AI customer service from Germany: Parloa is worth a billion

Parloa makes AI agents for customer service. For example, if someone calls Ikea, the call is answered by a Parloa AI agent. This also applies to Allianz, Booking.com, and several other companies that will be presenting their use cases on stage at Wave. Last week, around 500 Parloa customers and interested parties came together at the company's own trade fair called Wave.

At ATU, the Parloa-based service answers questions about opening hours but can also make appointments for customers. The problem for the car parts company is that there are extreme peak times, namely the time when everyone is changing the tires on their cars. According to ATU's Head of Customer Interaction, Roland Dolle, it is impossible to hire people to answer the phone, especially for these phases of the year.

With the AI agent, this is exactly where the company has had very good experiences. The company can look back on 100 percent availability and 60 percent less telephone time for employees. This means that around 60 percent of telephone enquiries are answered satisfactorily by an AI agent, while 40 percent still end up with human employees, which is just fine. According to ATU, there are no plans to cut jobs thanks to the use of AI; the aim is to complete tasks for which no one can be found.

Parloa: AI from Berlin worth a billion

Of course, Parloa is not the only provider of AI solutions in customer service. Salesforce leads the way, but Microsoft and Zoom also offer options for creating such AI agents. Parloa's technology is also based on Microsoft's Azure services, which ultimately means that OpenAI's AI models are currently being used. The development work then comes from Berlin. In addition, customers must deliver—namely, their data. An AI agent also needs guidance to know what to do in which case. However, instead of laboriously trying to describe every case down to the smallest detail as an if-then relationship, the AI agents based on large language models will need the same guidance that a human would receive. Malte Kosub, CEO of Parloa, says that it is more of a target; the agent finds its own way.

Parloa currently employs 300 people. More are to be added. In addition to Berlin, there are already offices in Munich and New York, and a branch will soon open in London. The company is valued at one billion euros. So AI from Germany is clearly working.

The vision is to help build meaningful relationships between customers and companies. According to the founders, there will be personal AI agents everywhere in the future. Every platform, every website, every app, and every service will need an approachable AI agent. This agent can then be reached both by a human and by other AI agents. For example, while someone uses the ChatGPT agent to make an appointment at ATU, ATU must also provide an agent that has access to the appointments of the workshops.

And AI agents will not only be found in customer service in the future; Parloa believes they will also become important in sales and marketing, for example, to help customers find products or book a trip. Stefan Ostwald, co-founder and Chief AI Officer at Parloa, demonstrates this straight away. Language can be used to select a vacation destination, check hotels and flights, and, if necessary, book everything straight away. Ostwald expects that such a travel assistant will have a memory function—knowing what the user has recently selected and what their preferences are. An idea that other AI companies also have. Agents then know everything about a person and can therefore be particularly helpful, which is, of course, also particularly questionable in terms of data protection.

(emw)