McMaster University

Ryerson University

Riyadh International Community School (RICS)

Agincourt Collegiate

Entrepreneur & investor

AI is taking over the contact center & GenAI is going to mature fast in this environment.  The ROI is crystal clear (many companies spend 10% of their revenue on customer service), support from executive teams is there and the technical capabilities now exist.  But……there are so many unsolved problems.  

I’ve been privileged to talk with hundreds of contact center teams tasked with deploying GenAI virtual agents.  They have a lot of challenges in this emerging space and one in particular that Bot Food Co is focused on solving.  We will focus on building our first product of a suite that will apply to many GenAI use cases.

Our first product, The Bot Food Store, will launch later this year.

More to come.

Bot Food Corporation

Founder/CEO

The family property development business in the Muskoka region north of Toronto, a perfect hedge to my day job as tech entrepreneur

Vista Investments

Partner

The team at Calabrio saw the future of virtual agents in the contact center and acquired Wysdom to compliment their suite of contact center products.  

Calabrio is a trusted ally to leading brands. The digital foundation of a customer-centric contact center, the Calabrio ONE workforce performance suite helps enrich and understand human interactions, empowering your contact center as a brand guardian.​  We maximize agent performance, exceed customer expectations, and boost workforce efficiency using connected data, AI-fueled analytics, automated workforce management, and personalized coaching.​  Only Calabrio ONE unites workforce optimization (WFO), agent engagement and business intelligence solutions into a true-cloud, fully integrated suite that adapts to your business.

Calabrio, Inc.

SVP Virtual Agent Solutions

Techstars

Mentor

ThinkData is the creator of the Namara platform which provides the ability to access the vast amounts of information available within Open Data. By providing a single access point to view, browse, and interact with all available Open Data, ThinkData intends to create a barrier free ecosystem where high value data can begin to influence the information we see and decisions we ultimately make.

ThinkData Works

Chairman Of The Board

AI is taking over the contact center but there was a massive hole in quality management for virtual agents.  Wysdom set out to solve this problem and built the best bot evaluation framework in the virtual agent industry.  

Anyone can build a dashboard with 100 metrics, getting it down to the 3 business KPIs that matter is much harder.  At Wysdom we focused on Automation (how often the bot solved the customer problem), CX (how did the bot make the customer feel) and cost (what is the cost per automated conversation).  Everything else was in service of these 3 metrics.

You'd be amazed at how aligned your customers, your delivery team, your developers and everyone else will become once you boil your goals down to something clear and concise.

Wysdom customers had the best customer service bots - end of story.

Wysdom.AI

In 2005 the world was just discovering digital photography and digital music.  Billions of people were amassing personal collections of digital photos and music (and the other boring stuff like presentations, documents & spreadsheets).  

Hard drives on PCs were storing it all and were notoriously unreliable (affordable cloud storage was still a decade away).  When hard drives stopped working, all of the treasured photos of family, special events, and everything else that could never be replaced were wiped out forever.

Although that risk was pretty clear to everyone, no one backed up their hard drive because it was just too much work.  Backup solutions were built by developers who thought people appreciated having options like "differential" or "incremental" backup.

In this environment we built Clickfree (automatic backup).  Just take it out of the box, plug it into your PC, and you're done.  Go get a coffee, when you come back it will be finished.  No options, no downloads, no questions, no "clicking", just plug it in and protect everything you care about.

Millions of people in 50 countries agreed that this was a good idea.  (They spent $100-200 for Clickfree backup devices). We nailed the 2 key ingredients to a great startup, an amazing product that the market wanted, and an incredible sales team.  It was only a pair of natural disasters that could have taken this thing down.

The boring version:
Clickfree helps consumers back up their personal computers with the world's largest portfolio of totally automatic backup products.  We've invented & patented the world's easiest computer backup solutions.  Protecting your photos, music, video etc... shouldn't require you to do anything, with Clickfree you just plug in the drive and you're done.

Clickfree (Storage Appliance Corp.)

In 2002 the world had just begun to discover Smartphones.  It's hard to imagine but only a few tens of millions of people had them.  Smartphones were obviously going to take over the world but there were a few challenges supporting them in the early days.

