On one hand, we have claims about AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence), while on the other, some argue there are no real use cases.

So much has been the AI hype that leading AI researcher Arvind Srinivasan said, “Companies should pivot from creating gods to building products.”

AI feels like magic but it is not. It is a phenomenal piece of technology. But it is a tool at the end of the day. And a tool is only good when you use it to solve the right set of problems. And this especially becomes true when you are building a product for businesses. Businesses don’t buy hype, they buy solutions. This is the first principle of building and investing in B2B startups.

At Neon, we strongly believe that in the AI era the application layer will drive most of the value. The startups that succeed will cross the hype barrier. They will build products which solve problems at scale and don’t get limited to cool twitter demos.

To do that you need to find the use case which can clearly demonstrate the impact on the bottom line. The best growth lever for B2B startups targeting enterprises is economies of scale. Which they achieve by building a product for a very specific use case and by executing a GTM motion which gets the product into the hands of a lot of users fast.

And with this rigor and focus Vibhanshu (“Vibs” as he is usually called) is building Alltius. As part of his academic life at Carnegie Mellon Vibs studied and taught for years on customer analytics and Artificial Intelligence. He saw how broken customer journeys were and how much effort and money is spent on optimizing it.

He noticed that the reason customer journeys and experience are uniquely inefficient is because of the siloed approach that businesses take when interacting with customers. In modern companies each department has a separate tech stack which doesn’t talk to each other.

When a customer contacts or is contacted they feel they are talking to the company in a parallel universe. Everything looks and feels the same but nothing is.

So when the first LLMs appeared, Vibhanshu envisioned a future where AI could provide personalized, knowledgeable assistance at scale.

He says, “Think of someone who knows all interactions you have had with the company. They have infinite memory, infinite capacity, infinite ability to help you with human level conversational ability.”

But LLMs are not magic but a tool. They are verbose and probabilistic. They are trained towards the average. They need to be optimized. And this where Vibhanshu’s years of experience comes in handy in building a product with high depth.

Today, Alltius is enabling businesses in providing a personal concierge to every customer. Alltius’s platform provides a library of knowledge sources, skills and channels that can be stitched together by business to create complex customer workflows that can be deployed in a multi-modal fashion.

They overcome silos by offering a unified AI layer that can handle a wide range of customer interactions, from sales and support to personalized recommendations.

Their proprietary symbolic AI layer enhances the capabilities of large language models, ensuring accuracy and determinism. They enhance LLMs’ capabilities by building industry specific knowledge graphs of different types of data representation which helps LLMs understand the specific context of that industry. Something that can’t be achieved with off the shelf LLM APIs.

This symbolic layer helps them move from a system of records to a system of knowledge and engagement with unprecedented accuracy. While Salesforce has been talking about low hallucinations at Dreamforce 2024, Alltius has been delivering no hallucinations for well over a year now.

Not only do they have a technologically superior platform with over a dozen custom models, Alltius has taken great strides in creating a real world impact. They have one of the largest deployment of LLMs answering millions of queries and taking actions on behalf of end customers.

With Alltius, a major US insurance company was able to reduce training time for new agents from six months to one month and increase sales productivity by 30-40%. Similarly, in the financial services sector, Alltius has helped companies like Angel One reduce call center volume by 40% while increasing customer satisfaction.

As Vibs says “Alltius is on the frontline with financial services and insurance customers on some of their worst days, and we try to bring an empathetic and human-like experience to all of them at scale. Something that wouldn’t have been possible without GenAI”.

There is a difference between playing AI and doing AI. But Vibs and Alltius’s stellar team, including COO Rajeev Ved (ex-BCG, Bain, Hitachi Rail CEO) and engineering head Deepak Sethi (ex-Google, Rubrik), alongside founding members from tech giants like Meta, Google, and Amazon mean business when it comes to building AI right at scale.

We are proud to back Alltius as they are transforming how businesses interact with customers. Alltius is not just changing how businesses interact with customers today, but is shaping the future of customer engagement in an AI-driven world.