Knowbl is a company that provides every business the ability to quickly create conversational AI solutions that can be deployed across any digital user interface, including but not limited to search, chat, voice, and agent assist. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Knowbl co-founder and CEO Jay Wolcott to learn more about the company.
Jay Wolcott’s Background
Wolcott is an innovative entrepreneur and global business executive. With a proven track record, Wolcott launched Digital Roots in 2009, which is a SaaS company providing advanced social media engagement and insights. Digital Roots saw multinational success, recognized by Inc. 5000 and many other publications. In 2017, Interactions acquired Digital Roots, where Wolcott served as Head of Digital, helping to build out their next-generation platform for omni-channel virtual assistants.
Since then, Wolcott has supported CX transformations as an Independent Consultant, and his past experiences include General Motors and successful entrepreneurial ventures like Seed Staffing and Verego. Wolcott serves on Western Michigan University’s Executive Council and he is a devoted family man based in Southeast Michigan.
Formation Of Knowbl
How did the idea for Knowbl come together? Wolcott shared:
“The co-founders were all veterans of the Enterprise Conversational AI industry. We aligned on similar pain points with a passion for innovating in a new way. We also connected ideas we were seeing in research with Large Language models as an alternative to some of the traditional machine learning approaches being used.”
Favorite Memory
What has been Wolcott’s favorite memory working for the company so far? Wolcott reflected:
“For me its the joy of seeing the first end-user interaction. Seeing a customer get the answer they were looking for is where all the dots get connected for me.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Wolcott explained:
“Knowbl’s product is referred to as BrandGPT. Within our platform, Knowbl focuses on helping brands with virtual brand assistants that provide exceptional customer experiences for customer-facing automation that helps in three key areas: 1. Making money 2. Saving money 3. and ensuring compliance/protection of the brand.”
“From there, our customer-facing automation product is available in two functions: 1.) Chat and 2.) Interactive Voice Responses (IVR), which ultimately serve to carry out 1.) Sales (Conversational Commerce) and 2.) Support (Conversational Care).”
“All from a product that leverages LLMs uniquely for speed, ease, and scalability for simple to complex customer transactions.”
“Features within our platform include:
- Content to Conversation Attribution
- Automated Contextual Management
- Automated Data Labeling
- Contextual Tag Management
- Few Shot Learning
- Slot Entity Extraction
- Internal GenAI Content Development
- Transactional Sequence Builder
Breakdown of Knowbl’s conversational care capabilities: BrandGPT’s Conversational Care is designed to assist customers in real-time, providing support and guidance through natural language interactions. This capability is implemented through advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms, allowing customers to engage in conversations on the brand’s website. NLP ensures an accurate understanding of customer queries, enabling BrandGPT to offer relevant and helpful responses.”
“Breakdown of Knowbl’s conversational commerce capabilities: BrandGPT’s Conversational Commerce facilitates seamless transactions and interactions, allowing customers to make purchases, inquire about inventory, and more within the conversation. Powered by AI and machine learning, Conversational Commerce leverages transactional data, order history, and inventory databases. This enables BrandGPT to guide customers through the buying process and provide personalized product recommendations.”
Challenges Faced
After asking Wolcott about the challenges faced in building the company, he acknowledged:
“Customization demands from different clients have posed bottleneck challenges. Tailoring the platform to meet the unique needs and preferences of each enterprise requires a careful balance between flexibility and scalability. Striking this balance to deliver personalized solutions efficiently has been an ongoing consideration.”
“We’ve also encountered the bottleneck of effectively communicating the value proposition of our platform in a crowded market. Addressing this challenge involves informing our targeted audience about the benefits of Knowbl’s safe and brand-compliant LLM technology vs larger incumbents in the space.”
Evolution Of Knowbl’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Wolcott noted:
“Knowbl’s core competency is research and innovation. Therefore, we have striven to create an infrastructure in which we can leverage the technology that best suits what we are aiming to do- which is building better experiences.”
“Our overarching goal is to empower businesses to scale beyond the ‘common use cases,’ facilitating seamless transactional experiences for customers. Knowbl leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) and patented technology called Few Shot Learning at the core of our BrandGPT platform. This advanced technology plays a pivotal role in training our models, enabling them to understand and respond to user queries with unparalleled accuracy and contextual awareness.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Wolcott cited:
“Very early on in the company, we received strong interest from outside investors, and we successfully raised our first round. From there, we saw success with Beta clients, and now the onslaught of commercial traction in our target market.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Wolcott about customer success stories, he cited:
“Knowbl’s BrandGPT has found itself in four major verticals with active customer use cases driving material improvements and benefits. For example:
– RIA Wealth Management – pilot generated 10x return and reduced their lead capture to an advisor from 2 hours to 4 minutes.
– Leading automotive company – launched 381 product web support intents in less than two months with less than four members of their technical team
– Fortune 50 insurance company – increased site engagement by 1.5x and outperformed prior chat servicing by 80%
– Credit card servicing company – launching four different web concierges in 3 months w/3 additional projects in backlog
– Largest home retailer – successfully serving 93% of customer inquiries for product returns and product availability via IVR”
Funding
After asking Wolcott about funding information, he revealed:
“Knowbl currently has investor backing from Boston-based Vestigo Ventures.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Knowbl from its competition? Wolcott affirmed:
“Our conversations with our prospects start with ‘What content do you have for your business,’ which is answered with, here is our website content, proprietary process documentation, agent training manuals, content roadmaps, and internal knowledge bases.”
“Starting with content is a fundamental shift from the traditional and monolithic approaches of the past where incumbent providers tend to start with ‘What intents do you want to automate.’”
“Knowbl’s BrandGPT product and patents for contextual awareness management, few-shot learning, and entity extraction make working with content easier, requiring significantly less manpower and resources, as well as lowering the level and amount of training data, tag management, and conversation labeling which speeds implementations timelines by 4x.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Wolcott concluded:
“Over the next 1-3 years, Knowbl envisions a transformative landscape where AI-powered branded assistants become ubiquitous, fundamentally altering the way individuals interact with their favorite brands. Our overarching goal is to empower businesses to scale beyond the ‘common use cases, facilitating seamless transactional experiences for customers.”
“Knowbl leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) and patented technology, called Few Shot Learning, at the core of our BrandGPT platform. As we look to the future, our vision involves further harnessing the potential of LLMs and Generative AI to continuously improve the quality of customer-agent interactions.”
“We anticipate refining and expanding our use of AI technologies in upcoming releases to enhance the natural language understanding, response generation, and overall user experience within the CI suite. By leveraging AI technologies, we strive to not only meet but exceed customer expectations, providing innovative solutions that drive customer engagement, loyalty, and ultimately, business success.”
“Our long-term vision is rooted in having the machine do more of the hard work so business leaders can focus on caring for their customers and employees. We envision an automated team of developers, conversational designers, business analysts, and quality assurance all within the BrandGPT platform so brands can finally achieve the self-service automation rates, and material business savings promised over the last 15 years of AI and conversational AI. By founding Knowbl’s BrandGPT platform on an LLM versus a rules-based, if/then system, we believe our future is bright and brands will deliver the exceptional experiences their paying customers or employees have been demanding.”
