AI Productization Profile - Branded, Secure and Accessible Chatbots
Dustin Dye, CEO and CoFounder Botcopy

AI Productization Profile - Branded, Secure and Accessible Chatbots

Personal background

Dustin Dye was previously cofounder of a startup incubator in Santa Monica (Expert Dojo) and advised fledgling tech companies on everything from product to sales to marketing. One in particular, a chatbot company founded by 3 techies called Swelly, Dustin helped to dramatically boost their engagement with a personality-filled chatbot script that matched the Swelly brand, a cute cartoon whale. That's when the idea hit him, Dustin realized that bot designers desperately needed help in creating personality branded and engaging messaging – a facet of the bot UX that programmers did not emphasize enough at the time. So he partnered with Rob Lubow, a seasoned copywriter who frequently consulted on writing at Expert Dojo, and Alexander Seegers, a tech-oriented product manager with a background in UI/UX. Botcopy – the chatbot agency – was born. But the goal wasn't to be an agency forever. The plan was to self-fund with design services, learn everything they could about enterprise conversational AI, and eventually pivot to a full lifecycle chatbot SaaS company that addressed all the customer pain points. All three partners loved AI and envisioned a near future where chatbots would overcome their clunky limitations and be able to create delightful user experiences instead.

Company and Product Overview

A big part of the emphasis at Expert Dojo's entrepreneurial training is a focus on sales and revenue instead of only fundraising. The team took that principle to heart with Botcopy and quickly had more than a hundred happy clients with updated chatbot copy. However, during that process, they noticed some popular bot-building platforms, while easy to use for the end-users, was almost impossible to design fluid, non-linear, humanlike experiences. So they researched all the available chatbot platforms and found Google Dialogflow – a sophisticated conversational AI framework that, when used correctly, made almost any experience possible. Moreover, the team found it far superior in dialog design capabilities to Amazon and Microsoft's competing frameworks.?

But one thing was missing: Dialogflow did not have an easy way to add rich-content Dialogflow agents to websites – something that Botcopy knew first-hand that their clients wanted and needed. So Botcopy decided to solve the problem end-to-end and pivoted from being a chatbot design agency and consultancy to a SaaS company. Botcopy is now a B2B conversational AI SaaS product that allows teams to create, host, and maintain website chatbots. They leverage Google Cloud Dialogflow to design the backend functionality and Botcopy for the front-end UI chat layer. This BYOC (bring your own cloud) approach was a new way to offer the best of both worlds: Google's intelligent AI technology combined with Botcopy's laser focus on the web chat UI layer.?

With the pivot, Botcopy had a hundred clients on day one and was profitable in the first month. Then, the MVP launched with a live demo as the official chatbot at the annual Chatbot Conference in San Francisco, only five months after deciding to pivot. It was a sleepless night for the Botcopy team, cutting it so close to the conference to get the new implementation working for all the conference attendees. Luckily the stars aligned that day, the demo was successful, and Botcopy officially pivoted from a design agency to a SaaS product and Google Cloud Partner.?

Industry

SaaS - Customer Service?

Technology

Conversational AI

Opportunity

Chatbots have been around since the late 1990s, but the experience was infamously lacking for decades. The promise of answering all the frequent questions with a friendly chat was rife with limitations and unmet expectations. As a result, users often overestimated what the bot could do and were let down. Moreover, the writing was often dry and dull, leading to low engagement rates and a shoddy brand feel. Giving these bots some branded personality was step one in making bots better. Having clear, concise, and entertaining messaging boosted engagement rates. But that was just the beginning.?

The much more significant value-add is to make all the online services fully accessible to end users regardless of their physical abilities. Imagine visually impaired users, hearing impaired, or mobility impaired users no longer needing to tab around endless website elements, but can simply ask for what they need done in a natural conversation with a personable and engaging chatbot. The Botcopy team envisions such a product changing the world of customer experiences, helping with everything from getting helpdesk questions answered instantly, to accessing driver license info, to filing taxes without filling out cumbersome online forms, and so much more. The possibilities are endless. Best of all, the Botcopy and Dialogflow stack would represent an affordable and accessible way for innovative AI teams to streamline operations, collect oceans of valuable data, and offer the best customer service experience to their end users.

Challenges

Messaging

Like many innovation technology companies, explaining to non-technical buyers and stakeholders the concept of conversational AI, the value of Botcopy, and persuading them to learn to use Dialogflow, is always a challenge. For this reason, Dustin would often pause for a GTO, or what he calls a "Grandma Time-Out," explaining how things work in a way that's so simple even your grandma can understand it. Botcopy routinely publishes blog posts and conducts workshops that demystifies what is AI, how does it work, and why it is essential. While the discussion of AI creates excitement for businesses and executives and makes things easier for end users, it can also trigger the question if this technology will put people out of jobs. The key is not only emphasizing the improved customer service for end users, but also the improved customer service agent experience. With their mind-numbing repetitive tasks removed, the service agents are now freed to handle only the more nuanced and complex requests. The combined benefit of better end user experience, better service agent experience, and more efficient business operations is the focus of the category education that helps companies commit to the value of Botcopy.

