Bad Medicine
Legacy CX vendors will be forced to reconcile their “pre-ChatGPT” technical stacks and rebuild most of it from scratch in an LLM world. Here's what I did.
This is my last look back at ‘23 before we warm-up for New Beginnings.
I’ve been preaching that legacy CX vendors will be forced to reconcile their “pre-ChatGPT” technical stacks and rebuild most of it from scratch in an LLM world.
To avoid any doubt that I can choke down my own medicine, here goes.
Last February, after spending time with ChatGPT - I made the decision that Xaqt needed to effectively start over. And so began the painful process of taking our existing products End-of-Life and transitioning customers to alternative solutions. As a result, I also shrank revenue by 85% on the bet that we’d come out the other-side better positioned to embrace future opportunities.
Out with the old:
Cognitive Insights Portal (formerly Smart City Engage) - this was really Xaqt’s first product to market and, we were fortunate to win some Smart City awards for it. If you know Cisco Unified Intelligence Center, this was a 2nd incarnation and we ended-up adapting it for Contact Center as well. We got A LOT of mileage out of it, but the opportunity cost of maintaining it was just too high compared to what we should be building.
AIgent - our custom agent desktop masquerading as a CCaaS and preview dialer built on Twilio Taskrouter and their desktop SDK. Y’all know my pains there... We exited that strategy completely.
KnowledgeFlow - a Knowledge Base we augmented into agent assist and IVA. I acquired this beauty in a distressed asset deal at the end of 2021 (that’s a story for another day). It was pretty solid, but there was no way to compete with LLM based solutions without a full rebuild.
Spectra - Unified CX Data integration and orchestration platform built on singer-io, Meltano and a normalized data model. Parts of this one will make a comeback, but I’ve concluded that, in order to realize the full promise of AI, we need to move from ETL/ELT to an event driven architecture and bespoke data connectors.
IVAn - This was the Conversational Voice IVA platform that helped us pivot from Smart Cities into Contact Centers when COVID hit and shutdown every major city in the world in the same week (that’s another story for another day too). While it had a pretty good run, I believe every CCaaS vendor will soon have their own onboard solution, and I have no interest in competing at the margins. We have one customer left on it, but it’s officially End-of-Sale.
So then what’s left from the legacy Xaqt?
Some amazing friendships and great memories made along the way
Zero Technical Debt
One lonely EC2 server
A new beginning with a blank sheet of paper
A Quarterback that’s still just warming-up…
Now, let’s get moving.