{"id":3751,"date":"2017-02-27T20:27:39","date_gmt":"2017-02-27T20:27:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/workfit-raises-5-5-million-seed-round-to-be-your-ai-meeting-assistant.html"},"modified":"2017-02-27T20:27:39","modified_gmt":"2017-02-27T20:27:39","slug":"workfit-raises-5-5-million-seed-round-to-be-your-ai-meeting-assistant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/workfit-raises-5-5-million-seed-round-to-be-your-ai-meeting-assistant.html","title":{"rendered":"Workfit raises $5.5 million seed round to be your AI meeting assistant"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

Conversational AI is pushing deeper into enterprise with Workfit<\/a>, a new startup promising to make conference call follow-ups and mid-meeting CRM updates as easy as playing a song or checking the weather on Google Home or Amazon Echo. Battery Ventures<\/a>, Greycroft Partners<\/a>, Salesforce Ventures<\/a> and a number of angels joined together to finance a $5.5 million seed investment in the startup.<\/p>\n

Workfit\u2019s announcement is underscored by a general uptick in activity around conversational AI for enterprise. Amazon\u2019s Alexa, perhaps the most enterprise-friendly of the popular conversational tools available today, boasts integrations with companies like Hipchat<\/a> and Sisense<\/a> for both team collaboration and data recall. Of course, the reality is that most meetings are not limited to a single conference room and even fewer have an Echo listening in.<\/p>\n

Workfit\u2019s assistant Eva\u00a0listens\u00a0in to\u00a0business meetings and lends managers a helping hand by highlighting important action items.\u00a0Aside from just coordinating follow-ups, Eva will plug into your CRM du jour to allow for voice-driven updates. This means that you can update the status of a given sale and even pull or update data entries. Workfit integrates with major meeting hosting players like BlueJeans<\/a>, WebEx<\/a> and Zoom<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The Workfit platform<\/p>\n

Other tools like the recently launched Chorus.ai <\/a>and Cogito<\/a>\u00a0are\u00a0respectively more squarely focused on using AI to boost\u00a0sales and improve\u00a0the effectiveness of customer support. Though Chorus.ai will join conference calls with roughly the same mechanism as Workfit, and both will highlight key action items, Workfit has no problem playing an\u00a0active part in\u00a0meetings.<\/p>\n

In lieu of fading to the background, the team behind Workfit wants enterprise users to lend the assistant a hand by explicitly calling out follow-ups. The workflow might sound unpolished, but the company argues that summarizing key points during a meeting is a best practice, regardless of the presence of an AI, to ensure all human participants are on the same page. Eva will do as much in the background as she can, but has no problem being recognized in the spirit of X.ai<\/a>\u2018s personal scheduling assistant Amy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith consumer AI, if you play the wrong song that\u2019s ok,\u201d asserts Workfit CEO\u00a0Omar Tawakol. \u201cBut wrong info in a pipeline on Salesforce, that\u2019s not ok.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Workfit<\/p>\n

Workfit team left to right: Geish, David, Ahmad and Omar<\/p>\n

This is the logic behind why the startup is focusing so heavily on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), even bringing on Ahmad Abdulkader, a former leader within Facebook\u2019s applied AI group. Though working on ASR in 2017 isn\u2019t necessarily sexy, there are some gains to be made by building a system for a specific use case \u2014\u00a0in this situation a lot of meeting language.<\/p>\n

When asked about sales, the Workfit team told TechCrunch that they hadn\u2019t secured any sales yet and that they still considered it early days. Tawakol\u2019s previous experience driving data management platform BlueKai to a $400 million Oracle acquisition<\/a> in 2014 undoubtedly helped streamline the fundraising process. Battery Ventures was an early investor in BlueKai.<\/a><\/p>\n

From here the team wants individual project managers to lead the charge in driving adoption. Once Workfit sees that a group of users is developing at a given company, it will jump in to try to close an enterprise sale.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Featured Image: Neil Webb\/Getty Images<\/small><\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunchIt\/~3\/TjugBXhcO9s\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Conversational AI is pushing deeper into enterprise with Workfit, a new startup promising to make conference call follow-ups and mid-meeting CRM updates as easy as playing a song or checking <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-3751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enterprise-software","tag-enterprise"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t