Working in customer support often means navigating disjointed tools to seek out data and solve issues. Nonetheless, lots of these actions are routine and repeatable, making them ideal candidates for automation. 8Flow.ai, which is launching out of stealth today and announcing a $6.6 million seed funding round, desires to do exactly this.

The corporate is rolling out an enterprise-grade, self-learning workflow automation engine that integrates with tools like Zendesk, ServiceNow and Salesforce Service Cloud to help agents of their each day tasks. But that’s only the first step. The corporate then plans to make use of all of this data to coach machine-learning models to generate AI-led workflows which might be tailored to every user’s needs.

“Ultimately, where we’re headed is that we’re constructing a tool that learns what an agent is doing today,” 8Flow co-founder and CEO Boaz Hecht told me. “But in the long run, it really doesn’t matter when you’re a support agent, otherwise you’re a finance person, otherwise you’re an HR person, or whatever — the purpose is, we’re constructing an engine that learns as a way to construct a model that’s then wealthy enough for use.”

Immediately, though, the team remains to be focused on phase one and on optimizing the user interface and experience. Hecht noted that this already helps out agents quite a bit and creates enough value for enterprises to pay for the product today. As well as, it also allows 8Flow to capture data and collect feedback.

“The concept is that we’re capturing data — we’re collecting the feedback — meaning we’re iterating for the agent on what they’re doing,” he explained. “Then, as they try this, we observe what they do after which we create — I almost consider it like constructing Lego bricks from the underside up — we learn what bricks have to be built. Once we construct the bricks, we learn the way you set them together. And once you set them together, we see what you’ve built and we recreate those into pre-built workflows.”

Image Credits: 8flow

Currently, this takes the shape of a Chrome extension that may mechanically copy and paste relevant data from one application to a different. The tool mechanically learns common steps for every agent after which presents them as actions they’ll trigger with a single click.

As Hecht noted, fulfilling an order return, for instance, may take dozens of clicks for a support agent, but it surely should really only be a handful because most steps are about copying and pasting data from one application to a different. There are only a number of steps where the agent has to make a call (to issue the refund or not, for instance) — and ideally, that’s what a tool like 8Flow allows those agents to give attention to.

“8Flow has allowed my team to significantly increase efficiency and accuracy,” said Heather English, a senior customer support manager at FloorFound. “We save hours using 8Flow to eliminate the necessity to modify between browser tabs to repeat and paste data. We’re enthusiastic about their roadmap ahead, as each release ends in freeing up more precious time for our team members.”

There’s also a further profit here for businesses, as they get data about which tools their agents actually use (and which they’ll cancel because they aren’t getting used) and the way they use them.

Image Credits: 8flow

Hecht is not any stranger to workflow automation. He was also the co-founder and CEO of SkyGiraffe, an early enterprise mobility platform, which he then sold to ServiceNow in 2017. After that, he stayed at ServiceNow until March 2022, ultimately becoming the VP of Platform, leading the corporate’s teams that focused on its core platform, mobile, AI chatbots and most employee-facing products. By late 2021, he decided that he wanted to construct one other startup, though, taking former SkyGiraffe and ServiceNow colleagues Josh Russ and Yev Goldin with him to co-found the corporate.

While 8Flow’s focus straight away is on support agents, largely because that’s the market the founding team knows best, there’s no reason it couldn’t add just as much value to businesses in other verticals as well.

8Flow‘s seed round was led by Caffeinated Capital, with BoxGroup, Liquid2, HNVR and Trilogy also joining the round. Numerous outstanding angel investors, including former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Airtable co-founder and CEO Howie Liu, and Snowflake CFO Michael Scarpelli, also participated.