Berlin startup That Was Easy AI shows how easy AI can be

Welcome to our brand new series featuring the best and coolest startups in Berlin and Brandenburg!

Cool Berlin Startup #1: That Was Easy AI

While “AI” – more than an artificial intellect, but a truly intelligent AI – is being bandied around so much at the moment that it’s almost become a cliché to say that you’re doing something with AI, the fact is that:

• it’s the future (and the future is now) and
• we’ve barely scratched the surface on this

While I don’t need to spend time telling you about how LLMs exploded into the world in late 2023 with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT; or how things have exploded (are exploding?) from there with each new iteration of ChatGPT, plus Claude AI (Anthropic), Gemini AI (Google) and Copilot AI (Microsoft), plus any number of other LLMs – still the sentence I hear most often from people (outside the AI industry usually) is that “Yes, but no one’s actually making money with AI”.

Well.

As I will no doubt be happily appending to various snarky comments at social gatherings in oh about five weeks from time of writing, that is just so early 2024.

Among other companies using, implementing and exploring AI solutions, at the centre of this rolling wave is the rise of a certain type of agency: the AAA; or AI automation agency (yes, I know, I don’t know what happened to the I either, but that’s what they’re calling them).

Welcome to the AI Automation Agency model

AI (and by AI most people are talking about LLMs and all the things you can do with them) can do various clever things, but the cleverest and clearest solution that it provides to business at least is automation.

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The first things you’d think about AI automating for you are of course all the drudgy and dreary repetitive tasks that any business has to shunt through on a daily or weekly basis. Whether it’s

• putting together all your receipts for taxes;
• going through your email and figuring out which ones are worth reading; which are worth actually answering; and which ones you can safely ignore;
• Handling FAQs, support requests, business inquiries and the like;
• Setting up, scheduling, booking and then carrying out meetings
• Inventory management
• posting to your blog and keeping your social media channels updated
• screening job applications and running initial job applicant interviews
• tracking KPIs…

….and so on.

AI automation agencies are providing ever quicker, easier and more streamlined solutions for these repetitive tasks, and That Was Easy AI is at the front of this rolling wave.

But at the same time, AI can do a whole lot more than automate simple tasks.

In fact, I think there’s a growing worry that AI will end up getting to do the cool, creative stuff while we pitiful humans are stuck doing the boring stuff.

AI Voice Agents: coming to a call centre near you

Lan from That Was Easy AI said:

“The area that excites us most at the moment, and which we’ve decided to focus on, is AI voice agents. The incredible ability of AI to answer a phone – or give you a call – and chat happily away, while also pursuing a business goal like setting up an appointment, confirming a dinner reservation, running a customer support hotline or calling to reactivate memberships, is brand new. But at the speed that everything’s moving right now, a year from now it’ll also be the norm.”

That Was Easy AI is at the forefront of German indie business startups in the field. One defining characteristic of these AAA agencies is their size: obviously, they’re not only offering AI as a solution, they’re making full use of the concept themselves, to keep the agency small in terms of (human) manpower and the structures simple and flexible so that a. they don’t have any major costs that make them dependent on big budgets, office space etc; and b. they can be fully agile, able to pivot to a different approach or even business concept at the drop of the proverbial hat. Because, while it might take a while to retrain a human taskforce to switch to a new approach or a bunch of new tasks, your AI workforce will probably need under an hour.

And then there’s Germany.

For startups concentrating on AI solutions and AI for business, Germany represents a conundrum: it’s both a challenge and an obstacle that Germany is, as has been much discussed in the media, behind other developed nations in its take-up of digitisation and embrace of new technologies like artificial intelligence and specifically AI for companies.

Lan from That Was Easy AI again:

“As someone who came to Berlin a good while ago and fell in love with its lifestyle and its creative, make-do energy, it is frustrating that Germany as a country, as an economy, as a state infrastructure, is extremely risk-averse and slow moving. As an American friend of mine said a while ago, “In the US you might get together and discuss a new business idea and then get started working on it the next day; in Germany you leave your meeting with a promise to spend time planning and thinking, and then plan another meeting for the following week.” But it’s also true that being based in Germany as an innovative startup, and being able to speak the German language, also gives one a huge advantage to get into this market…while it’s still early days for voice AI globally, in Germany we’re really right at the beginning.”

On the one hand it’s frustrating to try to implement solutions that are groundbreaking on the world stage in a country that has long been known for being resistant to the whole “move fast and break things” mentality; on the other, if you’re a startup planning to provide AI voice agents and the like for German businesses, then you’re in at the start of what is looking to be a revolutionary industry.

Even, dare I say it, Industry 5.0?

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If you’d like to have a conversation with the good folk at That Was Easy AI you’ll find them open and friendly and happy to chat (in English or German). Or drop by their website to check out their AI voice agents, AI chatbots, or their offer to “Answer 5 questions and we’ll give you the first 3 AI tools that you can get started with implementing in your business”

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All images created with Microsoft Copilot except photo by Diva Plavalaguna via Pexels