The hype of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s acclaimed AI-powered chatbot, hasn’t waned yet. This is reflected in Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 cohort that includes four startups that claim to be developing “ChatGPT for X”. It’s no wonder that new companies are jumping on ChatGPT’s bandwagon since it’s quickly become a standout player in the red-hot generative AI space.
Two of such companies are Yuma and Baselit. Yuma’s platform relies on text-generating AI models to give customer service agents relevant and customized suggestions for ticket drafts. The brainchild of Guillaume Luccisano, Yuma got started “by accident” when the founder released a prototype for fun in mid-December 2022 and saw an overwhelming response.
Guillaume Luccisano is a well-known name in the tech industry. He is the founder of not one, but three companies that have been backed by Y Combinator. The first to be viewed was Socialcam, a mobile photo-sharing app which was later acquired by Autodesk before he ventured deeper into tech with recruiting platform Triplebyte.
Baselit is also made to satisfy customer service queries but uses OpenAI’s GPT-3 which is finely tuned on contextual information like schema databases. It lets users perform queries in plain English, without having to address code, no matter the platform they are using. For example, a marketplace can allow its sellers to quickly figure out what products are most frequently out of stock.
The company is part of a flourishing industry, as Acumen Research has estimated that customer service software will grow to a market value of 58.1 billion dollars in 2023. Its competition is strong, as there are companies like Lang, Neuron7 and Ultimarte.ai doing the same, though arguably not as efficiently.
The last of the ChatGPT-related startups that we saw in Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 Batch is Lasso. Ochoa and Bose, who both once worked at Google’s Creative Lab 5 and had a hand in ChatGPT-based projects, developed it. The duo have combined a ChatGPT-like interface with robotic process automation (RPA) and made a Chrome extension to allow businesses to quickly set up automation processes.
The market for workflow automation tools is indeed ripe, according to a recent survey from Formstack, as 62% of companies say they are using them for their businesses and over the last twelve to twenty-four months 44% of businesses have made a significant investment into them. With the license-free Lasso, companies can now finally hope to spare themselves from the time consuming set-up process of incumbent RPA solutions.
Rounding out the group is BerriAI, whose platform helps developers create their own ChatGPT apps powered by their organization data by using different connectors. With BerriAI, it’s possible to let employees search through internal documents with a ChatGPT interface or use it to automate customer service requests via programs such as ZenDesk and Jira Tickets. A steep price of 999 dollars a month comes along with this package, but the demand might well be up to the challenge.
All in all, it’s clear that ‘ChatGPT For X’ is a popular concept that these four companies are striving to bring to life and possibly revolutionize how businesses automate processes. With each of their functions being slightly different from the other, there is sure to be one that will be able to make its mark in the customer-service software market. Only time will tell.
