Gradient Labs

Our team members Ashley Rosenthal and Zan Faruqui are back on the east coast after an exciting few days in Chicago at the Midwest Acquirers Conference, where they spent time with payments and banking leaders talking about where AI actually earns its place in customer operations, and where it doesn't. They also got the chance to experience Alinea, a definite 2-star Michelin recommendation for anyone in the Chicago area. ⭐⭐

For the banks and fintechs we work with, a seamless integration means going live with our agent without reinventing a single process. The result is that “magically effortless” feeling, and it's how agent 🤝 human collaboration should always be.

What percentage of your new customers sign up for an account or credit card, get partway through onboarding, then disappear?  Our customers tell us it’s higher than they’d like. Often, they're confused on a verification step, hesitating over a first deposit, or have questions about terms and perks. Our AI agent reaches out the moment a customer misses a milestone, like a first deposit within 7 days or verification within 3, on the channel they prefer.  It asks what's holding them back, walks them through the specific step they're stuck on, and either resolves it in the conversation or routes the case to your team if it needs human judgement. Your customers get proactive help, you get an immediate uplift in early month on book activation, and your team only sees the cases that genuinely need them. 💪 Read more at the link in the comments.

ICYMI: our CEO Dimitri Masin sat down with Rohan B., Global Head of Operations, and Jergan Callebaut, Product Lead for Customer Support at Wise. Both work with Gradient Labs every day to handle customer operations at scale with safe, empathetic AI agents. Their conversation covered resolution over deflection, quality at scale, and the role of human teams in the moments where trust matters most. Check out the full interview here: https://lnkd.in/gxTGbijC

Next week, four engineering leaders will share lightning talks on what they’ve built, diving into the infrastructure behind the AI agents that actually do the work. Join us on 30th July in London to hear from: ⚡ Nuno Campos (Co-founder & CTO, Witan Labs, creator of LangGraph) 🚀 Neal Lathia Lathia (Co-founder & CTO, Gradient Labs) ⚡ Emil Sjölander (Member of Technical Staff, Legora - previous Director of Eng at Figma) ⚡ Hayyaan Ahmad (Co-founder, Round Treasury) There’ll be drinks, networking, and a lot of engineering conversations. RSVP here: https://lnkd.in/gH7pqF9H

The customers we work with test our AI agents rigorously before anything goes live to their end users. One team runs 60+ manual tests before launching any new procedure. We listened to customer feedback to make this internal testing process even faster, with two key updates to our testing environment that we built and deployed in just one week. 🦾 Now: almost no setup time to test a full use case end to end in our platform, which gives teams the speed and ease they need to roll out the AI agent across more complex customer operations work, with full confidence.

We interrupt our regularly-scheduled content to bring you… the newest puppy in the office. 🤩 While Loaf has spent decent time on brand duty, Reece hasn’t figured out how to wear the “good bot” hat yet. 🤭 Want to join our team in London and meet these four-pawed friends IRL? We still have open roles. 🎉  (Link in the comments.)

What’s more stressful than rooting for your team in the World Cup? ⚽ Picking an AI vendor who will support you as much 6 months in as they do on day one. 🏆 For banks, fintechs, and lenders, there are three questions in the buying process that can save you huge headaches down the line. They are: ⚙️ What is the agent actually running in production today? "On the roadmap" isn’t the same as "live with customers." Ask for the named processes running now, and whether they go past frontline chat into the back-office work like disputes, collections, and KYC. 🛡️ Is compliance built in, or left for you to configure? Ask what checks run on every reply an AI agent gives a customer, and what happens when a regulator wants to know why the agent said what it said. Every decision and disclosure should sit in a timestamped trail you can hand over. 🏦 Does the team actually know financial services? The vendor's delivery team will sit inside your operation for months. Ask who configures and runs your agent day to day. A team that has worked in financial services already understands what it takes to automate a dispute end-to-end, without you needing to explain it.

Did you catch us on Anthropic's website? 🎙️ We’re featured in a customer story about how our team uses Claude to automate customer operations for banks, fintechs, lenders, and more. Most AI support tools stop at the simple queries. This piece covers why we went after the complex, regulated work financial institutions actually escalate across frontline and back office systems, and why Claude's natural, accurate responses made it the right model to build on. When the bar is 80-90% resolution rate, the right technology matters. Link in the comments. ⬇️

🗽 New York, want to swap notes on how AI agents are actually working for your business? We’re gathering a group of leaders in banking, fintech, and insurance for private rooftop drinks in Soho and casual networking and conversation. Topics that will be on our mind? AI implementation, what’s working for real teams out there (or not), and how your program can actually move the needle. If you’d like to join us, check the link in the comments for more information. ⬇️