• Zhang co-founded Decagon, a generative AI platform for automating every aspect of the customer support funnel with Ashwin Sreenivas.
  • Decagon, which sells primarily to enterprises and “high-growth” startups, develops what amount to customer support chatbots.

OUR TAKE
Decagon isn’t just a tech demo, but a utility designed to solve real-world customer support challenges. Its generative AI platform combines a deep technical background and a deep understanding of customer needs, enabling the company to bring innovation and efficiency gains to the customer support space.
–Revel Cheng, BTW reporter

Along with Ashwin Sreenivas, Zhang co-founded Decagon, a generative AI platform to automate various aspects of customer support channels.

What happened

Decagon, which sells primarily to enterprises and “high-growth” startups, develops what amount to customer support chatbots. The bots, driven by first- and third-party AI models, are fine-tunable, capable of ingesting a businesses’ knowledge bases and historical customer conversations to gain greater contextual understanding of issues.

Zhang is well aware of how stiff the competition is in the market for AI-powered customer support. By one estimate, the sector could be worth $2.89 billion by 2032, up from $308.4 million in 2022.

Both Zhang and Sreenivas have technical backgrounds, having worked at both startups and larger tech orgs. Zhang was a software engineer at Google before becoming a trader at Citadel, the market-making firm, and founding Lowkey, a social gaming platform that was acquired by Pokémon GO maker Niantic in 2021. Sreenivas was a deployment strategist at Palantir before co-founding computer vision startup Helia, which he sold to unicorn Scale AI in 2020.

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Why it’s important

“As we started building, we realized that ‘human-like bots’ entails a lot, since human agents are capable of complex reasoning, taking actions and analyzing conversations after the fact,” Zhang said. “From talking to customers, it’s clear that while everyone wants greater operational efficiency, it cannot come at the expense of customer experience — no one likes chatbots.”

At the same time, Decagon is committed to sustainability and social responsibility, always taking into account environmental and social impacts when designing and promoting its technological solutions. The company is committed to bringing positive impact to society through technological innovation and creating more value for customers, partners and employees.

In the future, Decagon plans to further expand the capabilities and applicability of its platform to meet changing market needs and technical challenges. Through continued R&D and collaboration with the industry, Decagon will continue to lead and drive AI innovation in customer support, ensuring a seamless, efficient customer experience during interactions.