Rebecca Clyde, CEO and cofounder of conversational AI chat provider botco.ai, has a clear purpose behind the company’s use of machine learning: making tech accessible to everyone. The company was founded in response to the frustrating and life-endangering appointment-scheduling systems Rebecca encountered when seeking medical care for her daughter: “Every time I would call to schedule appointments, I would be placed on hold for long periods of time, and then the pitch boards would time out, and I would be hung up on.” When Rebecca’s daughter had to be hospitalized due to systemic failures that seemed avoidable to Rebecca—the former cofounder of Ideas Collide and co-managing director of Girls in Tech, Phoenix, knew too much about addressing problems with tech to let this critical pain point slide. She tells us, “It just seemed so wrong that we create these bottlenecks. There's more people trying to call for these healthcare and medical appointments than there are people who will answer the phones, and yet no technology was being used to really open that lane.”

Opportunity met ability when she met her cofounders Anu Shukla and Chris Maeda, who brought extensive experience building AI-led customer engagement software. Chris, who had studied with MIT’s AI lab, proposed facilitating query-led interactions using AI, but the nature of health-related communication that deals with private information presented a major regulatory hurdle to navigate: “It wasn't as easy as spinning up a chat bot overnight, because we had to build it within this very complex ecosystem of enterprise security and healthcare compliance.” They used AI to generate models trained with transcripts from customer conversations that were anonymized to exclude personal data; machine learning helped the Botco.ai team to parse the questions people were asking and what the procedures were for handling those questions. Today, the company has live chat bots in production handling millions of conversations on a regular basis that uses chat data in real-time to build their models.

This process of continuous learning helped Botco.ai to identify the most common skills, tasks, and workflows associated with inquiries, such as pre-treatment insurance visibility: “How much will my insurance pay? How much will I have to pay? That's a very common question that people have struggled to navigate when they're trying to figure out their health care and what right appointment or treatment to schedule. So what we did is we took all of these questions, all of these workflows, and built models that are fine tuned specifically to these verticals that we are serving,” explains Rebecca. Starting with behavioral health, they trained chat bots to handle questions empathetically and respond sensitively based on a patient’s condition, and then recommend next steps such as access to therapy and treatment programs, or insurance-related actions. Rebecca tells us, “the whole idea is to help people feel like they've been taken care of, that they're safe; and that now we've moved them into the next step, they've been able to progress and get closer to that treatment that they were seeking, they can get healthy again. And that's really the goal.”

The next step in accessibility was ensuring that no user was excluded based on economic and linguistic barriers. botco.ai’s aim is to make their products available across multiple languages so every community has access to the right support. Rebecca, a Latinx entrepreneur from an immigrant family, knows first-hand the challenges non-native English speakers have navigating the health system; AI, she says, has made it possible to solve this pain point: