Forethought

Forethought is a San Francisco-based company providing customer service automation using generative AI technology. On March 8, 2023, Forethought launched SupportGPT—a generative AI platform for customer support. Powered by SupportGPT, the Forethought platform integrates generative AI throughout the customer lifecycle, resolving common issues, predicting and prioritizing cases, and assisting agents with relevant knowledge. Forethought's technology learns from a company's data to provide customized suggestions and insights, fine-tuning its performance based on a customer's conversation history. SupportGPT utilizes OpenAI models that have been modified and enhanced by Forethought for customer service use cases.

Founded in 2017 by Deon Nicholas (CEO), Sami Ghoche (CTO), and Colm Doyle, Forethought has raised $92 million in funding, including a $65 million Series C round in December 2021. This round was led by Steadfast Capital with participation from existing investor NEA and new investors Sound Ventures and K9 Ventures, along with individual investors, including actress Gwyneth Paltrow and former NBA player Baron Davis. Forethought won the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield in 2018 and has won multiple awards from G2, including G2's 2023 Best Software Awards, being named on the Best Analytics & AI Products list, and the Best Customer Service Products list.

The Forethought platform offers a range of AI-powered functionality to manage customer support queries. The company breaks this down into four key areas:

• Solve—using generative AI to automate answers to simple and repetitive questions, reducing customer wait times and ticket volume for customer support agents
• Triage—categorizing, prioritizing, and routing customer support tickets to the right team as well as removing spam
• Assist—providing customer support agents with relevant information and suggestions to improve the customer experience
• Discover—helping to organize customer support operations, providing recommended workflows, content, and analytics

The Forethought platform is powered by SupportGPT, which the company claims to be the world's first generative AI platform for customer support. SupportGPT leverages Large Language Models (LLMs), the same technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which have been fine-tuned on a company's data to improve performance. SupportGPT is capable of generating the following:

• Human-like conversations
• Automated workflow discovery
• Complete agent responses
• Gap analysis and content generation

To reduce AI hallucinations and unexpected responses, SupportGPT utilizes a narrower set of data than more generalized generative AI chatbots. Constraining the AI with focused data means it is more likely to respond appropriately. Early demos showed the model steering conversations outside of its scope back to customer support queries. To allow businesses to try SupportGPT and adapt the model to particular use cases, Forethought released SupportGPT Playground, a sandbox for potential customers to experiment with the system using their own data.