Customer service is a huge industry. Meanwhile, across many sectors, employees remain hard to find, so it's no surprise that a lot of startups have emerged to help companies offer a better experience for their customers through advanced tech; there's money in them thar hills.

Many have begun to turn to chatbots, but these rely on a so-called manual flow, in which case a kind of decision tree is created by populating conversational blocks that help the bots fulfill customers' requests based on certain triggers. The bots typically buy the company time while allowing it to gather information that can, in some cases, lead to a human interaction if the issue (assuming it can't be solved at some point along the way). But it can require a heavy lift in the form of costly professional services.

Now, a startup called Got It AI is emerging from stealth mode with claims that it has a whole new way of helping its customers centered on dialogue. Silicon Valley investor Peter Relan, who helped incubate the company in 2018 (he also helped get Discord off the ground and served on its board until 2020), likens it to a "fully autonomous" call service center.

Led by David Chu, who worked previously with Relan and Discord founder Jason Citron at Citron's first company, Open Feint, the startup is targeting small and mid-size companies that don't have the time or people or financial resources to design the manual processes that fuel their chatbots. Relan says that they simply port both voice and chat log conversations into the platform and it immediately, based on that data and the magic of natural language processing and machine learning, can begin communicating with customers.

He compares it to the GPT-3 bot that was used a couple of years ago to emulate someone's dead fiancée based on old texts and Facebook messages she had written and he fed into the platform.

Got It AI isn't the only autonomous contact center that goes beyond what conversational AI software can do. Replicant, for example, is a startup that promises its AI voice agents can handle complex, nuanced conversations in real-time, using what it says is human-like inflection and speed. (Replicant, founded five years ago, has raised at least $113 million in funding from investors.)