KAI turns 3!

KAI turns 3!

For a business that helps people to become more emotionally intelligent It’s not surprising its another emotional day. As KAI celebrates its 3rd Birthday, we reflect on the KAI journey and what it has taken to make an AI start up like ours ready for scale up. (hint: a lot of hard work and a little bit of good fortune!). 

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Way before people thought AI was cool…

We knew AI was going to transform the future, but it was the unique preserve of the FAANGs. We wanted to democratise it and get it into the hands of ordinary folks! As customer guys we were frustrated by the lack of insight from customer conversations and sub-optimal improvement cycles and actionability for customer facing teams. We bet we could go deeper and be more useful if we took a different approach to the most modern speech analytics tools, let alone the analogue side by side listening version. 

We also bet that the future of interaction was going to be increasingly video-based and that this would give much richer insight.  We focussed on higher value conversations in global pharma and targeted the largest global players. More latterly we have extended to patient-doctor interactions in the NHS.

No we didn't know Covid was coming, we were fortunate that it accelerated the trend to remote video conversations with Teams and Zoom. And of course, this shaped the type of company we are.

The table below shows the evolution over three years on a number of key dimensions. From Year 0 – when KAI is born; Year 1 – as a toddler as we start to engage with the real world and find out what it’s really like; To Year 2 – when we went through growing pains but started to mature.

Excited – Frustrated – Enlightened

What’s interesting on reflection is the personal emotional ark, which is remarkably similar across all three founders. We chose to bootstrap the business. I still believe that was the right choice as it made us be smarter. Going fast at the beginning and getting something that could be used to gain market feedback was invaluable. However, the pain and frustration of knowing what we needed to do, but not being able to get it done as fast as we wanted tested us all. We’ve broken the back of that now, which why frustration has given way to more positive emotions. 

AI-Aware

The market reaction to AI has been really interesting to observe, as clients have become increasingly AI-aware. When we first showed our product to clients, people found it scary – firstly what is currently hidden will be exposed. What if I get found out? We quickly learnt that those with growth mindsets would love what we do, those with closed mindsets would hate it. 

The debate quickly moved onto a discussion about bias. When we were evaluated properly over a year a go by one of the biggest pharma businesses the chief privacy officer handed us her hand-crafted AI evaluation form that included questions about bias. Fast forward a year and another large global pharma business slowed the project down because we needed to formally go through their AI-Bias Committee. We do worry about bias, in that we use datasets that have actively tried to eliminate bias and we minimise it wherever possible. That said, we know the bias in personal evaluation of conversations, unless done by an independent expert is far greater than our fact-based AI. 

AI for Good

Starting out, we had lots of questions about potential applications. Some positive – could KAI help us hold more effective management meetings? Yes probably, but not now. Some exploitative – can it tell me if the other person is lying? Yes probably, but we’re not interested in that. 

AI is about intent. And our intent is to use AI as a source for good in the world. Indeed, KAI’s purpose is to help humans be more human and have better conversations. This should lead to better experiences and outcomes for both parties.  So, in the discussions about regulation, we believe it should be incumbent upon organisations to have a charter and policies that hard-wire positive intent and embed explainability. This transparency isn’t how the biggest tech companies have behaved in the past. If you know you’re doing something bad for humanity, you shouldn’t be doing it!

Year 3 – Growing Wings!

As we turn 3, we look forward with hope and expectation. The AI market is moving very fast, so we have to too! We’re fortunate our chosen narrow EQ-focused AI application is exactly the sort that can leverage Large Language Models, but not be made obsolete. Our value is in our unique data and models that sit above this capability. We’re upgrading our operating model for scale. And raising £5M in our first proper round to accelerate growth. 

We've just starting our first projects in Japan and China. We're scaling globally with three of the Top ten pharma businesses.  We're actively seeking new partners in US.

If you’re interested in getting involved in a fast-moving AI scale-up with an intent to do good in the world we’d love to hear from you. Warning – it may get emotional!

Year 0 – KAI is born - learning to Walk

Over-riding emotion: Excitement about giving birth to our new baby! Adventure.

Focus: Revealing Hidden Human Insights

Activities: Building the Foundations iteratively. Built an MVP portal that incorporates a processing platform with three types of AI (visual, acoustic and text) and a visual read out. Determining how to measure conversation quality (what was said, how it was said, language used,  how it was received and outcomes achieved). Tuned for healthcare.

Clients: Finding brave ones that were open enough to try. (Thank you – you know who you are)

Applications: Sales Conversations and training

Market reaction: Intrigued, but AI is scary!

Team: Completely virtual remote small team – a couple of seniors with some fresh guys out of uni who couldn’t go on their gap years. Capability + Energy.

Key learns: Finding reliable signals from the noise isn't easy;  different conversation types need different models for evaluation; Accuracy is key for actionability.

Finances: Keep it lean, self-funding, limited revenue, not paying ourselves (that sucks!).

Year 1 - Engaging with the real-world

Over-riding emotion: Frustrated and overwhelmed. Progress, but can’t go quick enough! (stuck in the "technical debt" mud).

Focus: Building out for global enterprise; Improving utility/actionability.

Activities: Building in multi-lingual capability; adjusting for what happens in the wild (screensharing, faces moving etc); Adding features  & re-architecting product; redesigning User Interface. Tightening Security & processes.

Clients: European clients starting to see the power.

Applications: Sales & Coach the coaches (GROW)

Market reaction: AI Bias? I can't ask customers to record calls - can I?

Team: More and better dev't resource but still limited; 1 partner

Key learns: Starting internally is the gateway to external conversations. Why didn’t we architect this thing right from the start (because we didn’t know exactly what we were trying to do and we went quick to prove out the concept!)

Finance: Concept proven, more funds required. External Raise vs Friends and families? Got external offers but kept it close.

Year 2 – Growing Pains

Over-riding emotion: Frustration (eventually) gives way to Enlightenment. Achievable.

Focus: Emotional Intelligence; Integration (KAI Assistant) and Automation

Activities: De-bugging and re-achitecting for scale and real-time; Automating and deepening insights; formalise IP and register US patent; 

Clients: N American, S American, European and N African pharma clients. Healthcare (NHS) 

Applications: Sales (SFE & Customer insight), GROW, MSL and Doctor-Patient (NHS)

Market reaction: Chat GPT hype - AI is the future. Can AI make humans, more human – yes!

Team: Bring on business dev't resource, more data science and more partners.

Key learns: Don’t ever work with Teams documentation! At the heart, our application helps people to become more emotionally intelligent. We codify the behaviours that drive effective outcomes.

Finance: Re-investing revenue to go as quick as we can. Time to accelerate and go to US.

Year 3  - Growing wings!

We’re now full of hope. Upgrading our operating model for scale. We're raising £5M in our first proper round to accelerate growth. We've just starting our first projects in Japan and China. We're scaling globally with three of the Top ten pharma businesses.  We're actively seeking new partners in US.

If you’re interested in getting involved in a fast-moving AI scale-up we’d love to hear from you.