Ada’s founding story is one the Accel team has always loved. Before its launch, founders Mike Murchison and David Hariri convinced seven customer service teams to let them work as support agents. After a year of exhaustive intake, they knew that for Ada’s customer service platform to add real value, AI was imperative. This was 2016 and at that time, an AI-first approach to customer service was unique—but the results were astounding. We discuss their journey on this episode of Spotlight On. “We realized if we can put AI in the hands of customer service teams, allow them to help more customers and help them resolve more – we can transform the future of customer service. And that's what we've been focused on ever since.” - Mike Murchison Let’s back up a bit. In 2014, Mike and David had just launched a different startup. The company grew quickly, but it had a major problem: keeping up with customer service demand. Their team went from wanting to talk to our customers a lot, to avoiding customer contact. That bothered them. But these problems weren’t new. Customer service is notoriously cumbersome and hard to scale. The problems also weren’t going away, so Mike and David saw an opportunity to build a solution. Two years later, Ada was born. Today, enterprises like Meta, Verizon, Yeti, and Square use Ada to automatically resolve customer inquiries in any language or channel. In this "Spotlight On: AI'' episode, Mike discusses the early reactions to Ada’s customer service AI approach, challenges they’ve faced due to recent demand, advice for other founders on how to use technology to deliver real value, and the impact AI will have on the customer service workforce. Conversation highlights: 00:00 - Intro 04:00 - The core learnings from Mike’s experience working as a customer service agent, and how they approached AI in the early days 07:32 - Why Ada made an early decision to bring AI capabilities in-house, and how they built a strong technical team 14:09 - How the rapid development of ChatGPT and LLMs impacted Ada 25:00 - Advice on how to make a lasting impact with an AI product, and cutting through the hype Host: Ben Fletcher, Partner at Accel Featuring: Mike Murchison, CEO and Co-Founder of Ada Learn more at Accel.com/SpotlightOn/Ada