Voice was the unlock to many of the operations that are really needed to move the world.
If we talk about supply chain,
This is not a supply chain specific problem that we are solving.
It's actually an enterprise coordination problem.
The bigger problem in the coming years for like voice here is really knowing when to talk and when not to talk.
So it's understanding all these nuances in the work more than making the latency faster or making the voices more realistic, which I don't think.
That's the limiting factor today.
I feel like Happy Robot has always been at the forefront of kind of humanness.
Do you want the customers to know they're talking to an AI?
Where does that go?
I think it's super important that Most AI demos happen in controlled environments.
The real challenge begins when AI has to operate inside large organizations, where information is fragmented across systems teams emails, phone calls and workflows that have evolved over years.
Logistics and supply chains have become an early proving ground for these systems.
Success depends not just on model intelligence, but on coordination, context and the ability to execute work reliably in the real world.
Anish Acharya and Olivia Moore speak with Pablo Palafox and Luis Parag from Happy Robot about voice AI, enterprise agents and the challenges of deploying AI in operationally complex industries.
Olivia and I are here with the two incredibly talented founders of Happy Robot, Pablo and Luis.
Welcome, guys.
Thank you, guys.
Super excited.
Very excited to have you.
We're overdue to have this conversation.
Well look, we're here to kind of talk about the company and the incredible journey that you've been on.
I know when we first met you there had been a lot of buzz amongst YC founders and other folks about how you guys were sort of at the edge of the technology industry and then really getting a lot of pull from a go-to-market perspective.
So maybe take us back in time to the little office that had four or five people on 20th Street and what the origins of the company and the product were.
100%.
So Luis and I met on our second day of college just to set the scene.
Ever since we've been building stuff together.
Our other co-founder, Xavi, he happens to be my brother, so I've known him for a little while.
We always wanted to build something together, right?
So when we got into YC, We were looking for complex problems we could solve.
Keep in mind that Luis and I had been literally building submarines for robotics competitions to find mannequins underwater.
That is the sort of problems we were looking for.
So when we decided on solving for that complexity, we looked at what Javi was doing as a CFO of the largest olive oil distributor in the world.
He was literally moving tons of olive oil across the ocean.
And that was that complexity that drew us into logistics and supply chain.
He literally had to hire interns to call drivers to see where they were, to see where the shipment was, because Walmart was asking him where the hell is my shipment of olive oil.
So that was the sort of problems that we wanted to tackle.
And maybe you can talk about why we actually started with voice there.
I guess we took it from a very tech driven approach.
Really, the limiting factor back then was having an agent that could speak on the phone realistically.
Like we were in conferences.
Javi was like traveling all around, like asking people.
Hey, if we were to create a voice agent that could pick up the phone and sell these loads and track these shipments, would you buy it?
And it's like, dude, of course, this is a no brainer.
I just don't think you can do it.
So it was more so like, The idea market fit or product market fit made sense from the beginning.
It was more so like, can we prove ourselves?
We can build this technology.
And you know, LLMs were picking up.
We're talking about late 2023, probably.
LLMs were like decent enough.
11S was picking up with the text-to-speeds and everything was kind of working together, but we had to build something that could actually connect all the dots and actually make something work.
No,
That kind of shaped our company where we really had technology and innovation as the core of our company and always pushing this frontier and solving problems like firsthand.
So that's how we got started in the OS phase.
Amazing.
One of my favorite memories of working with you guys is actually when we first met outside a very crowded coffee shop and you called one of the live voice agents and it was seamless and it did an incredible job in a very non-ideal environment.
I feel like a lot of people might know Happy Robot from your amazing demo videos of the voice agent.
And that's definitely not all the product is, but it's an important part of it.
So maybe walk us through like why voice to start and then what voice has maybe unlocked for you more broadly?
Yeah, what Luis was saying is very important.
Voice was the unlock to many of the operations that are really needed to move the world.
If we talk about supply chain,
So when we were going to these conferences and people were like no, we are going to build these things that talk on the phone.
Negotiating rates on shipments was actually a big one.
So we actually fine-tuned LLMs back then.
We fine-tuned Mistral and Lama to actually make those voice agents faster, because otherwise using some GPT-4 at the time was extremely slow and GPT-35 at the time was like, terrible at reasoning and actually negotiating.
So we had to do a lot of tricks behind the scenes, build our own agent infrastructure, if you will, but also build our own voice agent capabilities, so that we could innovate faster than competition.
And that actually gave us a really good edge and logistics and transportation in the early beginnings.
