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Back to Inside the AI Startup Making Customer Support 65% Cheaper, with Jesse Zhang.

How Does Decagon's AI Customer Support Work?

Jesse Zhang says Decagon's customer support AI is built, tested, and monitored inside the product, so the customer owns the results and the process. People from Decagon still stay on the account, because an enterprise rollout is not a handoff of software to go use alone. The build is not code an engineer has to reconfigure, and not a change Decagon has to come back and make.

Sierra gets into enterprises and has scaled its team quickly. Sierra's deployment is closer to Palantir: forward-deployed engineers who tell the customer they can solve the problem. A do-it-for-you model fits a large company that lacks the talent to move fast. The same model makes less sense as AI models get better, because agentic AI lets people on the customer's own team do more. Decagon keeps the white-glove staffing and points the product at ownership. Where Salesforce and Google are the default tools, the deals come from a product the customer's team controls.

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Inside the AI Startup Making Customer Support 65% Cheaper ·

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More from this episode

  1. When Did Decagon's New Office Feel Too Big?Jesse Zhang felt Decagon's new office was too big the moment the team moved in.
  2. How Did Decagon Grow From 50 to 500 People?Jesse Zhang says Decagon went from roughly 50 or 60 people to 500 in about the last year, close to a 10x jump. A year ago the headcount was something like 50.
  3. Why Does Jesse Zhang Call Saturday Wife Day?Jesse Zhang keeps Saturday as wife day because he and his co-founder are in every day except Saturday, and that one day has to stay free of work.
  4. Why Is Zero to One Harder Than Scaling?Jesse Zhang says the zero-to-one phase is by far the hardest stage of a company, and he calls it awful.
  5. How Did Decagon Exit the Idea Maze in Three Weeks?Jesse Zhang says Decagon got out of the idea maze in roughly three weeks, maybe a bit longer.
  6. How Many People Have Left Decagon to Start Companies?Jesse Zhang says very few people have left Decagon, a few have gone to start their own companies, and even in a downturn it will still be pretty easy to start…
  7. Should I Know My Co-founder for Five Years?Jesse Zhang says wanting the same things out of life matters more than knowing a co-founder for five years.
  8. Can 200 People Eat Dinner Together?Jesse Zhang says a team of 200 people cannot eat dinner together anymore. Catering has one clear value: everyone eats at the same time.
  9. When Does Office Politics Start?Jesse Zhang says office politics starts as soon as there is a team.

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