Signals launches cloud-based ‘AI employees’ to rethink customer engagement

Signals, a startup building an artificial intelligence-powered Cloud Employee Platform, launched today with the goal of helping companies automate client-facing interactions across sales, marketing, customer service and human resources.

The company’s platform can deploy cloud-based “AI employees,” essentially AI agents, which can deploy instantly, integrate with company systems and understand business context.

“It comes pretrained with over a billion sales conversations,” Dave Elkington, founder and chief executive of Signals, told SiliconANGLE in an interview. “What that allows us to do is have these agents that come ready for defined use cases, whether it’s setting appointments, resolving cases or expanding accounts.”

For example, Elkington explained if someone is calling to schedule time with a chiropractor or a dental office, the company has more than 150 million examples of how to assist effectively. The AI employees operate across numerous communication channels, such as phone, email, chat SMS and social media. This allows organizations to engage customers wherever they are.

Signals AI agents integrate with every pool of data within a company and can deeply access customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning systems such as Oracle, and even behavioral data from the web, allowing agents to become extremely informed.

“All of this data are signals,” Elkington explained, adding that this informed the company name. “As employees, we should know this stuff but the individual tools don’t let us. Our agents do.”

The agents can remain online 24/7 and don’t sleep. They’re capable of augmenting the work of sales and marketing employees by doing outreach or follow-ups on email and on the phone. That makes them a primary resource for companies that want to maintain a good relationship with their customers or bring in leads.

“Signals’ AI Cloud Employees boosted our inbound lead follow-up performance by 23%, qualifying and scheduling more meetings than our previous process,” said Gabe Larsen, chief marketing officer of Kustomer LLC, an AI-powered customer service platform. “We achieved a 33% increase in pipeline by reimagining what was possible. Signals didn’t just save us thousands in costs — it helped us unlock a faster, smarter and always-on revenue engine.”

Signals’ agents can also make outbound phone calls and speak in a surprisingly natural-sounding way. They do inform people that they are an “AI agent from Signals,” or whichever customer is using it, when they call and why they’re calling. They can answer questions, look up and update information, sign people for events and more.

In one case, Elkington recalled, an agent called a receptionist to follow up on an email and asked to speak with a particular person. The receptionist, unsure if the person worked there, asked if the AI could wait. The agent replied, “Take your time, I can just hang out a minute. I’m just an AI; I’m not in a hurry.”

Something that Elkington believes makes the company stand out from the rest of the market is that Signals agents learn from every interaction. The AI is designed to continuously learn and improve from every conversation through reinforcement learning.

Just like speaking with a human, “This call will be recorded for training purposes,” a sub-AI listens to the call and evaluates if the outcome was successful. If a conversation didn’t go so well, the system automatically adapts the instructions to improve future responses.

Although the company is publicly launching today, Signals has already achieved profitability and has hundreds of AI Cloud Employees deployed across more than 65 organizations.

“Typically, when a company deploys an AI agent, it’s very specific: an email agent, a chat agent, a voice agent. We think very differently,” said Elkington. “With us you create an employee that has access to your company’s culture, history and tech stack. It learns, evolves and talks to customers on their terms.”

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