Swiss artificial intelligence startup Typewise AG today launched Nova, a system designed to build, run and continuously improve customer-service AI agents without requiring dedicated operations specialists.

Nova isn’t a customer-facing chatbot but an orchestrator that works behind the scenes to maintain agents’ knowledge, instructions, workflows, evaluations and guardrails as business conditions change. Typewise said its own research indicates that most customer service teams run AI as disconnected tools.

The company said its system monitors agent performance, tests proposed changes and adjusts operations automatically while leaving customers in control of what the agents are permitted to do.

Nova’s agents can resolve requests across email, chat and WhatsApp, answer presales questions and guide customers inside products. The platform integrates with existing applications, from Intercom Inc., Zendesk Inc. and Shopify Inc., and can transfer conversations to human operators when needed.

Typewise argues that the operational work required to keep AI systems accurate and current is preventing many customer-service pilots from reaching production. “Every company that deploys AI agents creates a new operations job,” said Typewise Chief Executive and co-founder David Eberle. “Someone must monitor them, update their knowledge, test changes and decide when they are ready for more responsibility. Nova is that 24/7 operations team.”

Typewise sits above a company’s customer-service and business applications. When a request arrives, an AI supervisor identifies the customer’s intent and routes the case to an appropriate specialist agent. That agent gathers information from some of the more than 3,500 connected knowledge bases and systems, such as customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, billing, commerce and logistics platforms. It can perform many of the steps to resolve a request, including checking an order, changing a booking, updating an address or issuing a refund.

Companies authorize connections and describe in plain language what the AI should do, avoiding the need to program every workflow, Typewise said. Administrators can set automation limits and require approval for sensitive or high-value actions. Each action is logged for auditing. Cases requiring judgment or authorization are transferred to a human employee through Typewise’s inbox or an existing help desk, with the conversation and context attached.

Nova initially drafts replies alongside human employees, allowing teams to review its work before assigning it more request types. Typewise said an initial use case can go live within minutes, although customers typically expand deployments over several days.

Typewise said AI agents now handle 70% of incoming inquiries across email, chat and WhatsApp, and fully resolve between 75% and 85% of them at HealGreen LLC, a Hamburg telemedicine platform.

Beurer North America LP autonomously resolves 65% of incoming inquiries, with a success rate above 90%, according to Typewise. The average handling time for human-fielded requests fell from 12 minutes to six.

Typewise said customer data can be hosted in Europe or the U.S., with zero data retention and no customer information used for model training. Nova is available immediately and uses outcome-based pricing: Fully resolved requests incur a full charge, partial resolutions cost half and unresolved requests are free.

Under a promotion ending today, new customers get 1,000 resolutions and three free months.

Image: Typewise