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In the conversational AI or chatbot space, there’s a thin line between live agent support and chatbots as breakthroughs in deep learning technology have made the automation of responses to a customer’s question via an AI-powered chatbot more feasible. Not only does this lead to lower customer service costs and improved agent productivity, providing instant and accurate responses to a customer’s question can increase delight, engagement, and loyalty with the brand. When this technology was still in a budding state, the first generation of chatbots did not have natural language understanding and processing (NLU/P) capability. One of the main challenges that enterprises faced when trying to create a chatbot was the absence of NLU/P, which made some of the interactions with customers very cold and robotic. Frustrated customers could not find value in those chatbots.

Founded by Silicon Valley veterans, Madhu Mathihalli, Mitul Tiwari and Ravi N. Raj in August 2016, Passage AI transcends the current limitations of a chatbot with an AI/ NLP platform that performs at over 95 percent accuracy and helps automate customer service interactions.

Since day one, we’ve had a laser focus on our artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and the sophistication of our natural language understanding algorithms

“Since day one, we’ve had a laser focus on our artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and the sophistication of our natural language understanding algorithms,” says Ravi N. Raj, co-founder and CEO of Passage AI. This focus appears to have paid off. Chatbots built using the company’s platform have the highest accuracy in the industry as reported by customers and analysts. As an AI-first company, Passage AI leverages messaging platforms and voice assistant as a channel, and lets a business create a conversational interface that they can deploy on a wide variety of channels.

Passage AI’s key differentiator is their console for building a chatbot that is all UI-driven and drag-and-drop. It frees the customer from having to write code to launch a chatbot or even label data for training—the company undertakes all those tasks.

The strength of Passage AI’s platform is best articulated in the KPIs that their customers have seen. Typically, a customer starts with one use case following which if they’re satisfied, they expand to other internally facing or customer-facing ones. All they have to do is explain their pain points that they are trying to solve using conversational AI, and Passage AI provides them with a turnkey solution.

In offering AI-powered conversational interfaces, the company provides four main features in their solution. The first is a UI-driven way of building a chatbot that once built undergoes training to fully understand natural language, which is the second feature. Thirdly, the company has a 'build once, deploy anywhere' strategy. After fabrication, the bot is serviceable on 25 plus platforms which include the customer's website, mobile apps, all the messaging and enterprise platforms, and voice devices. Passage AI’s fourth feature is their international cross-language capability which supports all major languages natively. Despite being a nascent entrant, the company sees positive signs as a small but dedicated start-up being able to take on some of the largest companies in the world. Three months back, Passage AI said it had exceeded $1 million in annual recurring revenue within six months of selling their product. As a recipient of a number of awards including the TiE50 award, the Red Herring 100 awards and the Golden Bridge award for Best Customer Deployment in the US, they have patented some of the best techniques in the industry to serve the end customer.

In terms of expansion, the Holy Grail is 100 percent accuracy in their artificial intelligence and deep learning tools that Passage AI hopes to attain soon. The biggest metric for the company is delighting the end consumer with a world-class chatbot experience which in turn will improve their engagement and loyalty toward Passage AI’s customer. “When our customers succeed, we succeed,” says Raj.