Why we’re building ReflexAI
A personal note from the cofounders
Sam Dorison and John Callery are the cofounders of ReflexAI.
This week, we announced ReflexAI’s first round of external investment, covered exclusively by Axios. It’s a privilege to partner with Footwork, Emerson Collective, Alt Capital, Gaingels, and an experienced group of angel investors across healthcare and technology innovation.
For us, ReflexAI is personal. We have volunteered on a crisis line and led teams responsible for developing and operating core parts of a 24/7 call center. More broadly, our work in mental health confirmed the importance of the wide range of organizations that support individuals in vulnerable moments including crisis lines, emergency dispatch, digital health, hospitals, and health insurance.
We’re often asked for our why. What inspired us to launch ReflexAI and what motivates us every day? Here is how we respond.
Every day, millions of people reach out to high-stakes call centers.
At life’s most critical moments, individuals find themselves reaching out to a call center operation. In time sensitive situations, this point of contact can be 911 or a crisis line. Collectively, these organizations answer over 250 million calls per year just in the United States. When planning more extended care, most people reach out to a hospital scheduler or health insurance specialist. Whoever answers the phone at these places will play a role — positive or negative — in navigating care. The person on the other end of the phone should be effective and empathetic.
From Day 1, our team has built ReflexAI tools to exceed the highest standards and address the unique needs of our customers.
We’re laser-focused on high-stakes call centers.
At ReflexAI, we believe that the best technology should support the most critical interactions. There are many technologies developed to support call centers, particularly in sales and customer service. But these tools are challenging to adapt to the industries where ReflexAI focuses. And they rarely make the clinical, ethical, and security investments necessary to be viable choices for sensitive settings. From Day 1, our team has built ReflexAI tools to exceed the highest standards and address the unique needs of our customers.
We’re focused on outcomes.
Before launching ReflexAI, one of our proudest achievements was developing simulation tools at The Trevor Project. Our innovation, the Crisis Contact Simulator, was listed on TIME’s “100 Best Inventions of 2021” and profiled in the MIT Technology Review. These tools were a critical part of Trevor’s ability to scale from training under 30 digital counselors per quarter to over 300 per month. ReflexAI’s wider range of training and quality assurance tools move the needle on cost as well as priorities such as call effectiveness, caller satisfaction, average call length, agent retention, and many others.
We believe this technology should be affordable and accessible.
For any single organization, building in-house, high quality, and responsible AI-powered tools represents an enormous investment and long-term human capital commitment. ReflexAI reduces the cost and expertise required by developing tools that can be used and customized across organizations. Our approach also accelerates the adoption of industry-wide best-practices, and our team is inspired that their efforts can impact many organizations doing life-changing work.
In short: We’re building ReflexAI because we’ve been in the shoes of our customers and the individuals who rely on their services. When we first built the Crisis Contact Simulator on OpenAI’s GPT-2 in 2019, very few people had heard of large language models. Years later — with ChatGPT and new models dominating the news — we are more inspired than ever to play a unique role by bringing AI-powered tools to organizations that collectively impact millions of lives every day.
