There is a peculiar indignity in being told that your call is important while a loop of hold music argues otherwise. Mike Myer built a company around that small contradiction. Not the hold music itself, which remains beyond civilized defense, but the old bargain beneath it: if a customer wants help, the customer must stop whatever else is happening, enter a queue, and wait.
Myer’s counterproposal was almost embarrassingly familiar. People already knew how to begin a text, pocket the phone, make coffee, enter a meeting, and continue later without restarting the relationship. Why should a conversation with a business behave as if none of this had been invented?
That question became Quiq, founded in Bozeman in 2015. Today the company talks about AI agents, voice, guardrails, and continuous context across channels. But its animating idea remains much less grand: a person has something to get done, and the machinery should not make the person perform a small administrative opera first.
“I like to build things - code, software products, teams and companies. There’s no greater satisfaction than getting stuff done!”Mike Myer
An apprenticeship in other people’s problems
Myer is an engineer by training, with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from Rutgers University. His early career moved through AT&T, Bell Labs Research, and Lucent Technologies. These are names from an era when technical seriousness came with large buildings, long research horizons, and the occasional patent. In 2006, he was among the inventors on a patent involving relationships between help topics and the way context could map them. Even then, the problem was how software could get a user from a question to a useful answer.
In 1998 he joined RightNow Technologies in Bozeman. RightNow sold customer-service software over the internet before “SaaS” became the syllable on which a thousand pitch decks would depend. Myer led product development and engineering from the company’s early years, through its 2004 public offering, and into its acquisition by Oracle. At Oracle, he managed a group of nearly 500 people responsible for Service Cloud.
That stretch matters because customer service is a splendid place to lose one’s innocence about software. A clean interface is useless if it cannot find an order. A fast answer is a liability if it is wrong. An automation that works in a demo may wilt when asked about a delayed flight, a return policy, or an account whose history lives in three disagreeing systems. Myer spent years close to the untidy reality: product decisions, enterprise integrations, uptime, data, and the human agents left holding the bag when any of those fail.
After Oracle, he moved to New York-based Dataminr as chief product officer and vice president of engineering. Dataminr’s business was detecting important events in streams of public data, another version of the problem he had been circling for years: find the signal, preserve the context, make the answer useful now. He also served on the board of networking company Cradlepoint until Ericsson acquired it in 2020.
The conversation goes in your pocket
Quiq began with a behavioral observation, not a laboratory revelation. People preferred texting family and friends, yet companies directed them toward phone and email. Myer described a customer starting a message while getting ready for work, pausing during the drive, resuming later, and pausing again for a meeting. The conversation goes back in the pocket. No dramatic handoff. No need to recite the account number to a new stranger.
The business case sat beside the human one. A phone agent can handle one call at a time. In a 2020 explanation of messaging, Myer said an agent could handle as many as seven interactions through messaging. Bots could take repetitive questions; people could step in for the cases that required judgment. The point was not to stage a contest between humans and software. It was to stop spending human attention on the parts a machine could safely carry.
Attention, unblocked
The obstacle, he once joked, was persuading companies to act in their own interest. His analogy was a business frantically fighting fires while declining a fire truck because there was no time to consider it. It is a very enterprise-software sort of comedy: the solution arrives precisely when the organization is too overwhelmed to adopt the solution.
His advice to aspiring entrepreneurs was shorter still: “Persistence!” The word is easy to print on a mug, but Myer’s version is visible in the product history. Quiq moved from SMS and social messaging to asynchronous contact-center tools, conversational AI, agent assistance, and AI agents. Persistence did not mean embalming the first feature set. It meant staying with the problem while the available answer kept changing.
Montana, with bandwidth
Bozeman is more than the dateline in this story. RightNow had already demonstrated that enterprise software could be built in Montana, and many Quiq employees came from that orbit. Myer explained the location with a thesis that arrived before remote work became a default setting: an internet company needed talent, quality of life, and an internet connection.
