One of the best ways that artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming business is by eliminating necessary but unprofitable administrative tasks that often take up a significant part of the average worker’s day. This might include completing forms and reports, transcribing customer and employee interactions, seeking approvals, notifications and other time-sucking activities.
A startup called Zocks is seeking to accelerate workflow using AI (and doing it in a way that meets the stringent privacy rules for highly regulated industries such as financial services). That's why Mark Gilbert, a former Twilio, Microsoft and Hearsay executive and product leader, and his co-founder Akos Ratku, a former engineering leader from Hearsay, recently launched Zocks as a privacy-first AI platform that analyzes conversations with customers to capture key information, create better records, and accelerate their workflows. The company’s first vertical focus is on the financial services industry, where a large amount of unproductive time is spent on administrative tasks.
Zocks believes that AI tuned for specific use cases (when paired with industry specific workflows and safety controls) are a winning combination. Many industries still use pen and paper, or clunky technology tools that more or less transcribe conversations. But even when successful, these models can require a large amount of data entry into back-office systems, something Zocks is designed to reduce and ultimately remove.
Research has shown financial advisors are only spending 20% of their time with clients, because they don’t have the tools and teams to support them. In addition, manually entered data is often incorrect or incomplete.
Zocks aims to fix this.
Recently, Zocks was also boosted by $5.5 million in seed financing led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Ascend Ventures, and Global Founders Capital and angel investors including George Hu (ex-COO of Twilio and Salesforce), Sheila Jambekar (ex-Chief Privacy Officer at Plaid), Jeremy Hermann (Co-founder of Delphina, Tecton, ex Uber AI lead) and Marc Boroditsky (President Revenue Cloudflare). After a successful closed-beta with over 100 design partners, Zocks is now generally available with its first release focused on the financial services industry.
“Zocks is addressing a huge gap when it comes to productivity. Pairing industry specific use cases and workflows with AI is the key to unlocking productivity and helping companies scale. It will save companies millions of dollars a year,” said Arif Janmohamed, Partner at Lightspeed. “With Zocks, key information is automatically captured, which then triggers AI-driven back office workflows. It’s like having an expert in the room that lets you focus on your clients.”
Edited by
Alex Passett
