Synthetix celebrates 18 years of developing cutting-edge AI-driven Customer Engagement tools

The year 2001 was a pivotal year for many tech giants – think Apple introducing OSX and Microsoft releasing Windows XP, but it also saw a new tech start-up, Synthetix, pioneer Virtual Agent technology with SmartAgent, one of the first commercially available enterprise Conversational AI chatbot services. As we celebrate our 18th birthday today, we are reminiscing about our past and our success …

2001 was a tough year for the founders of Synthetix, who with no salary and only a prototype of SmartAgent on old laptops, landed a lucky break, winning the BBC as their very first client. Unlike today, Virtual Agent/chatbot technology was not mainstream in 2001. In fact, it was a very niche idea to use Natural Language Understanding to assist businesses in engaging and supporting their customers online, 24/7.

Still, the idea seems to be catching on, doesn’t it?

Over 18 turbulent, fun, unpredictable years we’ve had the privilege to work with some of the world’s most innovative brands , such as the London 2012 Olympics, Toyota and McDonalds (to name just a few) and helped to reshape the way brands engage with customers digitally. Though our client list is a lot longer than in 2001, we still try to build a personal relationship with each of our clients and those personal connections are one of the many ways we strive to be different.

On behalf of everyone here at Synthetix, we’d like to thank all of our customers and partners for being part of our story. No, really.** ***Thank* you.

Of course, our mission has evolved over the years; Synthetix now sits at the nexus between automated customer self-service and agent-assisted customer service, handling millions of chat and callback interactions as well as the AI-powered self-service technology for which we are well known, but we’re still passionate about delivering brilliant customer experiences, time-after-time.

We also discovered some interesting facts about our birthdate. We would like to wish Mark Zuckerberg, Cate Blanchett and George Lucas a 01001000 01100001 01110000 01110000 01111001 00100000 01000010 01101001 01110010 01110100 01101000 01100100 01100001 01111001 00100000!

And who remembers these nostalgic throwbacks?

  •  The pops and whistles as your modem connected to the internet through your landline;
  • Trying to get WAP pages to render reliably over flaky GPRS connections;
  • Navigating to each meeting using a bunch of faded monochrome map printouts on your lap;

Well, time for some cake and fizz. Here’s to the next exciting 18 years of cutting-edge Conversational AI, Live Chat, Intelligent Web Form , FAQ Search , and Agent Knowledgebase  customer engagement tools.

What were YOU doing in 2001?