Skynet has arrived.
Bye Bye English, hello AI voice calls
Hi everyone,
Watch this 69-second video and tell me you aren’t scared of the future. Welcome to the year of AI Voice.
This video was released by Eleven Labs, one of the leading AI voice companies that has raised over $350M in the past few years. In the video, you see an AI voice agent call a hotel and realize that it’s talking to another AI assistant. Then, the two AI assistants switch into their own robot language to continue the conversation in a “faster, more efficient” modality. Bye bye English!
Today’s newsletter is an AI highlight reel of some of the more interesting developments in the past couple months. Voice is a big theme that is gaining more traction.
How many phone calls do distributors make with customers or suppliers to get simple information that could be replaced by an AI voice agent?
Today’s topics:
AI voice calls
Klarna CEO on why they used AI to replace Salesforce
Could AI be the ultimate B2B Marketplace growth hack?
Winsupply Invests in an AI Company
Grainger: B2B Customer Service Automation
Full Story from Klarna CEO about Replacing Salesforce with Internal AI
Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski recently published a Twitter thread providing more context on why and how Klarna replaced their Salesforce seats with internally developed AI.
He explains that their primary objective wasn’t about cost-savings to replace SaaS with internal tools. Instead, the primary goal was to harmonize fragmented data into one system, one AI brain. He explains here:
So, we decided to start consolidating; to put things together, connect our knowledge, and remove the silos. The side consequence of this was the liquidation of SaaS—not all of them, but a lot of them. And not for the license fees, even though those savings have been nice, but for the unification and standardisation of our knowledge and data.
We store knowledge of Klarna in SaaS, why and what (docs), plans (slides, tickets), performance (sheets), relations (CRM), people (ERP, HR) —all siloed different, creating an unnavigable web of knowledge that requires tons of Klarna specific expertise to operate and utilize.
So, the inspiration for their internal AI development was to connect all these different data silos and create new AI-powered infrastructure that was able to digest all the information in the company. Once they created the unified data infrastructure, they could then build AI-powered point solutions on top, which is what replaced Salesforce.
AI = the B2B Marketplace Growth Hack?
An interesting post on LinkedIn recently highlighted the prospect of using AI to reinvigorate new marketplace business models.