NewTech Friday: boost.ai – a no-code conversational banking solution
07/05/2021
Perspective
Henry Vaage Iversen, CCO & co-founder, boost.ai, spoke with Efma’s Boris Plantier about what sets his company’s conversational AI tool apart from its competitors.
What led to the creation of boost.ai?
The conversational AI market is a crowded space. This makes it challenging to cut through the noise and find chat automation software that’s the right fit from the countless chatbot solutions out there. When my co-founders and I started boost.ai, we observed that even though consumers were becoming increasingly connected, many businesses still struggled to make themselves available in a time- and cost-effective manner, particularly at the scale necessary for larger enterprises.
We identified this gap in the market as an opportunity to use conversational AI to develop a customer service automation platform that is quick to deploy, easily managed by non-technical personnel and scalable to meet the ever-increasing demands of businesses and their customers. Initially, we focused on making our AI-powered virtual agents fit-for-purpose for large financial institutions here in the Nordics; they had the traffic volume and digitalization experience that could maximize the value that our solution offers. Once we had perfected the platform we expanded, bringing our expertise and experience in launching over 250 virtual agents to organizations in the rest of Europe and the U.S.
Since launching in 2016, the boost.ai platform has been adopted by leading financial brands like Santander, Nordea and Tryg to automate thousands of customer service, support and sales interactions every day.
Could you present boost.ai’s offer?
Our platform takes a unique approach compared to other solutions. Our conversational AI technology stack consists of a number of proprietary language understanding algorithms that make it possible for our virtual agents to answer questions and automate actions on thousands of topics while maintaining accuracy levels of over 90%. In contrast, typical chatbot technology can only handle a few hundred topics before it starts to break down.
We package this market-leading tech into a no-code user interface that’s designed specifically to be used by customer service personnel. While other solutions may require a minimum of technical expertise or even a team of data scientists to operate, we built our platform to be used by anyone. This allows businesses to integrate the chatbot with their customer service team and empower existing employees to create dynamic conversation flows that leverage our artificial intelligence to deliver exceptional automated customer experiences. To date, we have certified over 3,000 people across our client base and partner network as AI trainers via a dedicated e-learning platform.
The final piece of the puzzle is how we are able to deploy our solution faster than any other vendor on the market. We don’t waste time with sandbox trials or limited demos, instead choosing to build prospective clients a fully-functioning virtual agent - based on KPIs and criteria that they set - in a 10-day proof-of-concept, for free and with no risk attached. Using self-learning AI, we can scan and analyze data from existing sources, such as a company’s website or even another chatbot solution, and repurpose it, with the help of some human QA supervision, into a useable model in a few hours. This significantly cuts down deployment timelines and means that we can have a new client up and running in a matter of days, instead of weeks or months, without any reduction in automation quality. We developed this technology and deployment strategy as a direct response to the pandemic where we observed that many businesses were caught off-guard by spikes in customer service traffic that could be alleviated by automation and needed to deploy something quickly that just works.
What’s coming next for boost.ai?
It’s an exciting time for the company as we are in an incredible period of growth. At the end of 2020 we achieved annual recurring revenues of $10 million and, in March 2021, we announced a partnership with Nordic Capital, a leading private equity firm focusing on growth companies in Northern Europe, with the goal of becoming a global leader in our space.
This year we are ramping up our expansion into both the U.K. and the U.S, as well as continuing our growth in the Nordics, with a focus on conversational banking and expanding our partner network. We are well-positioned to bring our solution to as many new companies in the banking, insurance and fintech sector as possible, offering them the same customer service automation successes that our solution has delivered to countless financial institutions here in the Nordics.
We identified this gap in the market as an opportunity to use conversational AI to develop a customer service automation platform that is quick to deploy, easily managed by non-technical personnel and scalable to meet the ever-increasing demands of businesses and their customers. Initially, we focused on making our AI-powered virtual agents fit-for-purpose for large financial institutions here in the Nordics; they had the traffic volume and digitalization experience that could maximize the value that our solution offers. Once we had perfected the platform we expanded, bringing our expertise and experience in launching over 250 virtual agents to organizations in the rest of Europe and the U.S.
Since launching in 2016, the boost.ai platform has been adopted by leading financial brands like Santander, Nordea and Tryg to automate thousands of customer service, support and sales interactions every day.
Could you present boost.ai’s offer?
Our platform takes a unique approach compared to other solutions. Our conversational AI technology stack consists of a number of proprietary language understanding algorithms that make it possible for our virtual agents to answer questions and automate actions on thousands of topics while maintaining accuracy levels of over 90%. In contrast, typical chatbot technology can only handle a few hundred topics before it starts to break down.
We package this market-leading tech into a no-code user interface that’s designed specifically to be used by customer service personnel. While other solutions may require a minimum of technical expertise or even a team of data scientists to operate, we built our platform to be used by anyone. This allows businesses to integrate the chatbot with their customer service team and empower existing employees to create dynamic conversation flows that leverage our artificial intelligence to deliver exceptional automated customer experiences. To date, we have certified over 3,000 people across our client base and partner network as AI trainers via a dedicated e-learning platform.
The final piece of the puzzle is how we are able to deploy our solution faster than any other vendor on the market. We don’t waste time with sandbox trials or limited demos, instead choosing to build prospective clients a fully-functioning virtual agent - based on KPIs and criteria that they set - in a 10-day proof-of-concept, for free and with no risk attached. Using self-learning AI, we can scan and analyze data from existing sources, such as a company’s website or even another chatbot solution, and repurpose it, with the help of some human QA supervision, into a useable model in a few hours. This significantly cuts down deployment timelines and means that we can have a new client up and running in a matter of days, instead of weeks or months, without any reduction in automation quality. We developed this technology and deployment strategy as a direct response to the pandemic where we observed that many businesses were caught off-guard by spikes in customer service traffic that could be alleviated by automation and needed to deploy something quickly that just works.
What’s coming next for boost.ai?
It’s an exciting time for the company as we are in an incredible period of growth. At the end of 2020 we achieved annual recurring revenues of $10 million and, in March 2021, we announced a partnership with Nordic Capital, a leading private equity firm focusing on growth companies in Northern Europe, with the goal of becoming a global leader in our space.
This year we are ramping up our expansion into both the U.K. and the U.S, as well as continuing our growth in the Nordics, with a focus on conversational banking and expanding our partner network. We are well-positioned to bring our solution to as many new companies in the banking, insurance and fintech sector as possible, offering them the same customer service automation successes that our solution has delivered to countless financial institutions here in the Nordics.
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