So we started working with these freight brokers.
Then we expanded to these freight forwarders, then ocean carriers, then tracking companies and today we actually serve many of the largest companies in the space of supply chain.
We were discussing before nine of the top 10 freight brokers in the us, seven of the top 10 tracking companies, like some of the largest fleets that actually move our goods everywhere in the US, which is crazy.
Two of the largest ocean carriers, those big boats we see in the bay.
That is the sort of customers that we needed to build for and where voice was the analog for many of the operations.
So it sounds like it wasn't just voice.
It was also voice plus negotiation.
So perhaps track and trace, which is customer support and sales, which is sort of this negotiation, is where we started.
And I think that forced us to build a deeper set of technology than we otherwise would have built.
Maybe, Luis, take us on the technology journey a little bit.
Yeah, so before I tackle that, I guess one of the things that we had very clear from the beginning when you're working on the frontier of technology is really what you have to reinvent versus what already exists.
No,
And I think people might take an approach where they just reinvent everything just for the sake of it.
Some people would just wrap around anything else and be like more of a go-to-market thing.
We started tackling the limiting factor always.
And again, back then, GPT, Paolo mentioned, 3.5 was relatively fast, but not so good.
So we had to find you on the other end.
Soon enough, we realized that prompting and all these good models came out.
Prompting was good enough.
Scratch that.
Let's do that.
And always focusing on that limiting factor.
Then voices, like the background noises, like supply chain is extremely messy.
You're talking with drivers in their trucks, with the radio on and background music and noises and accents.
So always focusing on those limiting factors on the negotiation part, something we got very often was how do you prevent the bot from hallucinating a raid or like max buy?
He's like dude, i'm building this thing and it's just hallucinating max buy and it doesn't know how to negotiate.
How are you guys able to do that?
And i think it's because You don't need to show the AI what it doesn't need to see.
And I think we're very opinionated about this from the beginning where we're building these proxy servers and actually exposing to the agent all the things they need to see.
And actually max buy.
The max amount of money the bot can actually see or actually negotiate is not even exposed to the bot.
We were not exposing that.
We were doing external negotiation algorithms so that the bot would just ask for permission, literally the same way a human would like.
Hey, let me ask my boss.
And it was really just calling a tool and asking for permission to do more and we would inject back the RAID.
No,
So those sort of things, instead of just putting it in the context window and having the LLM just freestyle it, we do it in a more deterministic approach.
So it's always that mix of probabilistic plus deterministic where you need to let everything to the AI.
No,
It's building for the real world.
The real world is messy.
Those things are going to happen where someone tries to jailbreak the agent and get that max amount of money that they can get.
But we needed to build those guardrails very early on so that we could actually go to the likes of CH.
Robinson or Uber Freight and all of these big players.
That would only trust us if we actually were building real technology.
That was pretty clear for us.
We knew that we didn't want to focus on the long tail of logistics and transportation because it's a very tricky space, but we knew we needed to serve the enterprise in transportation and supply chain and logistics.
So that was very clear.
That shaped the type of products that we had to build, the type of primitives that we had to build.
It's so interesting because Happy Robot was very early to both voice AI and enterprise agents more broadly, which is great.
And also it's like the ground has been shifting under our feet because the models themselves are kind of changing and evolving so rapidly.
To your point about fine tuning versus prompting, versus kind of what to do next.
Maybe we can talk through a few of the use cases you have where it's very clear that a smarter model by itself doesn't just do it, and like why you need to buy a platform.
I can bring up the Kuninagel use case.
We recently announced our partnership with the marquee like Freight Forwarder.
Great partners.
I was having a personal lunch with their head of air.
Shout out to our friend Imve at Kuninagel at his house in Spain.
And what I learned from their operations is that This is not a simple customer service type of create a ticket in Zendesk and you're done, or you reply based on a knowledge base.
Customer support for these services.
Real economy industries like logistics transportation, freight forwarders, broader supply chain, even other industries like the telco space or the utility space.
It's not as easy as just replying based off of a knowledge base again.
There's a lot that happens afterwards that really has to get done to provide that update to the customer.
So example Freight forwarding Kuninagal.
They are serving customers, very large customers, I cannot name who, but imagine that you are a big customer of Kuninagal and you ask hey, where is my shipment?
What happens now is an agent has to turn around and go find it.
That go find it is very complex.
You need that coordination.
You need basically an orchestration agent.
That is okay.
This is an air shipment, so obviously relates to airlines.
Who is the airline on this shipment?
