and just like that, I was born🪄
In 2022, when everyone was writing off conversational AI, Lisa Popovici and I saw a revolution coming. Here's the story of how we built Siena AI—and why we believe it's the future of customer experience. It all started with Cartloop, the first company I built in the space. We helped brands increase conversion rates through personalized messaging, generating millions in revenue. But our customers wanted more — automated DMs, emails, chat. Everything. There was a need a technology that's infinitely scalable and excels in empathy and contextual understanding across every channel. But at the time there was a question: how? The answer became evident when a friend introduced me to the concept of pre-trained AI models. Having worked with small models like BERT before, I was familiar with AI. But when I came across one of the earlier papers on RAG, I saw something different. The key insight was simple yet profound: We could use AI to retrieve relevant information and generate contextual responses in real time. This meant moving beyond scripts and decision trees that had long-constrained chatbots. It wasn't just an incremental improvement. This approach had the potential to fundamentally change how businesses interact with customers at scale. I saw a future where AI understands and adapts to each customer interaction. It wasn't about building a better chatbot; it was about reimagining customer experience itself. I built an MVP that showed it was possible to have AI engage in useful conversation without relying on decision trees. It was magic. We have built an early agent that responded to customers in a human-like way, solving the problem of robotic conversations everyone hated. I spent three months speaking to over a hundred industry experts. Most of them told me the same thing: ‘We'll never use AI for support, but we need help scaling.’ They feared another dumb chatbot tarnishing their brand's reputation. That's precisely what I thought Siena could solve. I knew that if we could nail context relevancy and brand voice, we'd have built something valuable. I knew we were onto something so I brought Lisa on board. We went all in. We launched the beta version and onboarded our first brand in December 2022 — weeks after ChatGPT was launched. Today, brands like HexClad, Simple Modern, and Coterie are powering their support through Siena. It's exciting to see so many great companies joining us in building AI Agents— but we're thinking about what's next. We're building what we believe will become the operating system for customer experience. This goes beyond automating responses. We're rethinking how businesses manage customer interactions and relationships across every touchpoint. The potential here isn't in replicating human-level conversations — but in creating entirely new paradigms for customer relationships. That's what we're working on. More on this soon.