GE Spins Out SmartAssist.io to Raise $5 Million for AI-Based Customer Service Platform
GE has spun out its AI-focused startup Wise.io into a new company, SmartAssist.io, which has raised $5 million in Series A funding from Madrona Venture Group. The company, which is expanding on the service and working with existing customers like Twilio, MailChimp, Zendesk, Zenefits, and others, uses AI to smartly route service requests to the right human agents. When possible, the service also can respond automatically, based on the ticket’s attributes and the routing rules a company can set for itself. Like all machine learning-based systems, SmartAssist needs a lot of data.
The SmartAssist team plans to expand its service to also support chat-based customer service systems. This is a key step as millennials don’t exactly enjoy picking up the phone to talk to a customer service agent.
