Celebrities have been getting involved in the LA startup community for some time now, but very few of them do more than lend their names — or checkbooks — to tech ventures.
William Adams took it a step further. Yesterday, Adams, best known as Will.i.am, took the stage at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference to reveal exactly what his startup, i.am+, had been working on.
Its first product, Omega, is a virtual assistant for enterprise customer engagement that can learn from multiple information streams. He also revealed that telecom giant Deutsche Telekom AG — the parent company of T-Mobile — has been using Omega to power an AI customer support chatbot since July.
“We set out with the ambitious goal of building even closer and more personal relationships with our customers in the digital channel by developing an intuitive, truly conversational one-stop digital customer service touch point and a more seamless customer journey,” said Christian von Reventlow, chief product and innovation officer at Deutsche Telekom, in a statement. “Leveraging [i.am+] Omega, we were able to offer customers a conversational and intelligent digital assistant. We ultimately want Tinka — our digital assistant at T-Mobile Austria — to listen and learn from our customers to deliver superior service in a highly personalized fashion.”
In addition to the product news, Will.i.am announced for the first time that the company, initially launched in 2012 to focus on consumer electronics, has raised $117 million to date. Its most recent round of $89 million came from a group including Salesforce Ventures, and was closed in March of this year.
Will.i.am noted that the customer support aspect is just the tip of the spear for the Hollywood-based startup, which plans to build out several more enterprise voice AI products moving forward.
