ai-assistants
(7)
NuAxis Innovations and the art of making government less trying
Twenty-two agencies. One service desk. NuAxis Innovations built its federal IT business around a deceptively difficult task: making technology work for the people obliged to use it.
Rohan Suri and the Useful Art of Changing His Mind
The Nooks co-founder began as an AI engineer, volunteered to make the first sales calls, and discovered that the shortest route to a useful product runs straight through the customer’s working day.
Microsoft AI Bought a Startup’s Brain. Now It Has to Build Its Own.
Microsoft spent about $650 million to import a ready-made AI team, then gave it Copilot, Bing and an enormous distribution machine. Two years later, the wager is no longer about catching ChatGPT - it is about whether Microsoft can turn borrowed momentum into models, products and trust of its own.
Connor Waslo Is Teaching AI the Fine Art of Leaving You Alone
The Caddy co-founder went from coding through class to cutting a polished feature. His current product thesis is disarmingly simple: a useful assistant knows when to act, when to ask and when to keep quiet.
The Quiet Company Teaching Retailers to Answer 50% of Their Customers With a Bot
Leon Chaddock spent 15 years watching contact centers drown in tweets, DMs and chat windows. Sentiment is his answer - one inbox, a low-code bot builder, and a bet that AI can handle half the queue without anyone noticing.
Vectara
Vectara is a Palo Alto-based enterprise AI company building a trusted, end-to-end platform for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and AI agents. Founded in 2022 by former Google AI researchers, it lets companies embed grounded, citation-backed GenAI - conversational assistants, semantic search, and agents - into their products while actively detecting and correcting hallucinations at runtime. Its stack includes the Boomerang embedding model, the RAG-tuned Mockingbird LLM, the open-source Hughes Hallucination Evaluation Model (HHEM), and a Guardian Agent layer, positioning Vectara as a leader in factual, secure, compliance-ready enterprise AI.
Conversica
Conversica builds Revenue Digital Assistants - AI agents that hold real, two-way conversations with leads, customers and prospects via email, SMS and chat. Founded in 2007 and rebranded in 2025 as 'The Conversation Company,' the San Francisco-based platform helps enterprise sales, marketing and customer success teams turn millions of contacts into qualified, booked, retained revenue.