New Investment: CuriousThing.io
Imagine what you could do with an AI that makes calls just like us… That’s what Curious Thing does.
TL;DR: The Curious Thing technology is complex, however, the value proposition is simple: empower every organisation to proactively interact with their customers, just as a human operator would, at scale, and in near real time. That is why we are excited and that’s why we have invested in this exceptional business.
What is Curious Thing?
The simplest way to think about the Curious Thing product is to recall the last conversation you had with a customer service representative from a company where you are the customer. Imagine now that the person on the other side of the call was not human, instead, it was a virtual AI, holding the same type of discussion with you and asking many of the same questions. That’s the technology Curious Thing is building. The AI is trained to learn about given topics so that it can enhance the quality of the questions asked in conversations with customers. In the future, it aims to act as a mass knowledge discovery assistant for the organisation deploying it. The company’s founders are calling this capability “computational curiosity”.
Organisations are currently using Curious Thing to engage their customer base at scale, all at the same time, to solve problems or to collect information. Imagine if your organisation’s ability to interact with customers via telephone was not limited by your deployed human headcount/time capacity, it opens up a world of opportunity for improved customer experience and satisfaction.
We’ve been a user and loved our experience 🤓
We first met the team at Curious Thing back in 2019 (thanks for the introduction, Peter Huynh) when the founders were focused on building an AI interviewer for the recruitment industry. We really liked the concept of the technology and decided to give it a crack for recruiting an Investment Analyst at Black Sheep Capital. It helped us interview and find Hannah Parton-Cyr from among +50 eligible and high-quality candidates. She loved the technology we used for the first round of interviews (Curious Thing AI) and found the overall process enjoyable. We loved the outcome — we found a fantastic hire and had more than 50 interviews completed by the AI without our assistance and all interview data and insights collected and summarised following each interview, all entirely automated while we continued doing our day jobs.
Some rough numbers in our use case were ~50 interviews completed by the AI which were approx. 10min per interview, totalling 500 min or ~8 hours of time saved for our team. At completion of the AI interviews, we’d not run a single interview ourselves, however we now had interview question and answer data on all 50 candidates, a range of insights around their suitability for the role and a scorecard of how they performed relative to others in the same process. Using this data, and other data points we had captured separately, we were able to shortlist top candidates that we’d later interview ourselves. It was fantastic and we were very happy with the overall user experience.
Their progress is very exciting 🚀
The early technology was deployed for the recruitment industry and has now completed well over 1 million AI to human phone calls. Imagine the insights the AI has around running conversations. I think you’d struggle to find a human on earth that’s run anywhere near 1million purpose/discovery oriented phone calls against an organisational objective (that would be ~50 calls per day, 365 days of the year for 55 years!). Unlikely.
Despite the impressive initial traction the company had within the recruitment use case, some early in-market learnings after deploying into this category led the team to complete a pivot in early 2020 to seek to use the technology for two refocused purposes, which now present a much larger opportunity for scale: mass proactive engagement in the health and public sectors (e.g. where there is a need for mass information communication and data collection) and customer oriented reengagement in e-commerce/fintech (e.g. engaging with a customer base to prompt customers to take a new action or complete required actions). Within these new applications, the company is already working with a handful of large organisations including: Foodpanda, HummGroup, Brighte, Illion, Quitline, Medibank, the Queensland Government and Blackbaud.
For your inner sceptic, or at least mine. 🧐
Initially I was personally quite sceptical about organisation led AI interactions via direct phone call, particularly given the amount of scam calls happening around the world at the moment. My scepticism was around why I would trust, or want to engage with, an AI when I barely want to communicate with a human in relation to any ad hoc organisation led comms. Skip forward a day or two (yes, that’s all it took) and I found myself hanging up a phone call with a real human claiming to be from my bank, where I was completely unwilling to engage with that person due to a back-and-forth disagreement around who should confirm which information about me first to confirm my and their identity for security purposes.
The Curious Thing team has already done a lot of work to alleviate much of this type of concern for organisations/customers before an AI call even takes place (for example by sending pre-call text messages, arranging scheduled call backs, planned interactions and so on). A Curious Thing AI interaction is made up of many pre-call touch points that build trust and prepare you for an AI call. Resultantly, I find myself trusting the AI call much more because I know the who, what, when and why well before interacting with the organisation over the phone.
We’re very excited about this investment and are thrilled to be working with the exceptional founding team building this technology — Sam Zheng, Han Xu, David Mckeague. If you know someone working in Healthcare, Financial services, B2C Fintech technology that could use this technology, do them the favour and share the links above so they too can experience the technology first-hand.
DW.
For the record, any opinions contained represent my views and me only.
