London-based Gradient Labs, a startup building an autonomous AI agent aiming to resolve up to 80% of customer queries, announced a bold new initiative — a $10,000 challenge.
“We’re offering $10,000 to any company that tests us side-by-side with ANY other customer support automation solution – and we lose,” says Dimitri Masin, founder of Gradient Labs.
“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,” adds Masin.
The initiative is designed to counter what Gradient Labs calls the “infinity plus one,” era of inflated marketing claims.
“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?” says Masin.
The Schrödinger’s pitch deck problem
One of the biggest issues Gradient Labs highlights is what it calls Schrödinger’s Pitch Deck.
It means vendors often claim they are both “better than everyone else” and “equal to everyone else” at the same time, depending on who’s listening.
Like Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment with the cat that is both alive and dead until the box is opened, many AI solutions remain in a state of claimed superiority until their performance is tested.
Gradient Labs believes the only way to “open the box” is through clear side-by-side results, not inflated hype.
How does the challenge work?
The challenge is open to any qualified financial services company – banks, fintechs, insurance companies. Here’s the three-step process:
Request a demo to see Gradient Labs’ AI platform in action.Run side-by-side testing with their current or preferred solution.Compare the results. If Gradient Labs doesn’t outperform, the company will issue a $10,000 payment to the challenger.
Why this challenge?
In regulated industries, customer inquiries often become complex due to compliance requirements, policy interpretations, and multi-step processes that require context and judgment.
Many automation tools struggle in these situations and end up passing the queries 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,” explains Masin.
According to Masin, current customers see automation rates of 40-60 per cent, without any need for a training period or lengthy tuning processes. They can simply plug it in and immediately manage nearly half of their support volume.
Furthermore, the last five customers onboarded provided a comparison of customer satisfaction (CSAT) ratings between the AI agent and existing human teams. In all cases, the AI achieved a higher CSAT than the current team.
Here are the details
Gradient Labs: AI customer support
Gradient Labs develops AI-powered customer service platforms purpose-built for regulated industries.
Leveraging advanced language models and secure integrations, the company helps enterprises automate complex support tasks, improve compliance outcomes, and deliver faster, more satisfying customer experiences
