Freddy takes center stage as Freshworks makes its generative AI pitch

Girish Mathrubootham

Freshworks CEO Girish Mathrubootham took to the stage at the firm’s Developer Summit in Bengaluru, India last week, but the star of the show was Freddy.

Who’s Freddy? Freddy is an AI bot which debuted in 2018, but is now threaded through a series of generative AI offerings from the company, including:

• Freddy Copilot, a tool to streamline workflows by using conversational prompts, currently in use by 390 beta customers.
• Freddy Self-Service, to drive personalized automation via the Freshworks platform and a Large Language Model.
• Freddy Insights, to automate analysis of daily productivity and provide recommendations to drive greater business impact.

Mathrubootham was keen to emphasize Freshworks’ track record with AI and Freddy:

Generative AI in its current form is really a pivotal disruptive moment in the history of technology. It is not a buzzword.  AI is just not a buzzword anymore. It actually represents human ingenuity. It shows us how we can use technology to solve anything from mundane problems to really solving grand challenges for humanity.

We embarked on our AI journey five years ago when we launched our Freddy AI. We have been using AI to solve specific problems, like helping chatbots answer customer queries or helping salespeople identify which are the best leads to focus on today. and so on and so forth. We have tonnes of features in AI even before ChatGPT. Some of these features were actually built using earlier versions of GPT.

But it was the ChatGPT demo that everyone saw back in March that has changed everything, he argued:

It transforms everything. Generative AI supercharges everything that you've seen before. And now we finally have technology that can learn, reason, and perform tasks without being explicitly programmed for those specific tasks. That's big.

Customer service

Mathrubootham said he’d asked Chat GPT to provide a list of industries and job roles that will be disrupted by generative AI and customer service/support unsurprisingly was top of the list. The task for Freshworks, he argued, is to take the potential benefits to its ‘Fortune 5 Million’ target customer base:

We all know that customer service leaders like automation, so it was going to be the natural first place for any new technology in AI to focus on.

But there’s still a lot of concern among customer service personnel about the potential impact on jobs, Mathrubootham conceded:

History has taught us a lot of valuable lessons. Take every major technology disruption from the past, be it automobiles disrupting horse carriages and blacksmiths, or introducing tractors in the farm or robots in the factory, or the introduction of the personal computer, or even modern e-commerce - we all know we have lived through these technology disruptions.

We all know that when a major technology disruption like this happens, it is going to create short term job loss in the industry. But it's also important to remember and understand that it opens up a whole new lot of new industries and new opportunities. It makes life better for all of us.  Our lives have become better with all the technology innovations that have happened. and that makes people more productive.

We believe that generative AI is not going to be any different. It is going to make our lives better. We are going to be able to use ChatGPT and Gen AI and so many other tools that are going to come, to not focus on all the mundane tasks that we have to do now, and move on to more productive stuff.

Different leaders throughout an organization will have different questions to ask about their use of AI, he advised:

If you're a customer service leader, you have to ask, can generative AI help me deliver even more automation than what I'm getting currently with IVR or chat bots or self-service portals? How can I drive more efficiency, but without compromising customer experience? As a customer service leader, you're also thinking about, how can I ramp my agents quickly and how can I help them? Can I use an AI to give them all the context that they need to solve the customer problem?

As an IT leader, you have to ask how can you leverage AI to deliver modern employee experiences, especially in the remote workforce where people are working from home and office? Can I use generative AI to modernize the employee experience? If you're a go-to-market leader in sales and marketing, can you use generative AI to grow even faster? Can you get more revenue?  Can you get more growth?

Freddy 

The new Freddy applications will change the way organizations approach particular tasks, argued Mathrubootham, beginning with Freddy Copilots ability to provide customer context and collaboration:

We've all been customers. Think of all the times when we have to repeat ourselves when going from one channel to another. You're talking to a bot and then you're talking to a human being and you're asked the same question. You identify who you are, give your email address 20 times, and then talk about the problem. Customers hate when they have to repeat the problem again and again.

As for Freddy Insights, he said:

Imagine a past world where a leader has to wait four weeks for the data analytics team to compile all the data and then come back to them. Freddy Insights is constantly monitoring all the key performance metrics and giving them real time actions on areas to improve.

Once you have the insight, you can conversationally ask Freddy Copilot to create the bot flow and deploy the bot...Being able to do it conversationally is the new AI-first experience. The fact that you don't have to have an admin who's clicking through 100 different steps to create the bot flow. that's game changing.

AI will also revolutionize sales and marketing, predicted Mathrubootham, noting that, as founder of Freshworks, he was also its first marketer:

Imagine with Freddy Copilot, any marketer or a start-up founder like me, can actually send the right message to the right audience at the right time on the right channel - and all of this with a few conversational prompts.

As for sales:

A lot of time is wasted for every seller in terms of doing all the admin work,  like finding the right prospects to contact,  drafting  emails and and setting up meetings and follow-up tasks. Having a co-pilot like Freddy would let them actually spend more time on what they do best, which is selling. That is going to be something that every salesperson I know would appreciate, because nobody loves filling in those forms.

My take

A convincing thesis on the potential of generative AI for customer service.