Okay, let me go to the airline's website.
So we have browsing agents that go and scrape the website of the airline.
Oh, bummer.
It's not there.
There's no update.
Damn, I need to go send an email.
Okay, I'm sending an email to the airline.
Two hours later, no reply.
Okay, I need to reason that if they don't reply now, I'm going to miss my SLA with my customer.
So now I need to call them.
I'm going to keep calling them until someone picks up at the airline and tell me where the hell is my shipment.
So that is the sort of coordination that we need to make happen for transportation and logistics really.
And how...
And that has shaped the type of product that we had to build at NIV.
Yeah, no, I subscribe to everything.
I guess another example on like the negotiation, which is always like how we started, and all these demos went pretty viral.
And I guess one point of how raw intelligence really wasn't enough is when you're negotiating, for example, loads and there's like 10 carriers or 10 like buyers calling at the same time, you cannot have all those agents like doing work independently, which is what happens to a certain degree with like humans.
They're on the floor and sure they shout to each other and they're like hey, this is a very hot load.
Please negotiate harder.
I have someone interested, you know?
All this information is really not in the model.
So what we started doing is, when you have inbound calls for the same load, you can start like sharing context across them.
Like, hey, I have someone, they're very interested.
Please push harder.
Like, this is a hot load.
So all this information sharing is literally what you put in the context window at any point in time.
Like general intelligence or the raw intelligence.
Doesn't really know if someone else is calling on that load.
So it's all that about, like, What do you know about the business?
What do you know about the negotiation strategies?
Maybe you know that pushing harder on this load, because it's like cross-border, is going to be better or whatnot.
That's not general intelligence.
That's very specific and different enterprises operate differently.
You cannot just build an agent, fine-tune it and have it work at any type of company.
All those nuances is...
Outside of the model is that context layer that we're trying to create, no?
And that actually, like we can talk about how actually doing the work and executing the work is what gets you that.
It's like learning by experience.
You do something and you learn and you explore that space of the context layer so that you can keep learning.
No,
Really interesting.
So you talked about two different things there, Pablo.
You just talked about a very cross-functional workflow.
Luis, you talked about the complexity of really mastering sales.
You guys started as sales and support.
And so what are some of the other surprises that you've had, having started with more complexity, I think, than some of your competitors?
Mm-hmm.
So one thing that we heard from one of the largest tracking companies recently was typically, when we buy technology, we see where we can apply that.
With you guys.
We actually have a problem and we come to you guys with that problem because we know that, as a platform that you've built, we can pretty much build any type of agent for our operations, from sales to customer service, back office, support and operations and even collections.
So some of the use cases that customers came to us were, hey, we have a huge collections problem.
Can you build an agent to reach out to customers via email or voice and collect money?
We're like, of course.
We talked about these use cases with one of our largest supply chain companies and customers where we need to call customers to recover duties on parcels.
And today we're running campaigns of 20000 to 50000 customers, daily outreach to customers collecting duties on parcels that otherwise they would not get if they don't pay the duty on the parcel.
So that's sort of... surprises, if you will, we've gotten from customers.
Like, yeah, I also need to recruit drivers.
Can you do that?
And we obviously can build an agent that not only just recruits drivers, actually connects to the operation, so that now they know they can service a truck with a customer earlier, because now they have a driver to move that.
So there's all sorts of interesting connections between the functions.
Maybe I'll give you another example.
We build an agent to reach out to maintenance shops to see where a truck or when a truck was ready.
You could just leave that agent in a silo and just have an agent that is proactively reaching out to those repair shops to see when the truck is ready.
Well, it turns out that the sooner you know when the truck is ready, the sooner you can put it in the market to sell it as capacity for your customers to actually move things.
So that was a very interesting realization of how sales, in this case, and maintenance were tightly connected.
So that is the context that we talk about.
There has to be an underlying context sharing across the different functions in a business so that the whole business optimizes for a global maxima, if you will, or a global minima depending on what optimization problem you're trying to run, versus just minimizing the, probably in one function, if that makes sense.
And then maybe can you talk about, like, how do you discover these workflows?
Who discovers them?
Who builds them?
How do they get built?
I mean, maybe, Luis, talk a bit about that.
Yeah.
So we're very forward deployed.
So we were early on understood that really to solve the customer's pain point, we had to build software that adapts to their operations and not the other way around, which is like the old era before AI was you build something and ask people to like run their business however you think they should be run?
But we think it should be the other way around.
