His rm, LivePerson, offers an AI chatbot to automate customer service, marketing and sales

BY CARA EISENPRESS

In December OpenAI made a pitch to investors that ChatGPT would generate $200 million in 2023, its rst full year on the market, according to a report from Reuters.

Yet there’s an arti cial intelligence company in the city that’s already bringing in more than double that amount, even as it faces headwinds from big-name competitors such as Microsoft and Google.

stantially—40% in two years—since it entered the AI market. LivePerson rst hit pro tability in 2003, according to a 2011 Crain’s article.

LivePerson recently launched a new product called Bella AI that lets customers create their own “assistant bots,” which can be programmed to automate customer service and business processes or help with personal needs. Notably, the product is only its second with “AI” in the title.

tion of innovation and customer service brick by brick to put us in the middle of this great revolution.”

Drop in share value

ket and enterprise customers spent, on average, $680,000 on LivePerson’s products last year.

Times Square-based LivePerson, which has made and sold automated customer-service products since 1997, brought in $514.8 million in 2022, according to its annual ling. e company’s revenue has grown sub- e company’s hallmark is an automated tool that works across messaging platforms and allows companies to communicate directly with their customers. Some products seek to aid real people providing customer service, while others give full rein to the bots. LivePerson used more than two decades of such conversations to train its newer machine learning tools—some built inhouse and others brought in through acquisitions.

“We have always had the vision that a machine could be as empathetic as a human,”

Rob LoCascio, founder and CEO of LivePerson, said at the launch. “We built a founda-

But LivePerson’s early entrance into a buzzy space has not given it a clear advantage in the markets. e company’s stock price peaked around $71.50 in early 2021 and then cratered. After the new product announcement, it was trading around $4. Recent lings with the Securities and Exchange Commission showed a loss of $225.7 million in 2022.

Some of the drop in share value can be attributed to a handful of strategy decisions. LivePerson made a foray into digital health care that hasn’t panned out yet, and the company made a costly decision to pay its 2022 bonuses in cash instead of stock. e new product announcement failed to bolster the stock, a puzzling sign given the soaring demand for AI services from investors and business leaders.

LivePerson has 18,000 business customers, including HSBC, Virgin Media and Burberry, according to its 2022 annual report. Midmar-

Going forward, the company said that it would emphasize safety in its AI products so that real people would be able to keep an eye on generative AI tools they use.

“It’s not enough for us to tell you we’re improving the models and making generative AI safer,” said Joe Bradley, LivePerson’s chief data scientist. “As an enterprise, you are responsible for your customers, to your regulators and to your stakeholders. We’ll give you the tools to take action and manage the safety of the AI yourself.”

Bradley added that the product gives companies the ability to keep data safe and make sure that automated responses are accurate instead of just sounding human.

LivePerson’s new product comes as Microsoft is planning to test a private version of ChatGPT that runs on dedicated cloud servers for customers worried about data security, according to an article on e Information. It could cost 10 times as much as customers pay to use the public version of ChatGPT. ■