AI is hot… real hot.

It’s something that Calgary-based Optave AI Solutions is diving into, but they’ve gone beyond having AI just answer questions.

Co-founders Oriol Martinez and Carlos Almeida want artificial intelligence to guide humans through the entire support/problem-resolution process.  Their system helps identify the problems, supervises the agents, generates tasks and helps to proactively deal with problems that may pop up.

“We’re not just using AI to answer questions … we’re basically building an entire platform that is able to automate those processes that are required to fulfill the request from the user,” Martinez said.

“It’s a fully integrated system that is not just responding using AI powers, but also triggering actions and providing a full suite of services that our customers can integrate with.”

Martinez had worked for years at Electronic Arts, specifically on the popular Sims franchise, before joining up with Almeida. Almeida was head of product support for a customer management system recently sold in Latin America.

His path with AI began back in university, when he was responsible for the artificial intelligence in games they were developing. When he was head of product at the CRM, he said he saw firsthand where AI could take customer relations.

“I saw the importance of artificial intelligence for customers, and when these new advances started appearing, I knew how it obviously could impact and change this entire industry,” he said.

“I’ve jumped straight away for starting a company.”

Almeida gave the example of a site recommending places to visit while someone’s in a new city. After the user answers a couple of questions activities it likes, it can rank suggested activities based on user likes. This can be overseen or adjusted by a human agent, based on the responses that show up; and the agent can also make suggestions to help the AI.

“This will increase the productivity of the agents many folds, and after that, the tasks from the agents will already be created,” he said.

Catalyzer is full of connections

Martinez said that one of the great things about the Alberta Catalyzer – Velocity program is that it already provides founders with great local tech ecosystem connections. Whether that’s legal advice, grants, or even connecting with investors, the Velocity cohort is exposed to different parts of moving a company forward, he said.

“This is great because we speed up our process of learning, and because we’re opening a company here for the first time, it’s great to have someone that has already helped many entrepreneurs to do it before, to help us,” he said.

From here, the pair just recently signed on a large travel company and they’ll be delivering the first part of that system in early 2024. They’re focused on making sure they can be a top-notch partner for that company, Martinez said.  

As they continue working with that system, Martinez and Almeida said they also have their eyes on fundraising to continue to expand their services to other organizations.

“This first customer allows us to grow our operation and we hope that soon we’ll fundraise and we’ll be able to grow even faster,” said Almeida.