SUMMARY
The company announced the launch of three new products — Freddy Self Service, Freddy Copilot and Freddy Insights
These offerings will deploy OpenAI’s LLMs to help automate tasks and derive actionable insights
The new offerings have come at a time when Freshworks reported a loss of $42.66 Mn in the first quarter of 2023
Joining the artificial intelligence (AI) bandwagon, Nasdaq-listed enterprise tech giant freshworks
has rolled out a slew of generative AI enhancements to its existing product portfolio.
On the sidelines of the second annual Freshworks’ Developer Summit 2023 in Bengaluru, the company announced the launch of three new products — Freddy Self Service, Freddy Copilot and Freddy Insights.
These offerings will deploy OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs) to help automate tasks and derive actionable insights.
“Freshworks’ goal is to have Freddy AI solutions unify the strengths of a range of LLMs to optimise business performance and speed deployments. Freshworks will build out proprietary language models and incorporate general-purpose LLMs to address customer-specific needs,” the company said in a statement.
Headlining the launches was Freddy Copilot. The AI capabilities aim to offload repetitive tasks and speed up workflows by allowing teams to use conversational prompts to do their jobs within Freshworks products. It also offers contextual assistance for teams across support, sales, marketing and developers, enabling them to build new applications to extend them.
According to the company, it has already onboarded more than 2,500 developers as part of its Freshworks Developer Platform to enable access to Freddy Copilot to build apps. The SaaS firm has already deployed the beta version of the Copilot product across 390 companies.
On the other hand, Freddy Self Service will leverage LLMs and account-specific models to offer personalised customer and employee support at scale. It deploys bots to handle large queries from employees and customers within Freshworks services and offers personalised responses. This, as per Freshworks, would enable customer support and IT personnel to focus on other projects and offload monotonous tasks to bits.
The third product, Freddy Insights, deploys generative AI to run through customer and employee support data to identify areas for improvement. It can also analyse marketing and sales data to recommend optimisation strategies to increase revenue. The AI-powered offering can also evaluate support teams to see if they are delivering on set goals and adhering to established guidelines.
“For far too long companies have spent time and energy training humans to understand software. Now with generative AI, products are learning to adapt to how humans think… Freshworks has a unique opportunity to bring greater productivity and proactive insights to businesses of all sizes and help our customers turn generative AI into business momentum,” said Freshworks’ chief product officer (CPO) Prakash Ramamurthy.
This comes a week after reports surfaced that Freshworks’ competitor Zoho was working on building its own LLM under the supervision of cofounder and CEO Sridhar Vembu. The company has already integrated LLM products such as ChatGPT in as many as 13 of its applications.
Interestingly, Freshworks CEO and cofounder Girish Mathrubootham previously worked at Zoho and parted ways with the company to start his own venture in 2010.
The Shaky Boat
The new offerings come even as Freshworks continues to grapple with a slew of issues. For starters, the company has been reporting losses, which stood at $42.66 Mn in the first quarter of 2023. Besides, the company has conducted multiple rounds of layoffs at its India and US offices as part of a restructuring drive to bolster numbers and cut losses.
The listed SaaS startup also saw the exit of cofounder and chief technology officer (CTO) Shanmugam Krishnasamy in September 2022, and its stock has been on a downward spiral since its record high of $50.25 in October 2021. Currently, the stock hovers around the $16 mark. An impending legal case also adds to the trouble brewing at the company.
Global inflationary pressures have also hit SaaS spending at major companies, making matters worse for the entire ecosystem. Despite the gloom, the homegrown SaaS market is projected to grow to a market size of $50 Bn by 2030.
