Steve Hsu

One of the lessons that people don't understand, like the real pain that startups have to go through isn't just inventing the technology.

It's actually diffusing the technology and getting customers to understand how it works, to adapt their workflow to it, to buy it, make a bet because you're taking some risk to let some guy come in and say, hey, my black box AI is going to replace those hundred people over there in the field grind that are in the call center.

So it's just slower than what people think.

I've been in many, many meetings now where in the room are usually it's managers, more senior people at a company, maybe a company that does BPO work or a company that hires outsourced BPO providers.

But people who are familiar with the customer service problem and have maybe even worked, some of these people have worked their way up.

So they have worked in a call center themselves or they spend time in call centers all the time.

And what's amazing is how big their eyes get when, you know, we might show them a video demo, which is a recording of maybe me or somebody else talking to one of the AIs.

And okay, that's impressive enough.

But then like some of them are a little more suspicious.

So like, well, let me talk to the AI.

Can I talk to your AI?

And I'm like, sure.

And I turn my laptop around and, you know, hit a button and they can talk to the AI.

And

When they realize that the AI is actually under, you know, quote, understands what they want and can make changes in the system, generate a return label, you know, can do lots of things that we've, you know, functionality that we've equipped it with.

It's kind of shocking because you see the wheels turning in their head and they say, wait, I employ a thousand people who do mostly this.

Like, surely there are some corner cases where you really want the AI to pass it off to a human.

But 90% of the labor that those thousand people do is being done by this AI.

And if I choose to power it with DeepSeek or something now, I can do it for, you know, we used to think in terms of one-tenth the cost per hour of labor versus the human.

But you could go down another order of magnitude.