So from the very beginning we started like hiring and building this forward deployed motion with the FDEs forward deployed engineers like everyone is talking about them now.
But I think it's about like really being customer obsessed and really focusing on like, the value add and their problem and really sitting down with them and going to their offices and learning what they need.
So sure, there's a lot of like synergies in the industry, and what you learn from a customer might be relevant to another, but very soon we realized that there's not a one size fits all.
Even within inbound carrier sales, even within this workflow in the enterprise, maybe like there's like a long tail where this might apply, but enterprises operate very, very differently.
And that's why we build a platform that is flexible enough to adapt to anyone's operation.
And it's because we were trying to like plug and play what we built somehow with a customer to another one.
It didn't really work.
Like they want something different.
They want to change the procedure.
They want to call these tools.
They want to escalate whenever the carrier is not vetted and someone else wants to do it automated.
So we really had to build up almost like horizontal technology because of the variety of all the nuances in this industry.
And that's how we create a platform that is not optimized for specific tasks but, more so, optimized for doing work.
So our primitives are around workflows and data and integrations and, you know, SOPs, prompts.
You don't see like particular tasks being modeled because that's, almost too opinionated.
And customers don't want like opinion, like their vendors forming opinions on how to run their operations.
Like they've been running it for a long time.
They don't know more about their business than I do.
I just come with the technology and I just want to come to like solve their problems, you know?
Yeah.
I feel like the forward deployed motion has been crucial for AI application layer businesses.
And also it's prompted a lot of questions about what are margins?
What is like a service versus a product? kind of where is the long-term alpha and moat.
Maybe walk us through how you think about productizing the work that your FDEs do, which I think is kind of a unique strength of Happy Robot.
Where does the forward deploy motion start and end?
Do you do custom work for one customer?
Would love to understand how that works.
Maybe let's start in the beginning.
Yeah.
I was the first forward-deployed engineer without knowing it, I guess.
Yeah.
Which is pretty much what any founder would do.
You just go to your customers, spend a week there and just chase down the people that are actually doing the thing that you want to help them automate, right?
So I did that, and I would be like pinging these guys, like, do it.
You need to build this thing because it's gonna make my life a lot easier.
And it's actually gonna be replicable across customers because I've seen it.
So please build it."
And he would be like, really, do I need to build that?
So there was that good tension between kind of that forward deployed motion and the product team.
So we kept going with these like separate worlds for a little bit, where I would be like leading the FDE team and the deployment strategists that we realized at some point we actually needed.
That was a bit of a realization, a bit of a parenthesis here.
We started just with four deployed engineers and then they're like the customer's like wait, you have these people building, but like who is managing?
I'm like, hmm, I guess that's like the deployment strategy to some degree.
So the deployment strategy is just a figure that scopes the problem, so that the forward deploy engineer can spend more time on building.
Although now what we see is that the right FD or deployment strategist, they have to be very cross-functional.
Close parenthesis on the type of profile.
So what ended up happening is we were too disconnected from the Forward Deployed world and the product team.
So we realized that that needed to be part of Luis's world, so that the FD team would actually be an extension of product, which is what they should always be.
It's an extension of product so that we can implement product faster.
We can gather the feedback faster from the customers and hence capture that context faster than anyone else.
So it's a bit of these, these iterate, the iterative loop that we let, that Louise really realized we needed.
Yeah, I'll add to that.
I mean, if we go like first principles, what are we doing?
We're deploying agents across different functions and channels in the enterprise.
So our product is built for the deployment of an agent.
Like we really understand the deployment lifecycle because we work very closely with our customers.
And we are actually deploying these agents and something cool that happens is that you have, to a certain degree, your user in your house because we're building for the FDs for the most part and it's not entirely true, of course, some enterprises they really appreciate having a platform and we can talk about that later, about how Interesting the mix of coming with a platform they can also use and an FDE that they can trust.
It's actually something very rare.
And they mentioned that.
But I guess, to the point of like the deployment lifecycle, we really understand what it takes to like deploy an agent no,
There's a scoping phase.
There's a billing.
There's testing.
There's monitoring.
There's like a self-learning loop.
So...
I guess the point is every feature we're building in the product is optimized for that deployment lifecycle.
And the only way to know if that works is being very close to the deployment.
And if these are doing these deployments or they're getting feedback from the other team.
So actually, more than the FDs being very close to the product, I think it's more so like our product is a combination of a platform and a forward deploy motion and it would really not exist.
And there's like this conversation about like services and stuff.
The difference is that The forward deploy engineer are like catalysts or accelerators to value.
