Dialpad Launches Agentic AI Platform To Tackle ‘Next Wave’ Of AI-Powered Customer Experience
Dialpad sees agentic AI as a big driver of partner engagement, company founder and CEO Craig Walker tells CRN.
Cloud communications provider Dialpad has launched an agentic AI platform that will help businesses and channel partners build autonomous voice and chat agents in minutes that go beyond simply retrieving answers, company founder and CEO Craig Walker told CRN.
Dialpad’s new agentic AI platform will let businesses create and deploy agents in under 30 minutes using no-code templates for retail, recruiting and automotive verticals that are baked directly into the company’s communications or collaboration platform. The agents can handle authentication, routing, scheduling and order management with seamless human escalation when the AI reaches its limit, according to Dialpad.
Dialpad in 2023 launched DialpadGPT, a large language model (LLM) that the vendor said at the time was built on more than five years and 5 billion minutes of proprietary conversational data. DialpadGPT’s generative AI-powered LLM is less expensive, faster and safer than many competing products because it runs on Dialpad’s own data, Walker said.
On the agentic AI front two years later, Dialpad wanted to keep the same “moat” in place for safety, privacy and accuracy, Walker said.
Dialpad’s new agentic AI platform is optimized, trained and refined by upward of 11 billion minutes of business conversations and training data, he said.
“We can be more accurate, do a lot of things a lot more quickly, and just have this differentiated offering that’s better than others. We saw generative being a big step up from wave one of AI, which we’ve been doing since 2018. Now we’re really in a great spot because we have years of history, a large team of Ph.D.’s [and] a number of AI patents. We’ve now been offering real-time AI for almost eight years, [and] we’ve tackled a lot of the issues around scale. … We have all the plumbing, capabilities and smarts to take that proprietary model and go have what we feel is the best agentic solution. It’s just a natural progression for us,” Walker said.
The platform is currently available via an early access program for all existing customers and partners, with plans for broader access later this month, the company said.
Dialpad’s Channel Strategy And Legacy
Dialpad’s channel strategy involves heavily investing in partners, particularly for large enterprise deployments, which Walker said is the driving force behind agentic AI adoption. It’s a departure from technology adoption trends in the past in which SMBs had been the first to adopt emerging technologies, Walker said.
"This is the first time I’ve ever seen a new, disruptive technology be embraced and adopted most quickly by largest enterprises. Usually, SMBs are willing to take a risk and see how it works, and then [the technology] becomes mainstream and then ultimately enterprises will try it. This is the exact opposite of that,” he said of the agentic AI opportunity.
Dialpad sees agentic AI as a major driver of partner engagement, Walker said.
“The partners generally bring you larger deals, [and] partners are getting pretty darn sharp on this pretty quickly because this is going to be the future of a lot of these contact center/support use cases,” he said.
San Francisco-based Dialpad, a self-proclaimed AI-powered customer intelligence specialist since 2018, has a deep bench of telecom talent, given that Walker previously served as founder and CEO of GrandCentral Communications, which was the basis of Google Voice after Google acquired the telephony company. After four years with Google, Walker left the company to start Firespotter Labs, which evolved into Dialpad.
In fact, many of the company’s initial hires came from Google, including Dialpad CTO Brian Peterson, who worked on Google Voice with Walker.
Dialpad does more than 50 percent of its business through the channel today, according to the company.