HACKER Q&A
📣 robin_sidekick

Advice on AI as a personal assistant, for customer support use cases


Hey HN community, we are building an AI assistant, specifically focused on being the single point of contact between a customer and any business, whose product or service that customer might be using. Customers understandably are already quite frustrated when they reach out to a business for support, because in most cases, they have had an unpleasant experience (either bill surprise, or product or device failure, or routine maintenance) that they wish to rectify. Now, most of us don't have a pleasant experience with support. Besides the time we have to take out to reaching support, navigating IVR, or navigating self-help options, talking to an agent (or a bot) and eventually reaching a human. A lot of companies are building agent co-pilot solutions for enterprises, to empower their agents, and fortify their self-serve options. We believe the incremental opportunity here is to focus on the consumer side and provide an AI assistant (always available) that you can speak to any time, and convey the problem you are facing for which you seek a resolution. And, this AI agent will go about figuring out, how to drive that issue to resolution, whether it's through a businesses self-serve options, their IVR, talking to a bot, or a human agent, whatever it takes. Wanted to seek the community's advice here, from a capability standpoint (we are building a prototype) if others have attempted this and found some fundamental limitations with agentic workflows today, and also from a idea standpoint, whether you believe, if this existed, it would be something you would pay for, to not have to deal with any business support directly ever again. thanks!


  👤 padolsey Accepted Answer ✓
The space seems saturated and a bit confused. Sierra.ai comes to mind. I have tried building a product around this need myself (tiptap.chat) but it's taking a bunch of marketing to convince people. IMHO having a sufficiently context-rich bot like this on any resource-heavy website or service is a net-win. But the procedural chatbot era of the last ten years – those little annoying bubbles in the bottom right corner – has soured peoples' perceptions. :/

Best of luck if you try building something!