But what we're leaving in the customer are like agents running.
There's a platform.
Once the FDs have done their work, they leave a working thing.
So it's almost like you...
Spend that time, you deploy a thing, but you're not delivering an output that the FDE has done.
You're literally delivering the agent working on a platform.
So it's a very different distinction of pure services versus a forward deploy implementation plus the platform running the value forever, hopefully.
Yeah.
Awesome.
I feel like another thing that has been a topic of discussion is kind of what is the value of systems of record in the AI era?
Does every application company need to become one of those?
And I know you at Happy Robot have a view on kind of systems of record versus maybe, systems of action or systems of execution.
So we'd love to talk through kind of your view on that topic.
Maybe I'll start quickly.
We see ourselves as that layer of execution, really.
Like that's where the magic happens.
You have to start doing the work to capture that context.
So it's very important that we start with executing work, with getting the thing done implementing one agent, implementing the second agent, connecting them through that context layer.
But the context layer happens after you're actually doing the work.
More than ever, the importance is on the execution layer.
So for us and Luis can comment on that more that data piece is a very important piece, but it happens after the agent.
So what we've built is twin.
Twin for us is really that data layer will reconnect systems of record of the customer, your CRM, your ERP, your transportation management system, whatever it is your snowflake instance.
And where agents can also populate their own or restore their own context.
It's almost happy robot native data points.
So we've basically created this data layer that holds both customer records and happy robot agent created records, if you will.
Yeah, I think there's an interesting tension in...
Um, how much, how much time you need to spend ahead of deploying the agents on clean the data, versus just deploying the agents and clean the data through doing the execution?
And I think it's a mix.
I think what we realize is these agents are creating a lot of information that really hasn't been captured before.
And it really doesn't fit in any of these systems because more like um high-dimensional semantic, almost like memory, intelligence.
So I guess the point is many enterprises, I guess, are waiting to clean their data sources so that they can power this workforce of agents.
And I think by doing the work and by actually having agents execute the work, you're going to clean the data as you go.
Because humans are great, of course, but they have a lot of limitations.
They can be in two places at the same time.
They drop a lot of threads.
They're not very diligent in putting the data in the right system.
Sometimes you forget.
Sometimes you write it down.
So actually you can clean all your data sources and then you can still run with humans and it's actually gonna probably get dirty very, very soon.
The good thing about AI is it's very diligent where it puts data.
So it's through the process of executing work.
You're gonna progressively start cleaning all your data sources, because you're gonna get visibility into all these things.
No,
So not only are you connecting the data, like the systems of record, like rows and columns and different entities, it's more so creating relationships across them.
So again, the shipment in the TMS is just a record.
Like that's really not the IPs. that record might exist in many different enterprises.
Like it's latitude, longitude, rate, whatever it is, like that really doesn't mean anything.
What means something is how an enterprise is gonna, what the enterprise is gonna do with that.
Like, once it gets into the system, how their processes are built, how their humans are gonna deal with that.
So all that is really not in the system.
It's more so, like in people's brains.
A lot of this context is like tribal knowledge the operator's whole.
And to a certain degree, it's super fragmented, no?
So actually, by doing the work, we're going to learn a lot about this more conversational record or intelligence, but also we're going to start like, cleaning the end systems of record, just by doing the work very consistently.
No,
You know Luis, that's such an interesting topic because it's sort of like my intuition.
My naive intuition is that information about execution is maybe ephemeral, or the value of it decays over time.
But I think what you're describing is how the value actually compounds over time and maybe that actually enriches the information in the system of record.
Which one is true and why?
Yeah, I mean, I think you're.
So what you're doing by doing the execution, as I said, is one creating a better understanding about the relationships of all these different entities.
So you're starting to connect the TMS, the CRM, the ERP, the Snowflake, the Notion page.
You have the docs.
Everything is so disconnected.
You're going to start connecting it, but you're also going to start enriching the relationships of how to deal with those particular records.
No,
So I guess the compounding comes from like two angles.
One is having clear or cleaner data sources like literally the data points is going to make everyone's life easier, but also understanding how to relate those different entities across the business no.
So I think it compounds from multiple angles.
And then, how much are you?
Initially, I imagine, you're capturing the way work is done on day zero, but over time you're changing the way that work is done.
What is that interaction like?
Yeah, and I think...
If you think about it from a context perspective, the FDs are really just seeding this state graph.
If you try to model the business as a world model or a model of the business, you need to seed it somehow.
