Decagon

“If you talk to a Decagon customer, they're actually slashing their customer support costs by up to 80%, and not only that, are they, they're seeing deflection rates go up from 30% to anywhere from 60 to 80%, and their CSATs, their customer satisfaction scores,…”

“However, the bottleneck, I realize, at least for a lot of the work that I do, is business context, right? There's a lot of context for every idea around, okay, the constraints that we have, the goals that we're going for, and things like that that is difficult…”

“Performance latency and accuracy is definitely the driving factor for most of this, right? Cost is a nice benefit in that, you know surprisingly, this is one of the few like tasks where you kind of get all the things for free, right? Like we don't actually hav…”

“So we think for jobs like that, Frontier models that are very smart, that can try out a lot of things, make a lot of sense.”

“Now, to the point of, Does that mean CRMs go away? I mean, my answer is no, because if you had you know, if you have a company today where your concierge is a human being, they still write your info on a CRM so that they can track it for later. So, and I think…”

“All the AI coding startups are hiring like crazy. You know, they're like the most sophisticated users, presumably, of these models, and they are hiring like crazy.”

“The labs themselves will have more application capabilities, but those will be fairly general. Like they're, you can maybe build general agents that can do this thing or that thing. But for a lot of these like core verticals, like ours, our thesis is that, you…”

“There are still things, I don't quite yet think we're at the point where we can have the AI agents make decisions on what to build, and kind of have that the taste of, is this done yet? Right? So we can outsource a lot of specific execution steps, but I don't …”

“If we ran our entire business exclusively on frontier models, I would care a lot about costs, and I would think a lot about that, but once you're already, once you've already made the jump to saying, okay, now, now we know how to think about open source models…”

“Everybody has access to these tools, and so if our competitors are going to use them and build more things, we need to build more things, right? If somebody else said, oh, here's our roadmap, and now we can get through it in, you know, a third of the time, and…”

“Automating things doesn't necessarily result in just kind of people laying off their entire teams.”

“And actually over time, the number of tokens we're using per conversation has gone up because we're actually doing more model calls to make the quality better, to do more checks, to parallelize more things.”

“The capability of models today is far greater than they are being used for within the enterprise, right?”

“There are definitely scenarios where people use their BPOs a lot less or Don't need the BPO anymore.”

“When we have open source open source models that we want to fine tune, we find that if we can clearly tailor our evals to customer outcomes, it's way better than just looking at, like, loss curves over time, right?”

“First of all, very few companies, if any, can do what Palantir does, which is like close massive deals off the bat. And like, it's kind of worth it to spend all that effort.”

“I think a common misconception that people have is, you know, fine tuning is, is a way to like customize it for that customer. In fact, most of the fine tuning we do is like customizing it for our use case, like the customer service use case.”

“Our most recent customer actually turned off of Sierra to come to Decagon”

“And so I think for the next few years, that's probably going to be you know, the primary thing that these models need to be able to work.”

“So today, 90% of our workflow is on open source.”

“Language is a lot easier with AI. So in the past, maybe a blocker would be, oh, my language just doesn't work in, or my app just doesn't work in German or pick your language. But now it's a lot easier to adapt to your app. So I think for those reasons, interna…”

“We don't just build our set of open source models and then, you know, it's done, we can move on to our next thing, and maybe we'll revisit this in two years. You often need to train new models all the time because As the frontier changes, as the capability of …”

“Being able to have teams that are so kind of disparate from like a function perspective all working together kind of one kind of needs people in the office because everybody's kind of jamming on ideas together”

“Generally in these conversations, we're not really having to convince people to like, Invest in this space. It's, like, more of, hey, we're the right approach for you, so you can partner with us.”

“The other profile we had a lot of in the early days were just like Ivy league athletes, I guess. And those profiles were kind of a good foundation for the group.”

“Our view, the reason why we've kind of built so horizontally is that we believe that in our space, the winners are going to be horizontal. There's just not that much that is like super verticalized that where like you could see a pure vertical solution survivi…”

“One of the things that we really try to do is, you know, kind of take the project and piecemeal it. So we're not just deploying across every surface area, every use case at once.”

“The thing that we built and we kind of built this intentionally from the start was not an agent that does customer support well, but rather an agent that follows business process well. And executing on operational workflows, doing sales lead qualifications, an…”

“But I do think we passed a threshold in like, I want to say about a year ago where a bunch of smaller companies or like new application companies, as they were trying to figure out, how do I really build an AI? Without just being a wrapper on top of open AI, t…”

“I mean, I think like Decagon has done an amazing job at this. Like, I think they go in, they basically evangelize that they're doing customer support better than anyone else. And then they're very good about saying, here are the benchmarks that we are signing …”