We’re excited to announce that we’ve led a $150 million strategic growth investment into Kore.ai, a leading conversational AI workflow platform.
This investment represents the continuation of our long-held thesis around the use of next-generation technology to augment digital experiences and streamline customer experiences (CX) and employee experiences (EX). In particular, Kore.ai’s use of generative AI (GenAI) to drive hard dollar ROI for large global enterprises aligns perfectly with our belief in the untapped potential at the intersection of AI and digital experiences.
Over the past 12 to 18 months, businesses have experienced dramatic changes in their operating environment. First, the macroeconomic backdrop has shifted significantly, with rising interest rates, inflation and labor costs forcing enterprises to prioritize fiscal sustainability over growth at all costs. In parallel, the customer service landscape has become increasingly complex. End customers increasingly demand highly personalized services, but disparate backend systems have become bottlenecks, making it difficult to surface critical information when needed. The combination of these challenges has forced businesses to refocus on cost rationalization and prioritize efficiencies across their organizations.
At the same time, there have been dramatic developments with AI and LLM technology, expanding the capabilities of conversational AI tools and amplifying the productivity and efficiency enhancements that can be driven across customer service organizations. In fact, a 2023 BCG report estimates that when implemented at scale, GenAI tools can increase the productivity of customer service operations by 30-50%!
Despite the transformative potential of conversational AI, many enterprises have struggled to integrate these disruptive technologies into their core CX workflows due to the technical complexity and heavy operational lift required to see value. As such, when we got to know Kore.ai, we were thrilled to learn about its unique approach to making conversational AI successful and driving business value for some of the largest enterprises in the world.
Since the company’s founding in 2014, well before the current buzz around GenAI, the Kore.ai team has been singularly focused on achieving their vision to create a leading conversational AI platform for global brands. Their prescience led to some early and well-placed investments in building the product, including a highly flexible foundation that can support and orchestrate digital customer experiences from input plus intent recognition through to output plus response.
Kore.ai offers a highly configurable no-code low-code workflow platform, allowing businesses to easily create virtual assistants that are deeply engrained into enterprise systems of record and accessible to end customers across more than 40 channels of communication, limiting the burden on human customer support staff. To complement this value proposition, Kore.ai also offers hundreds of pre-built assistants for vertical-specific use cases, such as banking, retail and healthcare, as well as commonly used horizontal EX use cases in IT and HR, significantly accelerating time to value.
Kore.ai’s platform was designed from the ground up to be customer-centric, meeting businesses where they are with their architecture and security posture. Customers have the ability to leverage pre-trained models from Kore.ai and third party open-source or closed-source models, as well as their own proprietary models, all of which can be deployed either on-premise or in the cloud.
While we were very impressed with the breadth of the platform, momentum of the business and third-party recognition from analysts like Gartner and Forrester that highlight Kore’s market leadership, we were perhaps most impressed with the tangible value and business results that Kore.ai drives for an array of Fortune 500 customers, such as PNC Bank, Cigna, Airbus and others. Customers consistently validate the ease of use and time to value, the platform’s flexibility and, most importantly, the compelling ROI (up to 10x!), driven in part by the platform’s ability to deflect volume from human agents.
With its proven ability to add value across leading global enterprises, including several institutions in FTV’s Global Partner Network®, and 95% of customer service leaders expecting their customers to be served with an AI bot by 2025, we’re excited to help Kore.ai continue their strong growth trajectory through our partnership.
Kore.ai marks FTV’s latest investment in the digital experience space, which includes portfolio companies such as Zoovu in digital commerce, Luma in digital healthcare, ID.me in digital identity and Coremetrics in web analytics.
We’re thrilled to partner with the Kore.ai team to scale their leading conversational AI workflow platform and help businesses augment the digital customer experience. Welcome to the FTV family, Kore.ai!
