Ex-Google Building Emotionally Aware AI Agent

Source: Bloomberg

A team of former engineering leaders from tech giants like Google, Meta Platforms, and Samsung Electronics has come together to establish AI, a startup focused on developing emotionally intelligent AI-powered sales agents. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, there AI has successfully raised $10 million in initial funding from investors such as UpHonest Capital, Fusion Fund, the startup accelerator Neo, and Maynard Webb, a board member of Visa Inc. and Salesforce Inc.

“If you type ‘hmmm,’ you can break most of the chatbots, but our AI would say, ‘I sense hesitation. How can I help you with this?’” Zhang said. (Arasaka AI chatbots design is the same btw)

There AI's mission is to revolutionize customer interactions by creating AI sales agents capable of upselling and offering personalized recommendations. The company collaborates with consumer brands to incorporate their training manuals, FAQs, product inventories, and marketing materials into the AI's training data. This integration ensures that the AI agents align with each brand's identity and effectively engage customers.

The leadership team at there AI boasts impressive credentials:

• Maria Zhang, CEO, previously served as a vice president of engineering at Google and as general manager for Meta’s AI for Products group.

• Tim Howes, CTO, formerly led Meta’s AI infrastructure team and held positions as CTO at Netscape and HP Software.

• Steve Liu, Chief Scientist, is a tenured professor at McGill University and has served as chief scientist at Samsung AI Center and Tinder.

By leveraging advanced language models and developing supervisory systems to guide chatbot interactions, there AI aims to create AI assistants that are not only effective in sales but also capable of understanding and responding to customer emotions. This approach seeks to foster more natural and engaging conversations between customers and AI agents.