The $10k AI Customer Service Challenge

Remember playing that childhood game where you'd try to one-up your friend with bigger numbers? "A million!" "A billion!" "Infinity!" "Infinity plus one!" It usually ended there because, well, where do you go after infinity plus one? (please don’t quote me on math exams!)

I've been thinking about that game lately while building Gradient Labs. Not because I'm nostalgic for playground arguments, but because the marketing in the customer support automation space feels exactly like that childhood number game, where everyone tries to “outclaim” the others.

The Schrödinger's pitch deck problem

I’ve recently come across the following claims and it feels like we are living in a strange quantum state.

Company A: "We outperform EVERY competitor, EVERY time" 

Company B: “Our AI agent is significantly better than Company A”

Company A is both undefeated and outperformed. Sounds like we’re in Schrödinger’s pitch deck - where both can outperform, until someone checks the actual results.

But it’s not a surprise that Customer Support AI is such a competitive space. The promise these tools make is so compelling: cut costs, improve customer experience, free up your team from repetitive tasks. It's a win-win-win scenario.

Putting our money where our mouth is

At Gradient Labs, we automate complex customer support cases in regulated industries like financial services and insurance. Instead of asking you to trust our own "infinity plus one" marketing claims, we would like to try something different. 

We're offering $10,000 to any company that tests us side-by-side with ANY other customer support automation solution – and we lose.

Here's what "losing" means: the other solution needs to come within just 5 percentage points of our customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) and match or beat our automation rates. We're not even asking them to beat us outright.

Why we're confident

Most AI customer support tools work fine for simple, repetitive queries. "What's my account balance?" "How do I reset my password?" The easy stuff that any chatbot can handle.

But in regulated industries, customer questions get complex fast. Compliance requirements, nuanced policy interpretations, and multi-step processes that require understanding context and making judgment calls. This is where most automation tools break down and hand everything off to human agents.

We built our platform specifically for these complex scenarios. While other tools automate the easiest queries, we're automating the difficult ones that actually move the needle for your business.

Our current customers see 40-60% automation rates right out of the box. No training period. No lengthy tuning process. No months of "getting the AI up to speed." Just plug it in and watch it handle nearly half your support volume immediately.

And here are the last 5 onboarded customers and CSAT comparison for our AI agent vs existing human teams. For all our customers, AI CSAT is actually higher than the existing team’s.

How the challenge works

We're opening this up to any qualified financial services company - banks, fintechs, insurance companies. Here's the three-step process:

Step 1: Request a demo on our website. We'll set up a guided walkthrough of the platform and give you full access. Zero technical effort required on your end.

Step 2: Test in a safe way. We'll guide you through our platform and show you how to test the AI solution without any risk.

Step 3: Compare the results. Run us against your current solution or any other vendor you're considering. If we don't meet the criteria above, we write you a check for $10,000.

What you get either way

Win or lose, you get a fully-featured trial period, a complete testing framework, detailed analytics throughout the process, and hands-on support with automating your customer support environment.

But honestly? We don't expect to be writing any checks.

Ready to test us?

The childhood number game always ended with infinity plus one because there's nowhere to go from there. In the CS automation space, we believe we've found our infinity plus one moment.

But instead of just claiming it, we're letting you test it. And if we're wrong, we'll pay you $10,000 for proving us wrong.

Request a demo, and let's see what happens when marketing claims meet real-world results.