Ashish Nagar, an engineer by trade, was working at Amazon’s Alexa org on the conversational AI team when he realized that AI had the potential to greatly bolster productivity in contact centers.
“Frontline workers, like customer service workers, are the biggest human capital in the world,” Nagar told TechCrunch. “So, my idea was to use ambient computing — AI that you can just talk to and it listens in the background — to augment human work.”
In 2019, Nagar founded Level AI, which offers a suite of AI-powered tools to automate various customer service tasks. The platform can score contact center agents on metrics like total conversations and “dead air,” for example, generating insights for both managers and the agents themselves.
“Level AI’s software enables brands to get insights on the pulse of the customer, quality of the service being delivered and action plans to improve service performance,” Nagar said.
So what else can Level AI do? Depending on how the platform’s configured, it can show hints to agents throughout a conversation with a customer, like a reminder to authenticate the customer’s identity.
Level AI can also attempt to gauge a customer’s sentiment and respond appropriately, for example highlighting for an agent that a customer is upset about a late delivery. And it hosts coaching tools designed to help managers walk agents through steps to improve their performance in areas like response time.
“Key challenges in the AI-powered customer service industry include data privacy and security concerns, the need for seamless integration with existing systems, ensuring AI accuracy and reliability and addressing potential job displacement fears,” Nagar said. “Additionally, there’s an ongoing challenge to keep pace with rapidly evolving AI technologies while maintaining ethical standards and regulatory compliance. Level AI is built from the ground up to address these concerns.”
Nagar is naturally optimistic about how Level AI’s platform is being and will be deployed. But there’s a very real dark side to call center monitoring software.
An op-ed in The Guardian reveals how call centers often become “electronic panopticons” where staff are constantly watched, and where minor errors are used to discipline and fire workers on the spot. That, along with low pay and the psychological toll of dealing with emotional customers, could be one of the reasons that turnover rates in the contact center industry are exceptionally high, averaging between 30% to 45% annually.
And then there’s the privacy implications of tools like Level AI. Do customers know that what they say is being analyzing by sentiment-classifying algorithms, and can employees expect their personal data to be deleted at some point?
Nagar says it’s up to the organizations using Level AI to define their own data retention policies. “We provide flexibility for customers to control and manage their data,” he clarified.
And customers seem to like this flexibility.
Companies including Affirm, Penske and Carta are signed up for Level AI, according to Nagar, which makes money through annual contracts calculated in part by the number of agents using Level AI’s platform. Nagar wouldn’t disclose revenue figures, but he said that he thinks the company could eclipse $50 million in annual recurring revenue in the next two or so years.
Looking at the larger market for contact center software, that’s not completely unreasonable. According to analytics firm Mordor Intelligence, the sector was worth $61.07 billion in 2024 and could climb to $145.20 billion by 2029, driven in part by contact center operators wanting to cut costs.
It seems at least some VCs agree with Nagar’s lofty projection, too. Level AI closed a $39.4 million Series C funding round this month led by Adams Street Partners with participation from Cross Creek, Brightloop and two existing investors, Battery Ventures and Eniac Ventures, which brought the startup’s total raised to $73.1 million.
Nagar said that the fresh capital will be put toward expanding Mountain View-based Level AI’s platform to new customer segments.
“We’ve already shown very strong traction with enterprise customers, and this funding will enable us to scale our solution to even more customers,” Nagar said, adding that Level AI plans to expand its 135-person workforce by at least a dozen people in the next six months. “We continue to innovate in the space with four product offerings already, and we will continue to heavily invest in our people and technology to continue this trend.”