Encore AI Raises $30 Million to Scale Top Employee Performance with AI
Israeli startup Encore AI has developed a technology called Interaction Mining that analyzes the work patterns of top-performing employees and replicates them across the company using artificial intelligence.
What if, instead of using artificial intelligence only to cut costs and save time, you could take your most brilliant employee and replicate their work method for the entire company? One Israeli startup is developing a new technology that promises to do exactly that, and is aimed at the place where organizations and companies lose the most money.
"We are solving the performance gap that exists in almost every large organization, between a handful of outstanding employees and the rest of the team," explains Dr. Dvir Ginzburg, founder and CEO of the Israeli startup Encore AI, in a conversation with Geektime. "Outstanding employees close more deals, retain more customers, and reach higher levels of satisfaction. They do this through clear work patterns: what they say, when they choose to be silent, how they deal with objections, and when they identify an opportunity to offer an additional product or service."
At Encore, they want to take all these processes and replicate them using artificial intelligence. "This knowledge already exists within the organization — in conversations, chats, and emails, but it is usually not extracted, documented, or applied on a large scale. As a result, most customers do not get to receive the service experience provided by the best employees in the organization. This is exactly the gap we are working to close," he adds. According to him, they do this by developing a new, patented technology called Interaction Mining, which dispenses with the organization defining a "successful conversation" or building processes from scratch. Instead, the technology connects the AI to existing activity: millions of real interactions — phone calls, chats, landing pages, emails, and CRM data — throughout sales, collection, service, and support processes.
Learning from the outstanding in real time
"From here, the engine identifies two key things: Revenue Intelligence, an accurate picture that shows where the organization is losing money, the highest priority opportunities where AI can increase revenue, and how to implement the actual integration; and Top Performers Playbooks, the system identifies within the data the work patterns of the outstanding employees that lead to the best results, and compiles them into a structure that we run in real time," explains Ginzburg. According to him, these processes usually require hiring engineers and consultants who sit inside the organization for months and cost a lot of money — while at Encore, they do it automatically with AI.
"We don't clone humans"
After these stages, the Encore system generates agents that can be used as "co-pilots" to assist human employees, or in "autopilot" mode where the AI acts independently. The agents simulate the outstanding employees in the organization and thus allow the company's customers to receive the service level of the best employee, at any time, on any channel (including voice, chat, SMS, WhatsApp, email, and IVR), and in any language.
When asked how he deals with objections regarding employees, Ginzburg notes:
"First of all, we don't clone humans — we learn work patterns. An AI agent does not replace the employee, it replaces their unavailability. The problem was never the employee, the problem is that the best employee cannot be in every conversation, at every hour, and in every language. In practice, the technology works in favor of the employees. The vast majority of our customers do not implement the technology to reduce staff, but to give them tools that allow them to be more productive."
Changed direction
Encore was founded in 2022 by Dr. Dvir Ginzburg, who previously worked at Microsoft as a researcher in the field of recommendation systems, personalization, and language. The startup was founded under the name Insait and previously specialized in the field of marketing analytics in companies. According to Ginzburg, this is not a significant change in terms of the field in which they operate: "It is a natural evolution and empowerment of the capabilities we already had. The ability to identify patterns within large behavioral data sets was already there. While working with financial entities, we realized that the most urgent and significant need is not only to analyze interactions or deflect inquiries from human channels, but to improve business results and increase revenue."
Today, the startup reveals a Series A funding round of $30 million. The round was led by Team8, The Garage, and Planven, and was joined by the Lukatz fund of Yasmin Lukatz and a number of global financial institutions that were Encore customers and decided to become investors.
