DRUID AI, the Romanian chatbot platform, that aims to automate work in a few clicks, received a Series A investment of €2M at the beginning of the year to expand internationally. The company has gained over €4.5M investments and has been valued at €8M so far. In 2020, it grew four times than in 2019, a year marked by partnerships with UiPath and Microsoft.
The Druid is a smart chatbot that helps employees, customers, and partners to communicate digitally. The bot is set to be human-like and intuitive. Every team member can have a dedicated Druid assistant that will provide a familiar user experience across all lines of business, tasks, and devices. The aim is to reduce non-productive time and overall costs while increasing data quality.
DRUID was co-founded in 2018 by Andreea Plesea, Daniel Balaceanu, and Liviu Dragan, who is also the CEO. They have developed the company because they noticed the need for self-service, speed in accessing information, and employees’ frustration in solving repetitive tasks.
At this moment, they seized the opportunity to create a conversational AI solution with a low-code technology designed for productivity. Using pre-packed conversational templates specific to certain processes and roles, the team can deploy the technology fast via an open API architecture.
The global AI market is set to have exponential growth over the next four years. This means that by 2025, the market has the potential of reaching over €20B, compared to €2B in 2018. The Recursive met with Daniel Ionescu, Marketing Director at DRUID, to discuss how the 3.0 digital future of work will look.
The Recursive: How do you define the 3.0 digital future?
Daniel Ionescu: Digital Transformation 3.0 is, in my opinion, a technological tsunami that will transform the entire interaction between organizations and consumers, resulting in an entirely new level of customer experience.
The COVID-19 pandemic has improved the DNA of DRUID technology, causing what we formerly assumed to be spontaneous mutations to fulfill the specific needs of corporations in 2020:
- We built conversational automation with human resources departments.
- We devised conversational solutions with consultants from the banking and financial sectors.
- We were able to minimize the processing time of a request and postpone installments by 97 percent in call centers.
- We built sophisticated virtual assistants devoted to the logistics businesses.
- We developed intelligent conversational solutions with energy sector consultants by offering customer digital onboarding solutions in less than 10 minutes.
What trends will take off in the next 1-2 years in your niche, what are the growth drivers of the market?
I see DRUID at the intersection of the three most important technological trends driven by the pandemic and its related economic impacts:
- Hyperautomation: anything that can be automated will be. By 2024, Garter says organizations will lower operational costs by 30 percent by combining hyperautomation technologies with redesigned operational processes;
- Total Experience: Organizations providing interaction, participation, and advocacy between customers and employees directly on their preferred digital channels will outperform competitors by 25 percent in satisfaction metrics for both customer and employee experience;
- Anywhere Operations: New IT operating models will embrace remote operations for digital-first, remote-first; digitally enhanced physical spaces, and distributed business capabilities. By 2024, Gartner predicts 40 percent of organizations will blend virtual and physical experiences, leading to increased workforce productivity and customer reach.
What is your aim for the next 1-3 years when it comes to product development?
Our main focus is to expand our solution library with new AI skills for various industries, processes, and roles. We are looking to open the solution library as a marketplace for customers and partners, to let clients and partners publish new solutions to be visible to certain organizations, or share new solutions with the entire DRUID community.
We plan to further improve UX/CX with advanced graphical conversational flow builders, we also plan to introduce dashboards for monitoring the impact and value engineering. Another direction is to address new trends like the voice in conversational automation, a trend that is more and more visible in specific domains like contact centers, IT help desks, or healthcare appointments.
What are the benefits of AI for enterprises from your case studies, can you share with us some data?
AI offers enormous advantages over traditional automation. Using virtual assistants developed on DRUID technology:
- the total economic impact in one bank brings $2.69M in savings in one year,
- 70,000 automated sessions and 500,000 pre-qualification messages in fully automated loan deferral solution,
- +13,000 WFH (work from home) requests,
- and 1,900,000 messages automated with HR Admin virtual assistant,
- 430% ROI and less than 3 months payback.
The largest European Retailer, using an HR Admin and Recruitment Virtual Assistant based on DRUID technology, experienced:
- a 75% onboarding time saved through DRUID OCR, AI Center, and Document Understanding automation,
- 3x more candidates scheduled for interviews,
- additional 30% savings in the time allocated to sourcing activities.
- 3,5M messages and 50k leave requests, 75k WFH requests, and 35k certificates automated through DRUID HR Virtual Assistant brings $917K in Total Annual Cost Saving.
Working from home hybrid models has put cybersecurity on top of the international threats map, what steps has DRUID taken to ensure safe usage?
DRUID was natively designed with enterprise needs in mind: high scalability, hyper-personalized deployments, mobile-first approach, and most of all, enterprise-grade privacy & security. As a result, it can be deployed either on the most secure cloud infrastructures or run entirely on client infrastructure, with no external AI providers allowed to interfere with sensitive data.
Furthermore, DRUID security is already tested and certified by third-party auditors and leading companies around the globe. In addition, the company complies with most data security and privacy regulations as requested by our targeted industries (e.g., HIPPA for Healthcare).
