From a telco platform recognised as having the ‘Best AI Product in Telecom’ at London’s CogX Festival, to AI-powered retail tech that increases shopper basket sizes, these Australian and New Zealand startups are getting noticed globally.
Earlier this month, Startup Daily and Microsoft joined forces for our first-ever AI Deep Dive event for startups, founders and digital product builders.
One of the standout sessions, Customer Stories: How Startups Are Using AI, gave three startups from Microsoft’s ecosystem a chance to showcase their AI strategies, how they’re implementing their latest innovations and the lessons they’ve learnt as they built their solutions.
The startups involved were:
Dubber – A cloud-based conversation capture and intelligence software platform for communication service providers. Founded in 2011 by Melbourne telco entrepreneurs Steve McGovern, James Slaney and Adrian Di Pietrantonio, and listed on the ASX in 2015.
Tutch – A digital platform for physical retailers to drive more sales. Their touchscreens give shoppers access to the entire inventory of a business, including online. Founded in 2011 by Sydney retail chain owner Grant Oayda.
LawVu – A collaborative legal workspace for inhouse legal teams to manage matters, contracts, documents, e-billing and more on a single platform. Launched in 2015 by founders Sam Kidd and Tim Boyne, based in Tauranga, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand.
The AI strategies:
Dubber
Dubber has been on an AI journey for a number of years. Their engineers have been focused on unpacking the key data points in conversations, across voice, video, chat or SMS interactions, to derive value.
The ‘aha’ moment was when they started to view those data points as ‘Moments’.
“We don’t talk AI. We talk about Moments,” said Michael Weeding, Dubber’s Global Director of Product.
“What are Moments? Moments are our trained models that are using AI and the data we capture to deliver an outcome.
“What’s your outcome? A Moment is tracking complaints. A Moment is tracking abuse. A Moment is identifying when someone in your organisation is trying to close a sale. That’s a Moment. I can understand that. I don’t need to understand the technicalities around it.
“What’s that going to do for a business? You can track your complaints. You can improve your customer experience. You can improve your sales team. Reduce abuse.”
Those ‘Moments’ have proven to be of high value to Dubber’s global network of 215 customers and partners, including Optus, Vodafone, Zoom, Microsoft and BT (British Telecom).
Dubber is building on its Microsoft relationship by leveraging the tech giant’s generative AI capabilities across M365 Copilot, to deliver even more value for customers.
“We’ve got these training models that take out of these conversations ‘complaints’ as one part. We’ve done that heavy lifting,” Weeding said.
“Take that data, put it into Copilot, and you can take it even further. Because we go that first part of the mile. And we can sell that.
“Every organisation I can see is going to be working to leverage a solution like Copilot themselves.”
Tutch
Giving retailers more bang for their buck is Tutch’s MO. Their interactive touchscreens are designed to convert more sales – a formula Grant Oayda originally trialled on his own fashion and lifestyle retail chain of nearly 30 years, Between the Flags.
“In our Campbell Parade store in Bondi, we cut back to one register. We put in five screens and the outcome was pretty amazing. We used to cap out at about 50 transactions an hour. We started hitting 153 transactions an hour,” Oayda said. “We also had a basket size increase of 14 per cent.”
In 2023, Tutch partnered with Microsoft to launch its tutch.GPT generative AI capabilities across the Australian and American markets. Their AI digital in-store assistant offers tailored product recommendations based on complex purchasing decisions. The modern upsell, if you like.
“This is where AI can really make it interesting,” Oayda said.
“We’re talking about hardware stores where you tell them the size of the deck you want to build and it gives you a few styles to pick from. And it literally just gives you the order, a video instructing you how to build it, even take into account where you’re building so you can get the right varnish for the weather you’re dealing with.”
Tutch recently showcased their latest tech at the NRF 2024 (National Retail Federation) trade show in New York, with Microsoft’s support.
“I was a little bit concerned about being the little startup falling through the cracks, but they couldn’t have been more supportive,” Oayda said.
“We ended up engaging with over 120 global retailers… and there are close to 38,000 locations available to us.”
LawVu
Anyone who’s heard the phrase “it’s stuck with legal” will get the problem LawVu wants to solve.
A SaaS success story from across the pond, New Zealand’s LawVu has had a stellar rise in recent years: they’ve raised NZ$55 million (A$51m) across various rounds with AirTree, US VC Insight Partners and NZ’s Icehouse and Movac. Their global client list includes Etsy, Splunk, Linktree, Estee Lauder and PWC.
Now they’re doubling down on their investment in AI for in-house legal ops. Not to replace lawyers, but to help legal functions in a range of business sectors overcome the admin backlog and operate with better efficiency and accuracy.
“Imagine you take on a new customer – they’ve got 10,000 contracts. It would normally take many months for a team of people to sit there and process all of the fields that we need to ingest into LawVu. So we used an AI extraction tool that reduced the time by a factor of four,” explained Sam Kidd, CEO at LawVu.
“Another thing we leverage is Azure AI Document Intelligence. This helps us read PDF invoices without the need for the LEDES XML framework, and then we can ingest those fields directly into LawVu.”
LawVu rolled out its latest stream of AI-powered features in 2023, developed as part of the Microsoft AI First Movers Program. Standout features include LawVu AI Assist, a high-level contract summarising conversational tool powered by Azure OpenAI; and AI Contract Extraction, which quickly captures and extracts key contract clauses and fields.
The startup has also implemented an internal ChatGPT capability using the Azure OpenAI Service, to accelerate their team’s ability to identify and extract relevant information during security assessments. Their developers also use GitHub Copilot, developed by GitHub and OpenAI, to help speed up product development.
And there’s more to come.
“We’re going to make sure that every matter or contract that comes into the LawVu platform is able to leverage Workspace Intelligence, driven by generative AI,” Kidd said.
More resources for startups on the AI journey:
- Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub – open to all, sign up in minutes, no funding required. The hub helps startups accelerate innovation, giving access to industry-leading AI services, expert guidance and technology.
- ISV Success – Accelerate app development, reach more customers, and amplify sales in the Microsoft commercial marketplace with exclusive tools and resources.
- M365 Copilot – Microsoft has removed seat minimums and expanded the availability of M365 Copilot so businesses of all sizes can benefit from its AI tools across all Microsoft 365 apps.
WATCH MORE: Highlights from AI Deep Dive
This article is brought to you by Startup Daily in partnership with Microsoft.
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