The AI built to answer the calls no one wants to be stuck on.
ASAPP, New York. Founded after its CEO spent 2 hours and 56 minutes on hold with a cable company, ASAPP now builds the generative AI that handles those conversations - for JetBlue, American Airlines and the Fortune 500. Photo caption in the tradition of Vincent Musi: the subject is a company that turned frustration into infrastructure.
In September 2014, Gustavo Sapoznik spent two hours and fifty-six minutes on the phone with his cable provider. The problem was not that the call went badly - it was that the entire system seemed designed to waste everyone's time, his and the agent's. Most people hang up and move on. Sapoznik started a company.
That company is ASAPP, a New York-based enterprise AI business that builds software for one of the least glamorous and most expensive parts of any large company: the contact center. Its pitch is simple to state and hard to execute - use generative AI to resolve customer problems faster, and give the humans who remain better tools to handle the hard cases.
ASAPP describes its mission as elevating human performance through generative AI. In practice that means an AI-native Customer Experience Platform that sits across voice and chat channels, listens to conversations, transcribes them, drafts responses, summarizes calls, and - increasingly - handles entire interactions on its own.
The company's flagship is GenerativeAgent, an autonomous AI agent that ASAPP says can listen, reason, act, and improve. It is designed to automate more than 90% of contact-center interactions and to manage the kind of complex, multi-turn requests that older chatbots stumbled over. When it cannot, a human steps in - a design ASAPP calls human-in-the-loop.
Behind the product is a research-heavy team. A founding member of the speech team that built Apple's Siri helped shape ASAPP's proprietary speech-to-text technology - the difference, in customer service, between a transcript that helps an agent and one that misreads a policy number.
The bet is that the contact center, precisely because it is so painful and so high-volume, is where enterprise AI proves its value first. ASAPP calls it the foundation of the agentic enterprise.
Fortune 500 enterprises in telecom, airlines, banking, insurance and retail run high-volume contact centers where every saved second and every avoided escalation is real money.
ASAPP states its technology is used by four of the top five US cable providers and about half of the leading US wireless carriers - industries defined by high call volume and complex billing.
JetBlue used ASAPP to 5x its digital contact share and save an average of ~280 seconds per conversation - an estimated 73,000 workforce hours in a single quarter.
American Airlines reports raising customer satisfaction by 11% using ASAPP's GenerativeAgent - measurable CSAT gains rather than a demo.
The core problem ASAPP attacks is the toggling, waiting and manual note-taking that makes both customers and agents miserable. Long hold times, agents jumping between a dozen applications, after-call summaries typed by hand - each is a place where AI can remove friction without removing the human judgment that hard cases require.
A layered platform: fully autonomous where it makes sense, human-assisted where it matters.
The AI-native CXP unifies automation, agent assistance and interaction intelligence across voice and digital channels, deployed alongside existing contact-center systems.
A generative AI agent that listens, reasons, acts and improves - automating 90%+ of interactions and handling complex, multi-turn requests across voice and chat.
Live transcription, suggested responses, surfaced resources and auto-generated call summaries so agents spend time talking, not typing.
Supervision and escalation workflows that keep humans in control of regulated and high-stakes interactions while AI handles the routine volume.
Figures disclosed by ASAPP and its customers. Bars are scaled for readability, not to a common axis.
Sources: ASAPP case studies, JetBlue and American Airlines disclosures. Q1 2023 JetBlue figure ≈ 73,000 workforce hours saved.
Contact-center AI is a crowded field. ASAPP competes with newer specialists like Cresta, Sierra, Decagon, Cognigy and Parloa, alongside platform giants such as Google Cloud CCAI, Amazon Connect, Salesforce Agentforce, NICE, Verint and Genesys.
Two things distinguish ASAPP's approach. First, it is AI-native rather than a chatbot layered onto legacy software - the platform is built around research-grade speech and language models, with roots in a team that helped build Siri's speech stack. Second, it leans hard on human-in-the-loop design, positioning AI as a way to make agents better rather than a headcount-cut story - a stance that resonates in regulated, high-stakes industries like banking, insurance and airlines.
Business model: ASAPP is B2B enterprise SaaS. It sells its platform to large enterprises on a subscription and usage/outcome basis, typically tied to the volume of interactions automated or the productivity gains delivered, and integrates with existing infrastructure from Genesys, Amazon Connect, Twilio and Avaya on cloud providers like AWS.
A 2h56m call with a cable provider convinces Gustavo Sapoznik there is a business in fixing enterprise customer interactions.
ASAPP builds out its NLP and speech research and engineering team in New York.
Large funding rounds and enterprise traction across telecom and travel; Forbes profiles the "AI designed to help humans."
JetBlue selects ASAPP; the company closes a $120M Series C at a ~$1.6B valuation led by Fidelity and Dragoneer.
Goldman Sachs names Sapoznik one of its Most Exceptional Entrepreneurs of the year.
ASAPP launches and expands its autonomous generative AI agent for complex voice and chat interactions, running on AWS.
ASAPP unifies its offerings into an AI-native CXP, covered by S&P Global 451 Research.
Led by Fidelity and Dragoneer at a ~$1.6B valuation. Part of roughly $380M raised across rounds.
University of Chicago alumnus who founded ASAPP after his now-famous cable-company call. Recognized by Goldman Sachs in 2022.
Culture: ASAPP pairs published AI research with rapid product execution, and emphasizes trust, security and human-AI collaboration. Its research arm, ASAPP Research, publishes in natural language processing and speech.
ASAPP builds an AI-native Customer Experience Platform for enterprise contact centers. Its software automates and assists customer interactions across voice and chat using generative AI, speech recognition and natural language processing.
ASAPP was founded in 2014 by Gustavo Sapoznik, who serves as CEO. The idea came from a frustrating nearly three-hour call he had with his cable provider.
GenerativeAgent is ASAPP's flagship autonomous AI agent. It listens, reasons, acts and improves, and can automate 90%+ of contact-center interactions while handling complex, multi-turn requests.
ASAPP serves Fortune 500 enterprises in telecom, airlines, banking, insurance and retail, including JetBlue, American Airlines, Dish and Astound.
ASAPP has raised roughly $380 million, including a $120 million Series C in May 2021 at an approximately $1.6 billion valuation, from investors such as Fidelity and Dragoneer.