When I ask Sophia Sy, co-founder of SOFI AI, how she would like to be called, she shares that she is really Sophia, but that people have been calling her Sophie because of the company’s name and core product. The 25-year old has, with her collaborators, launched a chatbot service that seeks to empower businesses.

At first glance, a customer-service chatbot isn’t a necessarily exciting use-case for AI. After all, these things have been around for a long time. And if you’re anything like me, almost every time you’ve chatted with you, you’ve probably wished you could talk to a human.

But what I discover in talking to Sophie is that she is well aware that she isn’t inventing something new. Instead she is taking already existing technologies and finding ways so that they can better serve her clients’ customers.

I note that she co-founded her company at 23, which is around the time most people are at their first jobs. Sophia shares that she hasn’t necessarily had a traditional background. While her father did have a business in e-commerce, she saw him work through debt and hard times.

She was home-schooled all the way through high school. And perhaps most interestingly, where most high school kids would be on social media or YouTube, Sophia was spending her time studying banking apps.

She was excited by the possibility of using apps to send and receive cash, and then as she was financially conscious that early, she was excited at the possibility of earning interest by putting money in these apps. Where before she had no interest in tech, after diving into digital banking and digital wallets, a seed was planted.

Then when the time rolled around to maybe take an internship or go into the corporate world, she felt that, “startup is more exciting.” So taking all the money she had saved up from working an assortment of side-hustles, she self-funded SOFI AI with the help of her co-founders.

Sophia shares that, “Most businesses know they need AI, but few of them actually implement it.” We’ve all heard the incessant clamor about AI’s power to transform everything. She says, "tech is available, but when you look at business processes, no one's implementing it as much or maximizing its potential."

One key to moving toward implementation is using AI to solve actual problems. And so I asked her, how did you pitch your service to your first client? Where others might talk about their tech solution, Sophie says she focused on the problem. She went to the client’s pages and took screenshots of hundreds of comments that were not replied to. She notes that businesses spend money on things like Facebook ads, but “are not taking care of their leads because it’s just too much.” So those are all sales, and therefore, cash left on the table.

Another key to solving a problem is consumer behavior. Sophia explained to me that while in other countries, if you put all the information in a website and use lead generation to drive people to a website, then that will convert sales. But in the Philippines, we value “back and forth” communication.

What does this look like? It’s having all of the information there in the post about how much, how to order, and all the product details, and commenters or people sending messages asking “HM po?” Even when the price is clearly listed, the typical Filipino user will still ask that.

Sophia and her team identified that businesses have so many leads that slip through their fingers, and that potential customers want to have a conversation with sellers, even if they are messaging at 2 a.m. She explains to me that competition is high and the business that "accommodates the customer first" will win.

SOFI AI is different from customer chatbots we’ve become used to, because it’s built on top of an LLM, and then it incorporates sentiment analysis. They’ve built it so that it understands context, tone, and customer concerns. They take what they’ve built and then customize it with the clients’ training data so that their chatbot solutions have the brand, voice, and feel of their clients. One thing the sentiment analysis adds to is the ability of the tech to detect when the customer needs more support, at which point it escalates and sends the concerns to a human.

So with this, businesses can address questions anytime, and customers can get that back and forth that they are looking for before they make a purchase.

It’s AI adoption like this which solves everyday problems that will help us begin to unlock the technology’s real potential. And this looks like only the start for Sophia and SOFI AI. If this is their launch product, then we should be excited for what they might build next.