Agentz: Birth of an AI Assistant

Six years ago serial entrepreneur and former Yellowpages com executive Ketan Shah pitched us on his idea for an AI-powered chatbot for small business websites. At the time Dialog didn't exist even as a vague concept.

While basic chatbots were seemingly everywhere, back in 2018, Shah's Agentz idea was more ambitious and a few years ahead of its time. The common chatbot or "virtual assistant" at the time was like a glorified IVR experience, perfunctory, bureaucratic and rarely helpful. It was a checkbox for the marketing team.

Chatbots were also perceived largely as a commodity. AI and generative AI in particular have changed all that and opened up a wide range of new possibilities both for the product and users.

Wife's Dental Practice

Shah was inspired by a very personal need. His wife, who operated a small dental practice, was overwhelmed by routine tasks: managing appointments, handling patient inquiries and other front desk responsibilities. These mundane but necessary tasks reduced the time she could spend with patients/clients, a critical aspect of any service business. Staff shortages, hiring challenges and rising wages compounded the problem.

Shah recognized his wife's predicament is shared by countless other service-based SMBs, which led directly to the creation of Agentz. His vision was an automated virtual assistant that could take over routine tasks, allowing business owners to focus on delivering higher-quality service.

Product-market fit took a little while. But from the outset, Agentz has sought to improve productivity, enhance customer experiences and reduce costs for small business owners. The company now says its mission is to empower SMBs through accessible, affordable and effective AI solutions.

From Idea to Platform

What began as a solution for a single dental practice grew into a platform designed to serve SMBs across multiple industries. By 2019, the Agentz team was refining the product to address challenges faced by most small businesses: limited time, rising costs and growing customer expectations for 24/7 service. The platform evolved to support multi-channel communication and integrated with third party technologies, including those in the home services industry. By 2021, Agentz was enabling businesses to manage customer interactions across SMS, social media, and Google. It was also serving multiple industries, including automotive, law, dentistry and healthcare, real estate, plumbing, roofing, mortgage and electrical services.

Pandemic Accelerant

When COVID-19 disrupted businesses worldwide, small businesses were hit especially hard. Many faced staff shortages while simultaneously fielding a larger number of customer inquiries, straining their capacity to respond. Agentz enhanced its assistant with natural language processing, making it easier to handle customer queries. It also introduced self-signup, streamlining onboarding. By 2022, Agentz had added industry-specific solutions, creating a more customized out-of-the-box experience for businesses across multiple verticals.

In 2023, Agentz integrated generative AI, including ChatGPT, which allowed for further personalization, more natural interaction and more sophisticated task automation. This marked a significant leap forward. Unlike most "traditional" AI assistants, that generally respond to questions, Agentz’s AI seeks to proactively guide customers to desired outcomes.

Multiple studies show that service businesses generally do a poor job of responding to inbound calls and other inquiries – let alone in a timely way – often leaving considerable money on the table. This can harm business reputations and rankings. A meaningful percentage negative online reviews express frustration over poor responsiveness to customer inquiries.

A now eight year old study (though still widely cited) found that 62% of phone calls to small businesses go unanswered. Even if the precise numbers have shifted in the interim, newer research confirms that SMBs still fail to respond to leads in a timely way.

AI chatbots like Agentz are one obvious response to this problem. They can ensure that leads are captured and customers get their questions answered, regardless of the time of day or particular channel they use. There's a similar customer service angle, which can help with customer satisfaction and retention. Great service leads to an improved reputation, more word-of-mouth and better online visibility.

Long-Term, Sustainable Growth

Shah is committed to long-term, sustainable growth. He says he will remain self-funded rather than seek outside investors. This decision has allowed the team to focus on organic innovation and real customer needs rather than meeting artificial SaaS metrics targets: "magic numbers."

As Agentz continues to evolve, Shah's team is working on expanding and boosting voice assistant capabilities, increasing language options and building out industry-specific automations. One can easily imagine, with the advent of agentic ai, much more complex automations that integrate chat with sales, marketing and other operational tools and systems.

We're at the very beginning of the generative AI era, which will be potentially transformative for businesses that choose to embrace it.