Farewell, Chatbots: AI Agents Are Taking Over Customer Service | Mike Murchison, CEO, Ada
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Why is customer service a perfect use case for AI?
Welcome back to the Matt Podcast. Today we dive into the future of AI powered customer service with Mike Murchison, the CEO of Ada. Customer service has long been a proving ground for AI, but with the rise of generative AI models, the space is experiencing a dramatic acceleration from the clunky chatbots that we all experienced not so long ago to highly capable AI agents today. When they started the company, Ada's Founders took an unusual approach. They worked as real customer service agents, manually answering thousands of tickets to deeply understand the field. Fast forward to today, ADA has powered over 5 billion customer service interactions, raised over 190 million in venture capital, and its AI agents resolve up to 83% of conversations autonomously.
In this episode, we unpack what makes AI and customer service unique.
The quality of customer service that's delivered around the world today continues to be abysmally poor. We now have AI that is capable of powering not only as good of experience for less money, but far better experience for less money. But as you scale your customer contact, you no longer have to choose between quality and scale.
Will AI become the primary interface between companies and customers?
While most people have still had mostly negative experience with chappas, there are increasingly people who have had some unbelievable experiences with AI. They are increasingly hoping that they can speak to an AI on the phone, over SMS, over email. And that is the experience that's gonna become the norm that will switch.
And where is this all heading? We are gonna raise the bar for
ourselves. What I'm very excited about is ADA's ability to collaborate with other agents. ADA will be able to go from customer inquiry to new product being shipped fully autonomously.
Enjoy this great conversation with Mike from ADA.
Hey
Mike, welcome.
Thanks, Matt. Great to talk to you.
Thanks for doing this. Um I'm I'm excited to talk about AI for customer service because uh it's one of the historical spaces for applied AI. Uh and in a world where there's uh a tremendous amount of uh demos on Twitter slash X uh of AI agents and all the things that uh you know look cool but may or may not be deployed in production at scale, customer service is actually one of those rare areas where this history of deploying AI and the space looks super vibrant. If nothing else, there seem to be more companies getting created, uh entering the space in addition to companies that um have been around for for a bit. So why maybe to start from the top, why do you think that is? What what does customer service uh seem to be such a ripe area for AI?
Well, I I think it's simply because The quality of customer service that's delivered around the world today continues to be abysmally poor. Like the average American will spend 40 days of their life waiting on hold. We all have a very visceral experience, probably in the last seven days of a negative customer experience we've had with the business. And businesses expend an incredible amount of money delivering what is fundamentally a poor customer service experience. The globally, every year. $500 billion is invested in human-led customer service operations around the world. And so it's a bad experience that's incredibly capital inefficient. And finally, uh, we now have AI that is capable of powering not only as good of experience for less money, but far better experience for less money.
So I think those three factors make it a logical entry point for generative AI in the enterprise.
And uh w one uh particularly interesting uh part of the discussion around AI for customer service in the last year or two is that there was this moment in time when it seemed that uh foundation models were going to completely kill that area. Uh and there were you know, there was a lot of chatter again on on on Twitter slash X about uh, you know, why would you need any uh kind of like AI chatbot company uh in a world where You can just like use Cloud or or GBT. And then that seemed to be corroborate corroborated by uh Klarna.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why is customer service a perfect use case for AI?
0:00–8:27
2
Why didn’t foundation models replace thin‑wrapper chatbots out of the box?
8:27–16:39
3
What is Ada and how does it automate up to 83 % of interactions?
16:39–25:34
4
How does Ada’s reasoning engine orchestrate multiple models to resolve inquiries?
25:34–33:20
5
What are hybrid AI agents and how do they enable multi‑channel support?
33:20–41:31
6
How does Ada ensure safe, ethical responses with guardrails and security?
41:31–49:33
7
How does Ada measure resolution and use analytics to improve CX?
49:33–57:19
8
What does the future hold for AI agents collaborating across departments?
57:19–1:11:26
Speakers
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