Customer service was one of them and a massive problem for all of the telcos we knew.  Regardless of where you bought your amazing new Smartphone, you called your telco when it didn't work.  Customers called 3 times as often about smartphones, and calls were 3x longer.  Unfortunately the telcos didn't have any idea how to solve the new types of problems that came with a Smartphone (can't browse the web, can't get email, etc).

As this customer service disaster was emerging we built Mobile Diagnostix.  We provided a tool for customer service agents that allowed them to look out over the wireless network into your phone, while you were talking to them.  With the press of a button the agent could see all of the important settings inside the phone you were complaining about.  

The Mobile Diagnostix tool, called SmartCare, would show the agent all of your settings, which ones were probably causing the problem, and allow them to push the correct setting back out to your phone.  Problems that took 30 minutes to solve before SmartCare could be resolved in 3 minutes. 

Telcos around the world jumped at the chance to implement this technology to solve their customer support challenges.

The boring version:
Mobile Diagnostix built the world's first mobile data customer care solution.  We made the gathering of data from a smartphone as simple as pushing a button.  The analysis of what we found was totally automatic.  With the smallest amount of training a CS agent could solve 90% of smartphone problems.  We sold the product to leading wireless operators worldwide.  The core product was called Smartcare and now resides somewhere inside HP.  MDI was acquired by Bitfone which was acquired by HP.

Mobile Diagnostix Inc.

Web2Mobile was probably the first mobile content portal.  We were way ahead of our time, probably too far.

This was a side hustle, we raised a few million, put a management team in place and tried to give it direction.  It didn't work for me, I can only focus on one startup at a time.

Web2Mobile

Founder

Yes, I couldn't resist using the name a second time (since I held onto the domain all those years). 

In 1998 a huge wave of internet businesses are starting to scale (and raise piles of money).  The problem is the online world is only available on a desktop or laptop computer.  It's hard to imagine today, but you left the internet behind when you left your desk.

In this environment Wysdom provided the infrastructure for new internet companies to easily push simple messages to the cell phones of the day (do you remember flip phones?) extending the internet to your pocket.  The pitch to the dotcoms was simple - would they like to be in every customer's pocket.

Wysdom.com's tagline was "Taking dotcoms wireless" and we rode that wave through the dotcom bubble and crash.  Great experience in how to build a company and how not to build a company.  

I also learned about a wonderful thing called a secondary.

Wysdom.com

My first tech startup.  The wireless revolution had just begun and we were helping our clients build wireless networks around the world.  Wyrex stood for "wireless experts".  I left a great job paying what seemed like a pile of money and exchanged it for long hours, no paycheque and no clear path back to making decent money.  

In 1995 the world wanted mobile phones, and they wanted them now.  Telcos around the world were going through a wave of wireless network building and could not build fast enough.  Canada was a few years ahead of this trend and after working at Rogers & Telus I knew a lot of experienced wireless engineers.  Our theory was that we would hire a bunch of these experts and find contracts for them around the world.  

Somehow my co-founder and I built a team of 50 engineers and pulled it off with contracts in North America, Europe and Asia.  It provided the experience and money to found more companies.

Wyrex Communications Inc.

We were building the Clearnet PTT (push-to-talk, IDEN) network from Windsor to Quebec City.  Back then there was still some debate about what standard would win in the mobile phone wars.  This one didn't but it was great getting into the world of wireless networks.

Telus (formerly Clearnet)

Engineer - Project Manager

I worked at this small startup called TeleZone right after finishing an MBA.  Getting back into wireless after going back to school was a good plan, doubling down on the experience I had from Rogers. We were working on a standard called CT2.  CT2 was like something in between a home cordless phone and real cellular networks.  The major selling feature was the price (phones were cheap), the size (like flip phones that cellular networks wouldn't have for another 10 years) and the batteries lasted forever.  It was big in Japan for a few years but was drowned out by real cellular networks so never caught on.

Telezone

This was my first real job as an engineer fresh out of school and first experience in the wireless industry.  A phone in your car was still a novelty and a $2000/month phone bill was normal (luckily we didn't pay)  The company was still called Cantel and wasn't part of Rogers yet.  As a nobody coordinator at the bottom of the food chain I got to see all parts of the business.  I joined while still in school and then after graduating in 1990 was paid $36k and a company car, it seemed like heaven.

Ian Collins