Cognigy Sees Fast Growth with AI Innovations: The 2024 CRM Conversation Starters

Cognigy, a customer service automation startup, has been on a mission to help create artificial intelligence that can handle the highly repetitive, rote processes that call center workers face daily. Its AI platform uses both generative and conversational AI to build, operate, and analyze the advanced AI agent workforces on which many companies today rely to deliver exceptional customer service and resolve high-volume customer requests at scale.

The company, which was founded in 2016, sells three core products: a self-service Q&A chatbot that draws on local knowledge bases to answer customer inquiries; a toolset to build chatbot experiences; and an AI-powered agent dashboard to deliver pertinent information to agents during customer interactions. Still, its product portfolio grew substantially in the past year alone.

Late last August, the company, which is headquartered in Dusseldorf, Germany, and runs U.S. operations from San Francisco, launched Cognigy Knowledge AI, a generative AI solution for knowledge search and retrieval in the contact center.

Cognigy Knowledge AI enables hyper-personalized interactions that go beyond standard answers and enable AI agents to tailor retrieved information to each customer journey.

The AI Copilot that it launched in November also uses conversational and generative AI to assist contact center agents. It includes the following capabilities:

• Identity Assist, which provides contextual handover tailored to each agent’s needs;
• Knowledge Assist, which surfaces vital information and knowledge sources in real time;
• Action Assist, which guides agents through complex processes for query resolution;
• Language Assist, which empowers agents to support customers in their native languages; and
• Wrap-Up Assist, which automates post-call busy work with one click.

To further bolster its growing market position in the contact center space, Cognigy in June upleveled its partnership with NICE to the Prime Partner Tier. The partnership also integrated Cognigy’s conversational AI with NICE’s CXone cloud-based contact center automation platform, allowing joint customers to streamline customer service workflows, automate routine tasks, and focus on higher-value interactions.

Cognigy this year also expanded its relationships with app marketplace providers, making its solutions available in the Genesys AppFoundry and Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

And its partnership with cloud communications company Bandwidth and Google Cloud resulted in the September 2023 launch of AIBridge, which enables companies to deploy voice-based AI tools in front of their contact centers. With AIBridge, incoming calls can first be routed directly to an AI-driven virtual agent through a prebuilt integration with Bandwidth’s Maestro platform. Companies can also orchestrate complex call flows using Bandwidth Visual Builder, a software-based, low-code/no-code drag-and-drop call flow designer.

And while Cognigy’s main focus has been the contact center, the company has not stayed in that lane exclusively. Just this past May, Cognigy launched AI Agents for Sales and Marketing.

Cognigy’s AI Agents are engineered to revolutionize customer engagement through proactive personalization and intelligent interaction that anticipates customer needs and drives sales growth. They leverage insights from customer profiles and context to proactively identify needs and customer conversations that align with individual journeys and preferences. The AI technology supports the entire customer journey, providing continuous assistance from initial contact through after-sales support.

Regardless of which department uses them, Cognigy trains its own generative AI models to power aspects of its platform, but it also integrates models from third parties, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Aleph Alpha. The vendor-agnostic, bring-your-own-model approach might be one of the reasons Cognigy achieved such remarkable growth in a such short amount of time.

The company has around 175 customers today and in the spring closed a $100 million funding round, bringing its total raised to $175 million. Cognigy plans to invest the new capital in geographic expansion across the U.S. and product research and development.

“We continue to enhance our offerings with the latest AI innovations with the intentions of making technology easy to use and empowering businesses to provide unparalleled service experiences,” said Cognigy CEO and cofounder Philipp Heltewig in a statement.