The Neuron: AI Explained
Can AI Improve Customer Service Without Killing Jobs? Crescendo Thinks So
20 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
There is a term in CX called deflection and containment. Most bot companies are talking about containment as if consumers are some kind of virus that you can't let near your organization. If I am allowed to speak to a human, then I know that that's a costly resource for you and you're really going out of your way to make that connection with me.
Whether it's handled by the AI or the human, we only get paid when we solve that outcome and we never charge a customer if it was a negative customer experience because we can do that now. To make AI work and automation work, being incredibly flexible about where you inject people and then continually evolving that is a valuable service.
Innovation in customer care is going to become as important as innovation in product. Bigger than anything since maybe the introduction of the telephone.
What if your customer service team could handle 90% of tickets automatically with 99.8% accuracy and still feel human? Today, we're talking to the guy building exactly that. Welcome, humans, to the latest episode of The Neuron Podcast. I'm Grant Harvey, writer of The Neuron Newsletter, and today I'm talking to Matt Price, CEO of Crescendo AI.
Matt spent over 13 years at Zendesk helping build one of the biggest names in customer service software, and now he's betting that AI plus humans together will beat AI alone. I like that concept, so I'm excited to chat with him about how he's doing exactly that. Matt, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Grant. Great to be here.
Awesome. So Matt, I want to start with the macro context to kind of set the stage. We often hear that customer service and coding are probably the two biggest jobs, most in the crosshairs of AI automation, right? And coding has seen incredible gains over the past year. So I'm curious, what about customer service? You started Crescendo back in 2024 after you left Zendex Labs.
So how has the tech progressed since you started Crescendo and where would you say we are now?
Without doubt, the introduction of LLMs is just such a major shift in customer care and the ability to do customer care. Bigger than anything since maybe the introduction of the telephone, where people can communicate with businesses. And there's been lots of incremental steps before then, but there really have been just that, small incremental changes.
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Chapter 2: How are LLMs transforming customer service?
And then I'd say, oh, if you're on mobile, can you just take me with you and I'll talk you through. Then the AI will say, well, I'm going to ask you to do things. Would it be happier if it was easier for you if we switched to voice now and I can talk you through the process of resetting the device? See, it talks you through it and it says, okay, can you do me a favor?
Can you just take a picture of what you're seeing right now? and then it can scan the image. So it's using all of these different senses all in one interaction, rather than handing me off to different points of sources and doing things differently. So we partnered with Ratio to implement that experience and it's game changing.
The head of customer support there now has moved from being a problem solver, people manager, tech evaluator, We partner with him and he's now become a customer experience creator or an innovator rather than a resource manager.
That's awesome. Yeah. So basically it's using all of the different modalities that, you know, between voice, vision, you even mentioned like tech, like it's calling an API and checking to see if it's, you know, it's getting a signal back. All these different modes to solve the problem for the user, almost as if it had like you had the person there helping you troubleshoot it in real life.
And I can see that being really important for a physical product. Like, Rashad, did you say is the name of it?
Yes.
Yeah, yeah. So that's huge, you know, because otherwise you'd be stuck Googling things or looking up YouTube videos and maybe there's not enough content for it. That's right.
And just the extension of being able to do these things is very different. But in order to make that happen... Under the hood, we had to have the AI architected and engineered in a very different way. The first phase of AI, LLM based AI is still very workflow driven or operation procedures. You chunk up things and sequence them, send them off to the LLM and bring them back. Well,
In a multimodal world, if you've done that for chat, you then have to do the same thing again for every other channel. In a multimodal world, because your sequences or flows are different according to those channels. What we've done is we've elevated things up a level further and given more autonomy to the AI. And so the AI, if we tell it up front, you now have access to the device.
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Chapter 3: Why does Crescendo emphasize a human-AI collaboration?
And a lot of tech is, hey, buy our tech, invest in it, and then you'll get great results and here's a theoretical ROI that you can get. And the company has to invest a lot of time in order to make that happen. And guess what? There's a lot of waste. There's a lot of seats left on the table unused and the ROI models never work out.
