Career Karma’s Ruben Harris and Timur Meyster have co-founded an AI-powered platform that aims to improve customer experience teams.
Since 2018, Harris and Meyster have been building out customer experience teams through Career Karma, a platform designed for people to break into the tech industry. It has been tasked with answering numerous calls to assist its users on job training and questions related to their career trajectory.
Beyond Career Karma, Harris has had several conversations with customer experience leaders to have a deeper understanding of what is needed to create more optimal solutions.
This materialized into an artificial intelligence (AI) agent, which had already been deployed at Career Karma.
“On nights and weekends or on holidays, people could come to Career Karma and still have some kind of human feeling interaction that guided them into job training programs and what we learned is that other companies and industries are going to also have to do that as well,” Harris told AFROTECH™.
OutRival
With backing from Y Combinator, Top Tier Capital Partners, Initialized Capital, Kapor Capital, Emerson Collective, GV, Jack Altman, among others, this has resulted in the launch of OutRival, which now owns Career Karma and operates as its own product for customer experience teams.
As for details around the latest platform, it will deploy a conversational AI agent, replacing the need for traditional solutions such as interactive voice response-systems and business process outsourcing. By allowing the agent to take on habitual tasks, it will prompt teams to be able to lean further into relationship building.
“What led to where we are today is realizing that a lot of these people that we helped get into jobs in the future are still friends with us now. And every company that we’ve worked with or every school that we’ve worked with has recognized that and admissions teams or the humans on our team represented their voice in their organization,” Harris explained. “And AI is transforming everything… They’re gonna have not only humans representing their voice like we have had, but they’re gonna have to have some kind of AI agent that’s representing the organization’s voice.”
In practice, OutRival will allow a user to create a general prompt that will allow them to write their conditions in order for a workflow to be generated. Selections will also include include personality type, gender, and voice provider.
“After the admissions leader just speaks what they want to get done or types out what they wanna get done, they can press generate and OutRival will generate a workflow that is intuitive and easy to understand and visualize and decide whether they wanna deploy it into production and if they deploy it into production, you can see the analytics, you could observe it, you could collaborate with the IT team versus your IT team having to do this all by themselves,” Harris mentioned.
OutRival will also consider intricate legal and financial questions and will include enterprise-grade analytics, compliance features, and monitoring tools to meet enterprise security standards.
Though its initial focus is higher education, OutRival revealed it’s already began supporting clients in human resources, real estate, and travel.
Addressing AI Hesitations
An optimistic tone about OutRival’s offerings is what Harris hopes for. He aims to dismantle fears around OutRival’s AI and doubles down on it being an intuitive tool requiring no manual that will democratize the technology by empowering non-engineering teams.
“If you think about the non-engineering teams, they’re the ones closest to the customer that understand it the most. So, but a lot of times they’re not at the table at the AI strategy conversation or the strategy conversation in general actually building the tools,” Harris said. “So, OutRival will actually helps companies bring the non-engineering teams to the table or the customer experience teams to the table to collaboratively create solutions that help the business make money.”
Furthermore, Harris doesn’t intend for OutRival to replace the need for a human workforce. Instead, he aims for it to serve as a collaborative tool to increase human potential.
“OutRival is essentially that tool that can help you create beings that report to you that can do things on your behalf,” Harris detailed.
