In this episode, I speak with Swapnil Jain, Founder & CEO of Observe.AI, an AI-powered platform focused on automating customer service and contact centers. Observe.AI helps enterprises enhance efficiency by leveraging AI-powered automation to evaluate customer interactions, support agents and sellers in real-time, and boost customer satisfaction.
The episode explores the evolution of AI in customer support and how enterprises are adapting to an AI-first world. Swapnil dives into the future of contact centers, predicting that within five years, over 50% of support calls will be fully automated by AI. He discusses the challenges traditional BPOs face, why many will struggle to survive without an AI-first strategy, and how businesses can leverage AI to shift customer service from a cost center to a revenue-generating function.
We discuss the convergence of voice, chat, and AI agents in customer support and why agentic AI is a game-changer for real-time automation. Swapnil shares his own leadership evolution, reflecting on the intensity required to build a category-defining company in AI. He also offers insights into the shifting landscape of enterprise AI adoption, the role of small vs. large language models, and how AI is reshaping human-computer interactions.
Enjoy!
Timestamps
* 2:40 – Starting an AI company pre-LLM
* 9:12 – AI’s impact on human-heavy services and industries
* 17:38 – Agentic AI breakdown
* 31:52 – How to measure the accuracy of your AI agents
* 37:40 – Leadership lessons for managing an international workforce
Highlighted Excerpts
SWAPNIL: It is a huge innovator’s dilemma for us to say, “How should we manage?” And I think our position is that we have decided to disrupt ourselves. The decision we had to make was should we disrupt ourselves or wait to be disrupted.
I want to be the one who automates my own seats and then reduces my revenue from my human products. So we have taken a hard call. We’re okay cannibalizing sort of our human products if we need to, but we are going all in on voice AI. We believe that. We are going to disrupt ourselves before someone else disrupts us.
SWAPNIL: We’re all talking about how AI agents are going to take over, and AI agents will do a lot of customer service interactions. We believe in that too. But we also believe in a world where five years later, you will have a lot of simpler queries, simpler customer service calls, and chat should be automated by AI. But we do believe there will be a part of those conversations that will be done by human agents.
There will be a lot more complex conversations, sensitive conversations, and conversations that require human empathy, right? So we see a hybrid world: AI agents handling most of the queries, and human agents handling more complex queries.
