For a business that helps people to become more emotionally intelligent It’s not surprising its another emotional day. As KAI celebrates its 3^rd Birthday, we reflect on the KAI journey and what it has taken to make an AI start up like ours ready for scale up. (hint: a lot of hard work and a little bit of good fortune!).

Way before people thought AI was cool…

We knew AI was going to transform the future, but it was the unique preserve of the FAANGs. We wanted to democratise it and get it into the hands of ordinary folks! As customer guys we were frustrated by the lack of insight from customer conversations and sub-optimal improvement cycles and actionability for customer facing teams. We bet we could go deeper and be more useful if we took a different approach to the most modern speech analytics tools, let alone the analogue side by side listening version.

We also bet that the future of interaction was going to be increasingly video-based and that this would give much richer insight. We focussed on higher value conversations in global pharma and targeted the largest global players. More latterly we have extended to patient-doctor interactions in the NHS.

No we didn't know Covid was coming, we were fortunate that it accelerated the trend to remote video conversations with Teams and Zoom. And of course, this shaped the type of company we are.

The table below shows the evolution over three years on a number of key dimensions. From Year 0 – when KAI is born; Year 1 – as a toddler as we start to engage with the real world and find out what it’s really like; To Year 2 – when we went through growing pains but started to mature.

Excited – Frustrated – Enlightened

What’s interesting on reflection is the personal emotional ark, which is remarkably similar across all three founders. We chose to bootstrap the business. I still believe that was the right choice as it made us be smarter. Going fast at the beginning and getting something that could be used to gain market feedback was invaluable. However, the pain and frustration of knowing what we needed to do, but not being able to get it done as fast as we wanted tested us all. We’ve broken the back of that now, which why frustration has given way to more positive emotions.

AI-Aware

The market reaction to AI has been really interesting to observe, as clients have become increasingly AI-aware. When we first showed our product to clients, people found it scary – firstly what is currently hidden will be exposed. What if I get found out? We quickly learnt that those with growth mindsets would love what we do, those with closed mindsets would hate it.

The debate quickly moved onto a discussion about bias. When we were evaluated properly over a year a go by one of the biggest pharma businesses the chief privacy officer handed us her hand-crafted AI evaluation form that included questions about bias. Fast forward a year and another large global pharma business slowed the project down because we needed to formally go through their AI-Bias Committee. We do worry about bias, in that we use datasets that have actively tried to eliminate bias and we minimise it wherever possible. That said, we know the bias in personal evaluation of conversations, unless done by an independent expert is far greater than our fact-based AI.

AI for Good

Starting out, we had lots of questions about potential applications. Some positive – could KAI help us hold more effective management meetings? Yes probably, but not now. Some exploitative – can it tell me if the other person is lying? Yes probably, but we’re not interested in that.

AI is about intent. And our intent is to use AI as a source for good in the world. Indeed, KAI’s purpose is to help humans be more human and have better conversations. This should lead to better experiences and outcomes for both parties. So, in the discussions about regulation, we believe it should be incumbent upon organisations to have a charter and policies that hard-wire positive intent and embed explainability. This transparency isn’t how the biggest tech companies have behaved in the past. If you know you’re doing something bad for humanity, you shouldn’t be doing it!

Year 3 – Growing Wings!

As we turn 3, we look forward with hope and expectation. The AI market is moving very fast, so we have to too! We’re fortunate our chosen narrow EQ-focused AI application is exactly the sort that can leverage Large Language Models, but not be made obsolete. Our value is in our unique data and models that sit above this capability. We’re upgrading our operating model for scale. And raising £5M in our first proper round to accelerate growth.

We've just starting our first projects in Japan and China. We're scaling globally with three of the Top ten pharma businesses. We're actively seeking new partners in US.

If you’re interested in getting involved in a fast-moving AI scale-up with an intent to do good in the world we’d love to hear from you. Warning – it may get emotional!

	Year 0 KAI is Born	Year 1 Engaging with the Real World	Year 2 Growing Pains
Overriding Emotion	Excitement / Adventure	Frustration / Overwhelmed	Enlightenment / Achievable
Focus	Revealing Hidden Human Insights	Building for global enterprises	Emotional Intelligence
Activities	Building MVP iteratively Measuring conversation quality Combining three types of AI	Multi-lingual Re-architecting/de-bugging Adding features/UI (slowly)	Automation Integration (KAI Assistant) Deeper Insight
Clients	Pioneers who want to change status quo	European clients, Learning & Development, Pilots	Global pharma launches NHS
Applications	Sales Conversations & Training	Sales, Coach coaches (GROW)	Sales, GROW, MSL, Dr-Patient
Market Reactions	Intrigued but AI is scary!	AI Bias? Recording Calls?	AI aware - ChatGPT hype.
Team	Completely virtual small Few seniors with uni grads Capability & Energy	Upgrade capability and increase team 1 Partner	Add business dev’t deepen data science Still lean! 2 Partners
Finance	Lean, our own capital & sweat!	Seed funding. Get external offers but choose “Friends and family”.	Product-Market fit proven. Still boot-strapped. Time to accelerate and raise properly.
Key Learns	Signals from noise not easy Different conversations need different models Accuracy is key for actionability	Internal use easier and is route to external use. Architecting right from start would have been better (but we didn’t know what we were building and early market feedback was key)	Don’t work with Teams! Our core is we help people become more emotionally intelligent. Work backwards from outcomes.

Year 3 - Growing wings!

We’re now full of hope. Upgrading our operating model for scale. We're raising £5M in our first proper round to accelerate growth. We've just starting our first projects in Japan and China. We're scaling globally with three of the Top ten pharma businesses. We're actively seeking new partners in US.

If you’re interested in getting involved in a fast-moving AI scale-up we’d love to hear from you. Click here to Contact Us.

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