By chance, Chandrasekaran had the opportunity to meet a couple of brilliant technologists with decades of call center experience, Tod Famous and Slava Zhakov, who shared the same vision. Even better, they had already written a working prototype. They didn’t think their own industry would wake up before it was too late. Crescendo was born.
AI that works with humans
Crescendo’s novel approach of using AI with humans still in the loop also addresses two elephants in the industry room. The first is diversion, which is a polite way of describing how difficult companies make it for customers to even figure out how to contact a company before being diverted to FAQs and the wilderness of the phone tree. Then there is attrition. Unsurprisingly, many of the industry’s jobs are pretty boring, leading to stratospheric employee attrition rates of up to 50% a year.
Crescendo’s approach to AI seems smart. Instead of launching hundreds of millions of massive GPU clusters and competing with OpenAI, Google, Meta, etc. for the latest AI PhDs from MIT, they have put humans in charge. For Crescendo, AI does not displace humans, but rather complements them. At the same time, Crescendo’s proprietary AI application can still benefit from leveraging the world’s largest LLMs and even its clients’ private knowledge bases to answer the vast majority of client questions. Best of all, customers say they can go into production with Crescendo in just two to four weeks, and after the first month, AI handles over 90% of queries automatically and accurately. To date, they have yet to experience a single hallucination and there has been no downtime for clients.