So with AI tooling now, both on the front end, but also the calibration, We actually have what we need now to assess what the outcome is and only pay customers for what they need. And it's proven to be incredibly popular. You know, it's one of the reasons we think at least we've been growing so quickly is because we can provide this unique approach to, you know, how we get paid.
Yeah, no, for sure. I'm sure that's part of it because it benefits everyone. Like you said, the incentives are aligned. I also think another thing that you mentioned is important.
So the experience that you described as far as multimodal, technically me as the customer, I could go to Gemini or I could go to ChatGPT and I could ask for help with like, let's say, like, let's use the Russia example again.
Chapter 4: What unique features does Crescendo's multimodal AI offer?
with this automated sprinkler and try to get it to help me. I could take my phone, I could film and be chatting with it live. But that's an experience that is very generic. It's relying on web searches. It doesn't have all of the integrations and the hookups that the backend version that you've set up does. And it's not through Rasho.
Rasho can create a unique relationship with their customers by offering that service directly inside their app. So I think that that's key. It's like, yes, these capabilities exist in regular chatbots, but this is now a service that me as the business owner can white label or provide and provide a deeper relationship with it, which I think is pretty valuable.
Yeah, you know, the first wave of AI was really why would you go to a vendor rather than chat GPT? And firstly, the vendor is almost like quality stamping the responses that are coming out. And one thing, by the way, that we learned real quickly is there's a lot of misinformation in the web. There's a lot of training material.
Even if you train it on conversations that people have had with customer service agents, guess what? Customer service agents don't always say the right thing. And you can always guarantee that your AI is going to find the one thing that's wrong or the one thing on the website and get that back to the customer.
The first thing we noticed was this curated experience and guaranteed experience is important. But then you picked upon the next thing is that behind the closed doors of the organization, the ability to connect into different things and curate the experience to the next level can only really be done within a customer's own environment.
And from guarantees and for security and safety, you don't want You know, chat GPT, turning on your sprinklers in the middle of the night, you know, accidentally. But those are the things that are important. And that's why I think a lot of people are seeing a lot of promise for this new generation of AI native CX companies like ourselves. And there are a few others out there as well.
So how do you decide what AI should handle versus maybe what needs to be hard coded on the software or what a human needs to do? We talked about this a little bit, like with the expertise side, but I'm just curious from a tech perspective, how you think of it?
The first thing is making sure there are no hallucinations and high quality, you know, so We have very high bar for the quality output. We talked a little bit about how it does that. In fact, across our whole system, we get about 99.5% accuracy. AI on its own is typically in the 90s. Humans are typically in the 90s or low. That's how we decide in the first place. Second is resilience.
These systems now are becoming... frontline for organizations, you know, concierges into the organization. They have to be available. You know, so if open AI goes down, you can't have customer care going down. You know, so for real, we've built an incredibly resilient failover architecture across multiple models that can, um, that can, um, flip. So we, we never go down.
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Chapter 5: How does outcome-based pricing improve customer satisfaction?
But typically products change and external factors change and new things are being introduced all the time into the system.
Totally. It's like it's theoretically possible, but just because things are always changing, it's like it may never actually be practically possible. Don't launch any new products in any new markets.
And, you know... You know, don't account for external world events that might, don't account for things like tariffs or things like that. So, you know, obviously that's where this fine tuning of a system and continuous management is really important because things just don't stay still.
So do you see that bringing the human back into it? Do you see that as where like the customer experience role like goes in the future? Is it's more of a continuous tuning with the AI as like almost like an augmented symbiotic relationship as opposed to like, I'm here for when the AI fails or how do you see it? Yeah, it's going to continuously change, but I can tell you how we do it is that
Our teams, we take customers, many of the times we're actually managing just the labor side things for them, and then we upgrade them to our AI native contact center. As part of that process, pretty much every role that's involved from the human side gets repurposed and retrained.
So a QA manager who would have been traditionally sampling calls and listening to calls and scoring them according to a Rubik and putting them into a specialist QA system that you would have had to abide. But most of their work is automated now because of our system. So they become insights managers.