The company’s home gives its public personality a useful distance from Silicon Valley theater. Myer can be playful - asked in 2020 what the future held for Quiq, he answered “World domination :)” - but the joke was followed by a sober account of consumer behavior and platform adoption. Even his grand forecasts tend to return quickly to the plumbing.
Quiq’s 2022 Series C made that plumbing more expensive and more ambitious. The $25 million round, led by Baird Capital, brought total disclosed funding to $47.5 million. At the time, the company said it worked with more than 200 brands and that its business had doubled in the preceding year. The customer conversation was spreading from post-purchase support into shopping, payments, and the wider commercial journey.
Growth also sharpened the original dilemma. A local shopkeeper can remember a regular customer, improvise, and repair a mistake in person. A global company needs to offer some version of that continuity across millions of interactions, many time zones, and several channels without pretending that scale is intimacy. Myer’s answer has been to treat context as infrastructure. A customer who moves from chat to voice should not become a stranger merely because the software changed rooms. The technical achievement is hidden by design; the visible result is simply less repetition.
Then the chatbot learned to improvise
Generative AI changed the scale of the promise and the danger. In early 2023, Myer compared its arrival to the internet’s long transformation. He called the technology “freaking amazing,” which is refreshingly unvarnished language for an enterprise executive. He also worried about hallucinations, off-brand answers, and the awkward fact that a general model does not automatically know the private account data needed to resolve a customer’s problem.
His position then was practical: generative AI could draft and improve a response, while a person supplied judgment and the company’s systems supplied facts. It was neither apocalypse nor shrug. The useful work lay in connecting models to live data and putting them inside a process where accuracy mattered.
“I’m much more, this is going to be an enabler which helps people get stuff done.”Mike Myer on generative AI
By 2026, Quiq’s vocabulary had moved from assistants toward agents that could act across voice, chat, messaging, and email while carrying context from one channel to the next. The difficult question was no longer whether a model could produce a fluent answer. Plenty could. The question was whether an enterprise could understand, test, and control what happened after the impressive demo ended.
Quiq’s answer was a set of controls called Verified Intelligence. One layer checks claims and encodes brand rules. Another runs realistic multi-turn simulations before launch. A third shows the sequence behind each AI decision. Myer’s line for the launch was neatly balanced: brands should not have to choose between innovation and control. Underneath the rhetoric sits an engineer’s instinct. If software is going to improvise in front of customers, it needs tests, constraints, and an audit trail.
This is also where Myer’s long apprenticeship becomes an advantage. The AI market rewards novelty, but customer service punishes amnesia. Policies have exceptions. Accounts have histories. A correct answer at the wrong moment can still be poor service, and a charming answer that invents a fact is worse. Decades spent around service software make it difficult to confuse eloquence with resolution. The useful agent is not the one that sounds most human. It is the one that can complete the task, explain what it did, and know when the decision belongs to a person.
The last interface
Myer’s more expansive 2026 idea concerns work itself. For most of computing history, he wrote, workers have had a second job: learning how software wants to be used. They memorize menus, screens, reports, and rituals. AI may become the layer that receives an intention in ordinary language and operates the underlying systems on a person’s behalf.
This is a larger claim than making a chatbot friendlier, yet it loops back to the beginning of Quiq. The user should state what needs doing. The complexity should stay behind the curtain. Control must remain deliberate, actions must be explainable, and judgment must still belong to people. The machine gets more agency; the operator gets a higher standard of accountability.
There is a pleasing continuity in Myer’s route from help-topic software to AI agents. The names changed. The interfaces changed. The fashionable anxieties changed with impressive speed. The job remained recognizable: understand the request, locate the truth, preserve the thread, and help someone finish.
A phone queue tells a customer to wait for the system. Myer has spent a career trying to make the system wait on the customer. It is not world domination, perhaps. It is considerably more useful.
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