Artificial intelligence startup Ask-AI Technologies Ltd. today announced the launch of its new Generative AI Sidekick tool alongside an $11 million round of funding.

Today’s Series A round was led by Leaders Fund and saw participation from Vertex Ventures, State of Mind Ventures and GTMFund, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $20 million.

The startup has created a generative AI platform that’s focused on enhancing the ability of employees to quickly find the information they need from their company’s knowledge base and other datasets. It also aids in the completion of repetitive business tasks, and has the ability to understand the “voice” of customers. Ask AI can connect to popular work platforms such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Confluence, Jira, Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, Trello and others, and ingest and analyze all of the enterprise knowledge within them. That information is then integrated within employees’ workflows, helping to improve their overall productivity.

Ask-AI says this is important because companies today tend to store information in multiple platforms, creating dozens of siloes that make it difficult to develop a clear picture of what’s happening within the business. This makes it especially challenging for workers to obtain all of the information about a specific customer, slowing down interactions. Although generative AI has long been touted as a solution to these problems, most enterprises struggle to create an accurate system they can rely on.

This is where Ask-AI believes it can make a difference. The newly announced Generative AI Sidekick tool is essentially a kind of “sidebar” that’s always running within any employees’ workflow.

So if a user such as a customer service representative is looking into a support ticket, the Sidekick can quickly pull up insights about that specific customer, including previous interactions, what products or services were used, and insights into customer sentiment and churn risk. In addition, Sidekick provides a confidence score, as well as linked citations to the content it generates, in order to avoid concerns around “hallucinations,” which is the term for false or made-up responses.

Sidekick is designed to be used alongside Ask-AI’s MosAIc model, which is described as an AI insights tool that’s able to create visual maps of a customers’ concerns, issues and repeating questions. It digs up the customer’s history from multiple data platforms and helps to provide a clear voice of each customer, so as to close knowledge gaps.

Founder and Chief Executive Alon Talmor said enterprises are excited about the potential of generative AI, but they have quickly come to realize it’s difficult to fine-tune existing models and customize them for their organizations. “What they really want is an out-of-the-box application that doesn’t rely on employees asking the right questions,” Talmor said. “It should tell employees what they need to know – answers, insights and actions – before they know what they need.”

The company says its platform has been a big hit with early adopters, and reels off a list of happy customers that include Monday.com Inc., CallRail Inc. and Yotpo Ltd. These customers, the startup says, have reduced their support ticket time-to-resolution by an average of 20%, while cutting the average number of tickets agents deal with each day by 25%.

Leaders Fund Managing Director David Stein said enterprises want to use generative AI not only to access internal knowledge but also to act on that information immediately. “Ask-AI is the only native gen AI platform with live enterprise-wide deployments in world-leading companies,” he said. “The platform enables employees to get answers from enterprise data and take smart actions to complete their work faster.”

Following today’s round, Ask-AI said its main priority now is to expand its 40-person team across its two locations in Tel Aviv and Toronto. The company aims to double its personnel within the next 12 months, while growing its client base.

Photo: Ask-AI Technologies