for sensitive verticals

With big privacy changes, creative has become even more important with verticals like health and wellness and finance. Learn how to make data the backbone of your campaigns.

Presented by MongoDB

Success in the digital age is predicated on the ability to deliver new  experiences to customers quickly. That’s why companies are rethinking not just the front-end of their company, but every layer beneath as well. They are streamlining their supply chains, optimizing customer feedback loops, maintaining less inventory, and applying metrics and AI/ML to generate operational insight. All in an effort to accelerate.

So when it comes to digital innovation, faster is better. Right? Not so fast.

Forward-thinking business leaders know that the decisions they make today will determine their competitiveness for years or maybe even decades to come. With this relentless push for speed comes the temptation to skip the basics. Cutting corners with security or privacy, locking into proprietary technologies, or accruing massive tech debt have long-term consequences.

Over time, these consequences add up, amounting to an “innovation tax” that must be continually paid in the form of inflexible technology, lost productivity, and slower time to market. And companies that don’t pay attention to this risk losing their best employees — a silent and hard-to-measure tax that nevertheless has killed some of the most innovative products in the market.

But there is a way for business and IT leaders to exercise both fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscles in this race; to think short-term and long-term. At MongoDB, we call it “sustainable speed,” and it starts with ensuring the proper digital foundations are in place. We believe that the cornerstone of your digital foundation is your data — the raw material of innovation in the digital age. In our work with thousands of customers, we’ve identified four pillars of sustainable speed, each of which allows organizations to accelerate innovation without courting long-term disaster.

Multi-cloud agility

Not all clouds are created equal — and neither are data centers. The fact is that each cloud provider can be the “best” cloud provider — albeit to different users, in different situations. While each provider offers a portfolio of services, they aren’t the same in terms of functionality or maturity. Developers should be able to use best-of-breed technologies across clouds — not just for different apps, but for the same application.

Imagine your devs being able to utilize AWS Lambda, Google Cloud’s AI Platform, and Microsoft’s Azure DevOps within a unified console. In addition, despite the energy around cloud, very few of the large companies I speak to are all-in on cloud — some plan to move slowly or even never move fully to the cloud because of regulation, compliance, or even cost at scale. Don’t fall for any kind of mantra about “all-in” on one thing or another — listen to your business units and listen to the developers in them.

Innovation velocity

If applications are the currency of the new economy, then development teams are the market makers. And yet despite the relentless strategic emphasis on speed and innovation in the digital economy, these teams continue to be mismanaged and malnourished inside both large and small companies. To maximize the innovation output of developers, companies must make an effort to understand the fundamental nature of development work, providing the most intuitive and flexible tools on the market, and removing time-consuming, undifferentiated work, like database administration.

Listen to your developers when they talk about wanting to fix the underpinnings of their test, deployment, or monitoring systems. And invest in the daily developer workflows, removing barriers and streamlining the process whenever possible.

Predictability (a.k.a., reliability)

Here is where we start to think about the ability to build quickly, but with confidence. Creating or updating mission-critical applications is always high-stakes work, with inherent risks of losing data or running afoul of regulatory requirements. Executives must feel certain their application development platform will protect the integrity of the customer and business data, handle outages with no significant impact (internally or externally), and scale to meet the ambition of the business.

You build this confidence by regularly asking your leaders and their teams to bring up areas of concern around the layers of what I call “The Onion of Requirements.”

These are:

• Security
• Durability
• Correctness
• Availability
• Scalability
• Operability
• Features
• Performance
• Efficiency

The first six are the ones that, if you get them wrong, can completely trash your business predictability. In most companies, you won’t hear about these things as much as you should; because all executives ever ask about is one layer of the onion: Features. That’s all great until the breach or the outage or the release you have to pull back. Builders build buildings that behave predictably, with thousands of years of best practices behind them. Technology teams should do the same.

Privacy and Compliance

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard things like “we innovate quickly, with no compromises on security, compliance, and safety.” That’s really hard to put into practice. We all know that the only way to be absolutely sure you never have an outage caused by a software deployment is to…not deploy software. The research and my own personal experience shows that more than 65% of outage minutes are caused by bad software deployments.

What happens after an outage? Executives sow the fear of consequences among engineers. But this fear can be a debilitating force in the race toward digital innovation. Think of an athlete with blazing speed, holding back because they are terrified of pulling a hamstring or blowing an ACL. This is the effect that cyber-attacks, privacy concerns, and ever-changing regulatory standards can have on the innovation process.

Security is often seen as a counter-weight to innovation. But the opposite can be true. The more secure the data platform, the more testing, the quicker the cycle time between development and production. And the more confidence a team has in moving quickly, identifying problems early and rolling them back before damage is done. To achieve this, security must be baked in, compliance testing must be mandatory, and continuous integration and delivery must be a priority.

Much of this work should be automated, because, whenever I hear that humans are doing security and compliance testing at a company, I want to take my business somewhere else.

A Fortune 500 CTO once said that technical debt should be shown on the balance sheet so the CFO can see it. Why? Because tech debt comes with costly interest payments and the same morale-crushing impact of personal debt

The same could be said for all innovation taxes: the short-sighted, lift-and-shift strategies, the organizational data silos, the vendor lock-in, and the lack of a rock-solid testing infrastructure.

The companies that focus on both innovation and rigor can manage these long-term impediments. They don’t have to choose between the tortoise and the hare. They can be both.

To learn more about this topic, check out The Foundations of Sustainable Speed white paper.

Mark Porter is CTO of MongoDB.

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