You can't just put the agent to work from day zero.
But then there's a point where there's like a flywheel, where like the second and third and fifth deployment takes less time.
But I think the FDs are the ones like going to the business and starting to seed all this context layer and actually leaving it there for like learning.
And the second and third one no,
So there's always this call start problem.
And we talk about like fine tuning SLMs in the future, like reinforcement learning and all that stuff.
I think that really doesn't make sense if you didn't have the basics and you didn't have the first and second agent in production.
And that's why FDs are so important to like actually start this flywheel.
Like they would go there.
Go there, interview the operators, get all the specs and actually put those first agents to work.
And from there the system is going to start learning and getting all this context and sharing it across functions and across channels right.
I feel like if I was trying to train someone to do my job.
The context that they need does not live in Salesforce or any traditional software system.
It probably would live in needing transcripts and emails and casual conversations and even things that software can't capture, hasn't captured.
I know you guys have this concept of the pyramid of complexity and how starting with some of these primitives allows you to get into more and more complex work over time.
Maybe we could walk through some examples of the type of work that happy robot agents can do.
So the pyramid of work as we define it is essentially the easy repeatable, low-hanging fruits type of work at the bottom.
Think about an easy B2B sales call, an easy customer service type of operation, some payment collection type of work.
Kind of the highly repeatable, easily automatable type of work.
One thing that we've already talked about here is how those actually interconnect, which is very important.
Like you might have, like these disconnected or siloed functions today in a company, but very important to keep in mind that those are actually very connected.
And going back to the pyramid of work, what you have at the top is the deep, complex work that is highly strategic.
That is almost the information that the CEO of that company needs to make decisions.
So, when we think about the work that we are doing with our customers, we might start at some point.
We might start somewhere in the bottom of the pyramid, but very fast.
We're going up the pyramid by combining those agents from sales and customer service and collections, combining the context, as louise was saying, so that you build on top and tom.
You build on top of every layer, so that every decision you make is based off of more context across the board.
When you're talking to that customer that has a complaint, you might want to remember that you already upsold them last month.
And sometimes human agents might not even remember that.
When you're talking to a driver that had an issue at his delivery two weeks ago.
You might want to remember that from the operations team, because maybe now you're more lenient with the rate that you are giving them.
Those things are highly interconnected and you need to build on top of them so that you grow into the strategic type of decisions.
Yeah.
And I would add that the real...
My opinion, the real economic leverage and value for the enterprises really lives at the top of the pyramid.
Those are the decisions that are less volume.
If you think about it, at the base, you have much more volume.
At the top, you have fewer decisions that are actually going to drive the outcomes of the enterprises.
And we keep talking and hearing about like outcome-based pricing or consumption-based pricing and whatnot.
I think really, if you reach the top of the pyramid is where you really make decisions that drive the revenue of the company.
But you cannot start at the top.
Like those decisions are highly contextualized.
The same way, you can probably not be the CEO of a company if you don't understand anything.
What's happening below?
So actually the only way to get to the top and make those decisions is by actually capturing all the context underneath.
And...
That's where everyone is getting stuck at.
Everyone is focusing at that base.
It makes sense.
It's already to a certain point being commoditized.
Those are simpler tasks and people keep talking about AGI and general models being able to automate that work.
Maybe
But the point is, if you get stuck at a corner of that base, you're never going to climb that pyramid of complexity, because in order to climb you need to actually capture context across channels and across functions.
We've mentioned this a bunch of times now.
When I was explaining the the example of a negotiation, I was talking about like phone calls.
But what if you get an email from another carrier actually putting an option?
Like all of a sudden, what if the voice agents don't know that there's an email coming through for the same load, like it's the same information, doesn't matter the channel no, and also what you learn from that carriers the same, like the same customer you have, or the same carrier you have when you're tracking a load or doing all these things.
No, so if you focus on like, automating this part of the base, that one corner for everyone, you're probably not going to be able to climb this pyramid of complexity.
So it's about creating a unified understanding of the business in order to start climbing that pyramid of complexity and going to the deeper, complex decisions that actually drive economic value for the enterprises.
Really interesting.
Maybe you guys talk about how that opportunity has set you up to be pulled into other markets.
Now we're starting to see pull in financial services, utilities, telecommunications.
So why is the work that we've done in supply chain applicable to these other markets?
With DHL, we've deployed over 40 agents across 80 countries, agents that are sharing context across regions and functions.
What I realized, what the team realized when working with DHL and many others like Cunanagal or CMA-CGM, second largest ocean carrier in the world, was wow, this is not a supply chain specific problem that we are solving.
