Wysdom

Wysdom (formerly CrowdCare, also marketed as Wysdom.AI) is a Toronto, Canada-based provider of software and managed services for monitoring and improving the performance of AI-powered virtual agents, including chatbots and voice bots. Its flagship software-as-a-service product, the Wysdom Operations Center, functions as quality-management analytics for bots: it uses AI to monitor and measure bot performance at a topic level and issues automated recommendations to bot operators at large international brands.

The platform produces metrics such as the Bot Automation Score (measuring whether the customer's problem was actually resolved rather than simply contained), the Bot Experience Score (an aggregate derived from signals including bot repetition, customer paraphrasing, abandonment, negative sentiment, explicit negative feedback, profanity and repeated requests for a human agent), and Cost per Automated Chat. Dashboards categorize "automation gaps" by their causes — escalation to a live agent, negative feedback, bot false positives, user abandonment, bad containment and unconnected escalation requests — and report per-topic results across roughly 100 conversation topics. Wysdom also developed topic modeling that groups interactions into categories such as product information, order status and order cancellation.

Earlier, as CrowdCare and then Wysdom.AI, the company built a "cognitive care" offering that combined natural language processing, machine learning and a large customer-care corpus to answer end-user questions across chat, web, smartphone and social channels including Twitter and Facebook, supported by an in-house AI supervision team that trained and tuned the models on customers' behalf.

Founding story

Co-founders Ian Collins (CEO) and Jeff Brunet (CTO/President) had previously established Mobile Diagnostix in 2003, a business that analyzed problems on cellular devices and built a library of device faults and corresponding solutions; that company was acquired by HP. The pair subsequently founded the company in 2012 as CrowdCare, on the premise that combining natural language processing with machine learning and large volumes of customer data would produce a more intelligent support solution, and were joined by a technical development team that followed them from Mobile Diagnostix.

Business model

Wysdom sold subscription software-as-a-service — the Operations Center bot analytics platform — combined with managed services and an AI supervision team that helps enterprises deploy, monitor and continuously tune virtual agents. At the time of acquisition the company derived revenue from several major Canadian firms contracting for virtual agent managed services and analytics software.

Enterprise software subscriptions for the Operations Center analytics platform, supplemented by managed services engagements for bot deployment, monitoring and ongoing optimization.

Traction

The company reported a 97.5 percent precision rate and 125,000 specific customer questions in its corpus in 2017, growing to 200,000 questions by 2018. In one client engagement, the platform's share of customer query traffic grew from 3-5 percent at launch to over 40 percent. At the time of the Calabrio acquisition Wysdom had roughly 60 employees, with more than 75 bot industry professionals cited as supporting customers.

Latest developments

On January 9, 2024, Calabrio announced its acquisition of Wysdom, positioning the deal as largely a product and technology purchase that adds AI/ML-driven conversational analytics to Calabrio's workforce engagement management portfolio and supports its 2024 themes of digital interaction support and expanded AI use. Most Wysdom employees joined Calabrio, and founder Ian Collins became senior vice president / head of virtual agent solutions. Calabrio indicated plans to combine Wysdom's metrics with its own conversational intelligence in a single interface and to eventually apply Wysdom's models to live agent chats.