And what they're doing is constantly looking at all the interactions and they will proactively come to our customers and say, do you know what? As a shoe manufacturer, you've got a sizing issue on this line and you're generating these refunds and the AI is helping them there. We recommend that you put a sizing guide on your website.
And so their role has changed from being a very functional role to being an advisor on insights.
That's fascinating. So like you're taking your human context where you can kind of see things at a more, honestly, like the memory, I feel like our ability to kind of take things and feed it in to what we already know about the world and and is just better than the AI, I think, at this point and will be for a while.
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Chapter 6: What roles will customer service professionals play in the future?
You know, what's really interesting is that we're starting to, customer care has been a very transitional industry, you know. This didn't happen within our company, but a lot of outsourced contact center companies, they turn over 40% of their staff every year. It's an incredibly transient kind of market.
What's interesting is that people who are, you're starting to see the development now of a core group, and we're fortunate to have many of them working at Crescendo, of CX professionals or CX leaders who invest time. They're good because they can show empathy. They listen to customers. They're diligent about the work and the follow-up and everything.
They're not just sitting there copying and pasting from notepad into a chat window to answer questions. So I would say continue to focus on those things, you know, empathy, understanding. What AI is really good at doing is complementing now in other areas.
So you could be an amazing electronics expert, but not speak English very well, which means that the capacity for you to serve is limited or the way you speak English is not great or something. Now AI can bring your skills to everybody. And so...
I'm excited about AI being an amazing democratizer that removes the language barrier and allows people to connect with other people who have the skills that they need.
totally yeah you're totally right about that like for instance you could use the technology available today to be speaking in your native language and i don't know if any system does this yet but automatically translates it into the language of the listener and then you know maybe with a little bit of latency there's no you know hopefully not a lot of information lost it's yeah it's there and there's no latency i mean it really is just the adaptation of it but the um
So I think we're going to, I think we're going to see a lot of change, but customer care, people in customer care are amazing people, you know, the best.
And, you know, I think that's the reason why it's always recommended, you know, if you want to be in business, start working in retail or work in customer care, because those are developed skills that you really need to know in order to have to, you know, progress your career. And that now... Let's take Lovebot, for example. I'll give you an example.
One of our clients, I don't know if you know them, greeting card manufacturer, amazing product. They do these pop-up, beautiful pop-up greeting cards. Oh, I've seen those. Yeah, if you want to impress somebody, you do it. So amazing product, actually a very, very good returns policy.
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Chapter 7: How is AI reshaping the customer experience industry?
I mean, I know there's, I'm not sure to what extent there's AI in there, but there's automatically generated language models that tell them what's been going on today in the world and things like this. But yeah, it's very exciting to see the new form factors coming in for devices.
Well, I'll just I'll end this here because this has been an amazing conversation. Five years from now, what does Crescendo look like? And and I guess like the let's expand it to the larger customer experience industry. Like, are we going to see incredible change in the industry? What's your take?
Yeah, I mean, there's a new breed of companies that are evolving, which are these AI-native customer concierge companies. And our goal, and we fully expect to be a category leader within that new space, but we'll have approached it from a different way. Rather than just being AI pure tech, we'll have come at it from the overall solution. In five years' time, as I mentioned...
I think people will be saying, I can't believe what we tried to DIY everything ourselves and bolt all this stuff together. And we are now able to free up time to be innovators and Crescendo can take care of the rest of it. And then from a consumer perspective, Really just remember the old days when you couldn't actually get a telephone number or talk to somebody at the business.
Remember the old days when even if you did want to get something done, you had to escalate through their really bad deflection. And by the way, a lot of CX companies still talk about deflection. I hate the word. Who wants to be deflected?
So they actively deflect customers instead of helping them.
There is a term in CX called deflection and containment. Most bot companies are talking about containment as if consumers are some kind of virus that you can't let near your organization. And we think differently. We think about engagement. So that would have changed in five years' time.
I just can't imagine anyone with that mentality surviving in five years.
Yeah, and this is why we believe we will, because those words originate in labs, people who don't have the human contact. When you have thousands of people serving customers every day and understanding the processes, then you really start to think about your language and how you think about customer care differently.
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