It's actually an enterprise coordination problem.
When we think about ourselves as a startup, we're like 120 people.
You know we might have like some like miscommunications here and there, but really we don't have a coordination problem in the company.
You can easily reach out to the people involved and you just ask questions.
That doesn't happen in a company as big as DHL or FedEx or Deutsche Telekom or T-Mobile or Telefonica, these massive enterprises that have hundreds of thousands of people just coordinating work.
We recently started working with one of the largest utility companies in Latam and Europe.
They have over 10 million customers, dozens of thousands of employees across the world.
How on earth are they going to know real time how to best serve their customers when they themselves don't even have the tools to interconnect quickly and to share context across them quickly?
So what we realized is we were not really solving for a supply chain problem.
We were solving for the coordination problem of the enterprise.
Think about a utility receiving a customer call with someone complaining about a leaky boiler.
First of all, you should already know that that customer already had the problem 10 days ago.
That's for sure.
Second of all, you should also know that the technician you sent was not the right technician.
So now, in this situation, second attempt to fix that boiler, you need to send the right technician and the technician that is best suited for that particular boiler type.
So that is now on the operation side potentially, or you could frame that as an operation type of problem, no?
Versus when I started with the customer calling in.
That's more of a customer service type of problem, right.
Again, to the point of how these functions are interconnected.
But what happens after that technician is being dispatched to the customer's house?
Well, now you have an additional layer of coordination between a customer and the technician and the company that is lending the trucks to send that technician.
That is that coordination problem that we saw in these industries in the real economy.
Operationally complex businesses like utilities, oil and gas, telcos.
So we're now seeing this pull from the market.
We're already working in POCs with three of the largest telcos in the world.
We're being pulled into home and auto insurance, because the sort of coordination problem of dispatching a tow truck to help you when your car breaks down is very similar to when a trucking company has a broken track.
That sort of problems are repeatable across the real economy, if you will.
When there's this coordination problem across customers, partners and your own employees.
I think this market too has broad-based, voice-first customer support agents.
There's the models themselves in voice trying to move into being agentic.
And then there's more verticalized solutions that can move more horizontally.
How do you think about like what is a happy robot shaped problem and where does that expand into over time, versus what are problems that are maybe less interesting for you to tackle longer term?
Yeah, I would say highly communicational.
More than communication interface of work interface to the external world meaning also browsing a website to retrieve the ETA of a shipment is some sort of interaction with the outside world.
Voice to a certain point is a soft API, as we were talking about.
Same as an email is a soft API or a website is a soft API.
Like when you're extending information between systems.
Of course, an API programmatically makes more sense, but sometimes that doesn't really.
It's not the case.
So...
However, we can help move the flow of information between systems via voice email, browsing a website or whatever it takes.
And also when there's this high complexity, when the decisions are contextualized and the SOPs are not super clear.
I think that's the bigger point where sometimes the enterprise doesn't really know themselves.
People don't know what they know.
You can ask them, what they're doing.
And it's like well, I'm doing this, but they really don't know the specificity of what they're doing.
So it's actually through doing this execution of work that we're learning a lot about how these companies operate.
So when the SOPs are not clear and it's like super communication driven, I think that's where we shine.
Really cool.
Luis, I want to actually pick your brain a little bit about the voice models themselves.
Many of the other companies that we may overlap with rely on Eleven Labs, which is a fabulous technology.
We're, of course, investors in Eleven.
You guys have done a bunch of your own model work.
What are the kind of tradeoffs of a vertical model versus a horizontal model?
Maybe take us through a bit of that.
Yeah, my 11 is great.
We actually use them for a long time and they're great, of course.
I guess to the point before.
I was always focusing on the limiting factor and seeing what do we need to do to solve the current problems of the market.
I guess we started very soon realizing how there was a problem in like turn.
Taking detection like end of turn is probably the biggest problem in voice ai and we realized that very early on because everyone was focusing on like making the latency lower and making the voices more realistic and that's fine.
But i don't really think that's the bottleneck right now to to deployment of these agents.
Not even the intelligence like model capability is high enough.
Like we're reducing models in certain uses that were released like two years ago.
Right.
Like, sure.
Like everyone, is like pushing the frontier and increasing context windows and making more reasoning budget.
And PhDs doing customer support now.
Exactly.
Everyone is waiting for someone to release a 10 trillion token context window to do whatever.
We were using models from one year and a half ago to call drivers and ask if they're going to make it on time.