Integrating Generative AI

Chatbots are the dominant implementation of conversational AI and are poised to integrate generative AI capabilities soon to make existing user experiences exponentially more humanlike and flexible. Botcopy is riding the wave by offering a safe, secure, ADA-compliant way to bring world-changing LLM technology to the front-end UX for government and enterprise clients. Botcopy serves enterprise and public sector accounts without room for wrong information or security breaches. Unlike Microsoft's hasty ChatGPT integration with Bing, Google takes a more deliberate and measured approach, rolling out these generative AI products only after adequately vetting them. Google knows that clumsy, inaccurate messaging or reputational risks are not an option. This conservative approach reinforces to Botcopy that they chose their partner wisely. Botcopy enjoys daily conversations with the Google AI team, discussing their needs and concerns to implement generative AI for the proper use case into their products.?

While the world is having fun generating raps and essays on ChatGPT, businesses want their chatbots to focus more on the products, services, and information unique to that particular company or government agency. So the challenge for the Botcopy team is to help their users leverage generative AI to focus only on relevant topics and respond with the appropriate rich content across text, images, audio, video, forms, web views, and more, all in a way that matches the company's brand, style, and tone guidelines.?

Success

It's unusual to meet a SaaS company that had a hundred clients on day one, is profitable after one month, and has worked with 20,000 companies only four years after launch. Clients include industry-leading corporations like Century21, Riot Games, and Roche. Earning revenue as a service agency to fund the SaaS launch worked well for Botcopy. Moreover, the early laser focus on a specific niche – the web chat UI for a leading framework like Dialogflow has given Botcopy years of deep experience in a paradigm that's finally spreading to a majority market.?

As Botcopy expands, they remain singularly focused on enhancing user experience capabilities. Most recently, they added Live Chat to integrate the human component with the AI chatbot. This fully-integrated live chat suite allows businesses to get up and running immediately with existing agents while the AI trains on internal data. It also adds a continuous feedback loop to improve the AI based on ongoing live agent conversations. Additionally, Botcopy meets the unusually high ADA 2.1 AA standards – fulfilling current requirements for governments and enterprise businesses.?

Key Learning

While I took away many critical learnings from the Botcopy story, two stand out. One, startups can be profitable without early investment capital if they provide valuable services out of the gates, find product market fit, and establish clear differentiation. And two, generative AI, with all its current hype, becomes far more valuable if provided in a predictable, accurate, and secure way to meet specific use cases where failure and misinformation aren't an option. When we can achieve this reliably at the enterprise and government levels, then the floodgates will open for LLM’s to transform how business is done and make life easier for everyone.

Additional Articles in the Series

Wellness – Touchless Vitals Sensing

Marketing – Real-time Competitive Brand Intelligence

Education – Multimodal AI at ETS AI Labs

Agriculture 4.0 – Plan Level Intelligence

Gaming - Human Behavior Modeling

Content Platform - Generative AI for Creatives

Financial Services - Automated Investing for Everyone

Gaming - AI Experimentation & ML Live Ops

Photography - AI Generated Headshots

Mirna Daouk

Founder and CEO @ Picoast AI | CFO | QFE with Strategy, Transformation and Risk Management Expertise | Board Member | Investor | Financial Services, FinTech, EdTech, B2C, B2B, global | Ex PayNearMe, JPM, McKinsey

1 年

“generative AI, with all its current hype, becomes far more valuable if provided in a predictable, accurate, and secure way to meet specific use cases where failure and misinformation aren't an option. When we can achieve this reliably at the enterprise and government levels, then the floodgates will open for LLM’s to transform how business is done and make life easier for everyone.” Couldn’t agree more!

Uma Parvathy

Senior Digital Transformation & B2B Growth Executive | Partner / Global Managing Director | Data / Analytics / Generative AI / AI Strategy | Digital Transformation | TMT (Technology, Media, Telecom) Industry

1 年

Thanks for sharing! Interesting read!

Mamta Valderrama

Ready for my next senior operations role | Startups and SMB | CHIEF | Best Selling Author | Collector of Chocolate Bars from Around the World

1 年

Thanks for sharing, Yuying!

Irina Koroleva, PhD

Drug Development Executive + Advisor | Chief Development Officer | Chief Scientific Officer | Biotech | Pharma | Clinical Development | Biomarkers | Translational Medicine | Founding Member of CHIEF

1 年

Thank you for sharing Yuying Chen-Wynn.

Sasha Wallinger

CEO, Chief Marketing Officer | Innovation &Entrepreneurial Strategist| Founder| Board Member I Global Business Growth Expert connecting fashion, technology and sustainability.

1 年

As always adore your POV Yuying Chen-Wynn thank you for separating the real from the hype, super important.

回复

要查看或添加评论,请登录

Yuying Chen-Wynn的更多文章

社区洞察

其他会员也浏览了