Serendipitously, Chandrasekaran chanced to meet a pair of brilliant technologists with decades of call center experience, Tod Famous and Slava Zhakov, who shared the same vision. Even better, they had already written a working prototype. They didn’t think their own industry would wake up before it was too late. Crescendo was born.
AI that works with humans
Crescendo’s novel approach of using AI with humans still in the loop also addresses two elephants in the industry’s room. The first is deflection, which is a polite way of describing how hard companies make it for customers to even find out how to contact a company before getting shunted into the FAQ and phone tree wilderness. Then there is churn. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the industry’s jobs are pretty boring, leading to stratospheric employee churn rates of up to 50% a year.
Crescendo’s approach to AI seems smart. Instead of throwing hundreds of millions of massive clusters of GPUs and competing with OpenAI, Google, Meta, etc., for the latest PhD graduates in AI from MIT, they’ve put humans in charge. For Crescendo, AI doesn’t displace humans, it complements them. At the same time, Crescendo’s proprietary AI application can still benefit from tapping into the world’s largest LLMs and even the private knowledge bases of their customers to answer the vast majority of client questions. Best of all, customers claim they can go into production with Crescendo in just two to four weeks, and after the first month, AI is handling more than 90% of the queries automatically and accurately. To date they have yet to experience a single hallucination and there has been zero customer downtime.