You don't need PhD-level intelligence for that.
I guess the point is, as we make models faster we realize how important the conversation handling and the flow of the conversation is like.
If you think about it, the faster the models get, the more you're going to interrupt.
And the harder it's going to be to have a normal conversation.
And actually, if you think about it, the bigger problem in the coming years for voice AI is really knowing when to talk and when not to talk.
And sometimes you need to speak fast.
Sometimes you need to wait because the other person has not done talking.
Sometimes you might need to stop and think.
And that's something that the models are not today very good at like really stopping and knowing when a question is hard and when they need to like probably trigger a reasoning thread that is more async and just think about it and say something like and really be thinking not something you put in the problem because it's cool, but just literally have them think no.
So it's all about understanding the conversation.
When is it my time to talk and what should I say, no?
So we invest a lot in this end of turn interruption handling, filler detections, background noises.
Like if my mom is speaking at the back of the car, the bot doesn't need to know or interrupt, no?
So it's understanding all these nuances in the work, more than making the latency faster, which is of course we can be improved or making the voices more realistic, which again I don't think that's a limiting factor today.
Yeah, it's interesting.
It feels like we're at the point where the models are so good that as they get better, especially with voice, it actually takes us further away from humanness in some cases.
Like the latency is too fast or the interruption handling is too sensitive.
Like if someone says a filler word, you don't necessarily want the model to react.
You want it to keep talking.
I feel like Happy Robot has always been at the forefront of kind of humanness.
How do you think about how that shapes product development?
How do you think about... what that looks like five years from now.
Do you want the end customer to know they're talking to an AI?
Do you want it to feel like a perfectly human experience?
Where does that go?
I think it's super important that the experience remains as human as possible, even if you say that it's an AI.
We're now live with hundreds of thousands of end customers or end users talking to our agents, not only via email or chatbot or website, whatever it is, but mostly through voice.
Like voice is one of our primary channels.
And one thing we saw is, even if you say it's an AI, even if you disclose at the beginning hey, Mr Driver, I'm an AI agent.
I'm calling you because I need to know where you are.
At the beginning, they might be like, what do you just say?
But then very, very soon they forget.
And they forget in a good way, because they are now just having a normal conversation with a system that is smart enough to not make their life or their day even harder than it was already before.
So I think the conversationalness, the conversationalness, the human-like conversation capabilities are very important to make technology work.
So for us, the product is shaped around that experience.
Some people were telling us at the beginning like no, you don't need these agents to sound superhuman.
Why are you investing so much on the text speech?
Why do you care if the agent just mispronounces a load number, a shipment number?
It's like, what do you mean?
That's the whole point.
You want the experience to be as good as possible.
So it's very important that we continue building towards a really human-like experience.
Again, voice is obviously a primary channel for us, but even across the board, everything should feel.
Everything should feel just a very natural exchange of information as we were discussing before.
We're just trying to build an AI workforce that is almost colleagues to to the employees in these companies, so that they almost collaborate together.
That is very important to, to the DNA that we're building in, in Hapro.
It almost goes with, with the name, if you will.
Like there's that there's, there's that um human-like sense in the product we build for our customers.
Well, you know Pablo, to build on that, it also strikes me that you make the employees, the human employees of many of your customers also more human.
And so far as you know I think it was Keely was telling me a story about DHL and Home Depot and the folks that had previously spent all week on a phone trying to just schedule deliveries with Home Depot.
We're now taking folks out for dinner and building deeper relationships.
Maybe talk a bit about what is the future of sort of humans and agents working together in these enterprises.
Yeah.
It's a bright feature.
It's a very cool feature, because a lot of the work that we're helping our customers automate is work that no one really wants to do.
Think about collecting payments from customers.
Would you really want to be calling your customer to be like hey, you know, this invoice is past due man?
Are you going to pay?
Who wants to be doing that, right?
Who wants to be calling a list of doorman accounts to see who would want to ship with us?
Or who would wanna be picking up a call from an angry customer whose delivery was late or whose technician broke the boiler or whose technician didn't fix the router?
That is the sort of problems that agents can help your human teams alleviate so that, again, your humans can actually take that steak dinner with your customer and work on building up the relationship, not unfixed in the operational problems.
That's the problem space.
We're looking at complexity that these businesses have.
That no one really wants to do, but that has to get done.
Thanks so much for joining us today, guys.
We know you are very busy serving a lot of very happy customers and there's so many more exciting things to come for Happy Robot.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for supporting us all the way.
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