30 01732 759725 Intelligence is such a huge opportunity. Customer interactions, whether on the sales side or the support and success side or to understand the temperature of a specific account, are pretty high-touch today, and so naturally these happen to be layers where the business process optimisation function seems to be quite engaged. “I’ll also say that there is a second factor here, which is that people want to make sure they are able to validate the savings, the optimisation they’ve made through AI or whatever product they’ve adopted. For that reason, KPIs are important. And it just so happens that when it comes to customer satisfaction, the NPS score happens to be a pretty robust and broadly adopted KPI. For that reason alone, customer interactions are really interesting areas for early adoption of agentic products like Computer.” Agentic AI benchmarks One of the challenges DevRev faces is that everyone is claiming to have industryleading agentic AI, which Bashir says is creating the need for benchmarks and leaderboards like the TPC benchmark introduced for databases in the late 80s which enabled people to see very clearly how databases fared against each other in terms of performance, personalisation and accuracy. “I think we’re going to have to build those same leaderboards and benchmarks here so people can distinguish the leaders from the pretenders,” he said. In the meantime, Computer by DevRev will continue to evolve. “On the technology side, I think our product’s going to become increasingly collaborative and increasingly multiplayer. The surfaces on which we operate – the desktop, the web and the mobile – will refine themselves. Our product will start to become more voice-driven. And the sophistication of the Agent Studio will allow you to upskill Computer and deploy to your team, to your organisation or just to yourself agents that have been upskilled for specific brands, for specific regions or for specific channels. Our ability to drive that and to evaluate it and version it and deploy it and roll it back is going to get more and more sophisticated as well. “The Agent Studio, the multiplayer experience and the surfaces will continue to refine themselves. The product will become more collaborative, it will become more personalised and the benchmarks will start to reveal where companies have distinguished themselves in terms of accuracy, speed and personalisation.” on a support portal, wherever it needs to manifest. It’s multilingual. It has an entire Marketplace that allows you to synchronise information using Airsync. You can see exactly what’s going on, every workflow, every agentic skill, every operation. You can see the sessions you can administer. You can check what roles, responsibilities, groups exist, what has been brought in from different systems. How do you interact with this data? How do you reconcile and cleanse it? A very sophisticated platform of services must exist for you to feel comfortable deploying in production.” What’s certain is that despite deployment challenges nobody is immune from agentic AI. Mid-market enterprises have a clear mandate to optimise business processes and even small and medium sized businesses want to substitute human labour for GPU labour. “Agents are really workflows that have the repeatability of a micro service but the sensibility of a human and that combination is mighty powerful. Small companies want to act big by having these AI workers. The joke goes ‘I have a staff of 350 engineers, of which 35 are human’. It’s the new normal for a small business. Then, of course, established enterprises want to build operational efficiencies, because that’s what’s going to help their bottom line. We’ve got hundreds of paying customers and most of them right now are mid-market enterprises. And we’ve got a lot of smaller companies that are exploring our product; we like to have that free tier that allows them to get involved and pick their tool of choice, and as they grow into the product, there’s obviously going to be commercial opportunities.” Bashir believes business process optimisation, especially in those areas DevRev has been addressing since 2001, is where the money will be spent. “We’ve talked to analysts from Gartner and many others and they confirm that even though there’s a lot of dialogue around how AI can really help growth for business, what’s happening is that people are spending for business process optimisation and you can optimise business processes in any and all departments. “For us, customer experience, customer support, customer success, enterprise sales and general enterprise-level search are interesting problems because they have not seen much automation. People continue to expend lots of energy on finding information, which is why Team learn AI. And there are leaders in every business, who are eager to allow people to see what they can do, even if it doesn’t get to the finish line. I think that eagerness, the novelty and momentum of a new technology and, I would say, the desperation of business leaders to describe interesting things that are happening within their four walls have generated investment in a lot of ideas, but not necessarily enough investment to get them to the finish line. That’s one reason why projects fail. “The other, more practical, reason is it’s not as easy as to build business logic on top of a frontier model as it looks, because you still need a data reconciliation layer, a synchronisation layer; you need a data cleansing layer; you need a way to handle data redundancy, because if you’re bringing information from disparate sources there will be data redundancy; you need an access provisioning layer; you need an orchestration layer; you need an auditability layer – you need the ability to make sure that performance is not regressing but also to see who is spending money on the technology, who is using up all the tokens, who is going to be charged back; and finally, you need to understand the application. You have to understand the needs of an enterprise sales team versus a traditional sales search use case versus a customer success or customer support or even developer productivity use case, and because those other layers simply aren’t seeing investment, these projects fail,” he said. “That’s where companies like DevRev with Computer come in. You need to be able to handle the data layer, the provisioning layer, the orchestration layer, the agentic layer, the application layer, and we do that through our Marketplace (of pre-built integrations with external systems), through Computer, through the surfaces we’ve created. Our product is manifesting on your desktop, but also on your website (if you need it to), on customer success, on a help portal, AI ...continued
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