Why we’re building AI avatars

AI avatars hold the promise to upskill human teams and help them master complex, valuable skills much more quickly than previously possible. If we can help humans execute these complex skills more efficiently, everyone benefits –employees, employers and customers alike.

Avatars are uniquely able to upskill humans

AI poses a fascinating paradox in shaping the future of white-collar work. It has the power to replace routine human tasks, but it also has a unique ability to enable humans to reclaim our ancient ways of mastering complex, specialized skills. This is the fundamental premise behind Avarra – leverage AI-powered avatars to capture, teach, coach and disseminate valuable expertise the old-fashioned way, the way humans have learned for millenia: one-to-one, conversational and personalized.

For 100,000s of years, humans passed valuable knowledge and expertise from master to apprentice with 1-1 coaching and feedback. Only in the past few decades has most learning of new skills transitioned to written documents and one-to-many videos. …And frankly, while scalable, it is wildly ineffective compared to traditional conversational, one-to-one learning.

AI avatars, for the first time, offer the ability to combine the effectiveness of one-to-one conversational mastery with the scale of written and one-to-many communications.

Over the past year, we’ve proven the premise. We’ve combined cutting edge tech and ancient learning techniques to deliver 10,000s of GTM training and coaching sessions with game-changing results for our customers: ramp times cut in half, win rates up by 40% and more. Results so compelling it’s driven not only 400% revenue growth but also nearly 200% net revenue retention, as customers have expanded their use within months of initial deployment.

And individuals are benefiting too. New sales professionals with no prior software selling experience have been able to achieve 90% of the performance of more tenured reps in just a few months, giving them a jump-start on an entirely new career. Experienced reps are engaging with Avarra expert coaches daily to accelerate active deals and hit quota faster.

Avarra AI avatars are just that–avatars, not digital humans or superhumans

At Avarra, we call our AI experts “avatars,” not digital humans or super humans. Why? For the simple reason that they are bots, not humans. Call us old-fashioned, but we think that distinction matters. Humans are humans, machines are machines. No matter how human-like some of their skills, capabilities and appearance might be, that doesn’t make them human. We think it is important to acknowledge that and always treat them differently.

Humans have capabilities that are uniquely human and can’t be replaced by AI

Avarra avatars are incredibly capable, in some cases more capable than their human counterparts thanks to their instant recall of vast quantities of information and nearly infinite scalability. But there are many things they can’t and will never be able to do because they aren’t human.

Here is Avarra’s view of some of the key differences:

Avatars and humans should be easily distinguishable at a glance

One of the many lessons we’ve learned from delivering 10,000s of hours of human/avatar interactions is that avatars shouldn’t be hyper-realistic. When we started Avarra, we assumed that the more realistic in appearance our avatars were, the better. It turns out that isn’t the case. Humans want to know at a glance who the humans are and who the bots are. Being easily distinguishable at a glance builds trust, reduces cognitive dissonance and makes them less threatening. This is particularly true in multi-party meetings where avatars are participating with multiple humans, a use case which Avarra has pioneered but we believe will be very common going forward.

So our goal in designing our avatars isn’t to make them indistinguishable from humans. Quite the opposite. Instead, we’ve designed our avatars to be clearly “machine, not human” while being engaging and non-distracting. While there is still much work to be done to dial-in and improve the experience, the strong engagement and satisfaction we’ve seen in conversation after conversation give us confidence we’re striking the right balance and on the right path.

GTM is the perfect place to use AI to boost productivity because it isn’t a zero sum game

In many applications, boosting productivity is a code word for replacing people. That doesn’t have to be the case in GTM, because improved go-to-market efficiency grows revenue. Closing more deals, more quickly means you can hire more people and pay them higher commissions while still lowering the average cost of sales. That is one of the reasons we chose to focus our avatar technology on GTM teams instead of back-office functions that don’t grow with improved efficiency.

We understand that AI has risks

The Avarra team isn’t naive to the risks posed by AI and the debate surrounding those risks. Some of our team members are more concerned, some less. But we all share the belief that AI is here and not going away, and that those in tech with a moral compass should try and leverage it in ways that we believe are net-positive for society. If we don’t, we’re ceding the right to influence how it impacts our world to others who might not be as careful. We don’t promise we’re right, but we do promise we’re trying to be thoughtful.