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Daniel Vassilev met his future co-founder Jacky Koh in year 8 maths class. Now, at the age of 27, the pair have raised $15 million for their hi-tech startup, Relevance AI, which helps businesses build and deploy autonomous AI workforces.
Vassilev and Koh’s vision for the future of work may sound far-fetched, but they say it’s already here: teams of AI agents working together to manage sales and answer customer enquiries while their human colleagues are freed up to complete more creative work.
Relevance AI founders Daniel Vassilev, Daniel Palmer and Jacky Koh.
And they say it may be the answer to Australia’s ageing population.
The company launched in 2020 and has since racked up more than 6000 paying companies that have used the software to complete more than 250,000 tasks.
Autonomous AI workers are able to help teams of 10 people be as productive as a team of 100, Relevance AI co-founder Daniel Vassilev said in an interview. According to management consulting firm McKinsey, generative AI’s impact on productivity is projected to add up to $6 trillion in annual value to the global economy, a benefit being dubbed the “AI dividend”.
Vassilev said that dividend will be critical in helping Australia’s economy weather the likely impact of an ageing population on productivity and economic growth. The proportion of people aged 65 and over is expected to more than double over the next few decades, raising questions about the future make-up of the workforce.
While the latest generative AI applications like ChatGPT can already handle routine tasks, Relevance’s view is that AI will soon be much more advanced and embedded across every company, lifting the nation’s productivity in the process.
“While a lot of AI to date has been about co-pilot, we think about it more as autopilot.”
“Our vision is that by 2030, every organisation is going to have an AI workforce,” Vassilev said. “It will be absolutely crucial to help alleviate some of the struggles we have today with productivity.”
“We’re seeing productivity stagnate around the world due to ageing populations and other factors, and our AI workforce will create huge change in terms of what companies can deliver. Teams will only be limited by their ideas, not their size, and that’s our mission.”
Relevance AI’s “no code” platform makes it easy for any business to build custom AI agents that can autonomously complete repetitive reasoning tasks, according to company co-founder Jacky Koh. There’s no coding knowledge required, Koh said, as AI “workers” are trained using a business’ processes and knowledge, and they then adapt and learn as they progress.
Koh said his startup has landed household names in tech, retail and property as paying clients, including MYOB, Microsoft, Mirvac and Unilever.
Relevance has launched two products to date: AI Tools, which customers can plug and play into their existing workflows to automate repetitive tasks, and AI Agents, which can complete processes in areas like marketing, sales and research.
“While a lot of AI to date has been about co-pilot, we think about it more as autopilot,” Koh said. “We help you just focus on your own work and creativity, so you don’t have to wrangle Excel or Salesforce. You can just give your AI agent some instructions and it will go off and do those things for you.”
While concerns abound about potential job displacement caused by AI, Vassilev said he firmly views AI as being an enabler, and a tool at the disposal of humans. The EU over the weekend agreed to a historic deal among member states to pass the world’s first laws to regulate AI.
“[The] Jevons paradox in economics suggests that when efficiency is increased for a resource, the demand for it is increased not reduced,” Vassilev said.
“We believe AI workforces will have a similar impact, where companies will be interested in creating more value and operating in larger markets creating a lot of new jobs and opportunities rather than becoming smaller.”
“We do see a future where businesses have entire teams of AI workforces working autonomously … but existing teams will play a critical role in current functions as well as managing, monitoring and delegating to AI. We’ll just see a change in how some roles function, like with previous tech innovations over the last century.”
Relevance’s backers include local and international investors King River Capital, Peak XV, Insight Partners and Galileo Ventures, who have poured into a $15-million funding round.
It was a big vote of confidence in Relevance that some of the biggest VC firms across the US, South-East Asia, and Australia all converged on this one startup, according to Vassilev.
Zeb Rice, Partner at VC outfit King River Capital in Surry Hills.Credit: AFR.
“We took our selection process very seriously. The reason why we selected our set of investors was to do with our global ambitions,” he said. “You’d notice that we have pretty much the top investor in every region, and they align with how we want to scale up globally.”
“We strongly believe AI is the biggest opportunity of our lifetime, and as a nation, we should be investing heavily in being a leader in the space.”
Zeb Rice, co-founder of lead investor King River Capital, said the startup’s point of difference was its “autopilot” take on AI.
“Relevance is the first company in the world to truly move beyond the classic search box or co-pilot interface that has predominated with generative AI so far,” Rice said.
“Instead, Relevance AI unlocks this new technology’s true potential through the use of pre-built components and visual interfaces that help anyone create and manage AI teams from scratch, supercharging employee productivity.”
“It’s a game changer.”
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