Until today, I wasn’t aware that 1 in 7 companies worldwide is someone’s franchise. This means franchises represent almost 15% of all B2B clients! Therefore, there’s good potential for earnings by solving problems specific to franchises. One useful and relevant option is to create an AI assistant for franchisees, similar to what this startup has done.
Project Essence
Ezee Assist has created an AI assistant for franchises, capable of answering questions from franchisees (franchise buyers) that previously had to be addressed by the franchise owner’s staff.
The AI assistant functions as a chatbot, allowing franchisees to ask questions and receive instant responses 24/7.
This way, the franchise owner can reduce the burden and expenses on the franchisee support service and save money by conducting fewer trainings for franchisees. Why overload their minds with information they won’t remember at first, when there’s a robot available at any moment to ask questions and get answers 😉
To enable Ezee Assist to answer questions, it needs to be connected to relevant information sources. These can be documents stored in SharePoint or on Google Drive, videos from YouTube, or the franchise owner’s website.
Ezee Assist can be integrated with SMS, Slack, Microsoft Teams, other messengers, or email. Then franchisees can ask the AI assistant questions and get answers through any communication channel they prefer.
All interactions with the Ezee Assist AI assistant are recorded, analyzed, and compiled into a report. As a result, the franchise owner can see a list of questions that pose difficulties for franchisees and make corresponding changes to their informational materials and training programs.
The startup was founded in spring of this year and attracted $150,000 in seed investments. In the first few months after launch, it conducted 6 pilots with different franchises, 3 of which became paying customers – with whom it fine-tuned the beta version of the platform.
Currently, Ezee Assist is in the process of integrating its platform with 175 Canadian franchises, as it originates from Canada. For this reason, it has raised new investments of 1.9 million Canadian dollars (approximately $1.36 million US dollars).
What’s Interesting
Communications between franchise owners and franchisees is an interesting area for the application of AI assistants, a concept that hadn’t occurred to me until today’s review.
Franchisees are like startups, always looking for experts to answer their questions 😉. However, the most frequent answer to startups’ questions on how best to do something is “try and find out”. And this is not because experts are stupid, but because the very essence of a startup is that they are venturing into uncharted territory – so there can be no ready-made answers to their questions by definition.
Franchises are simpler. Franchise owners, again by definition, should have answers to all franchisee questions – otherwise, it’s a lousy franchise 😉. However, like startups, franchisees always have many questions, and answering them takes a lot of effort and time, translating either into additional personnel expenses or lost opportunities.
Moreover, the franchise market is large. There are about 800,000 franchise businesses in the US alone.
Additionally, franchise owners and franchisees face the same issue as all other types of businesses – high employee turnover. As a result, new employees of franchise owners are not always able to answer all franchisee questions, and new franchisee employees ask franchise owners the same questions that their predecessors asked.
The increase in staff turnover has led to a trend in the popularity of platforms for preserving and transferring knowledge within a company.
For example, turnover among salespeople is currently 35%. New salespeople are often unable to answer many customer questions, leading to a drop in the percentage of deals closed in companies.
This problem was tackled by the startup 1up, which I wrote about in November. They created an AI assistant that answers salespeople’s questions about the products they sell, allowing them to get answers 10 times faster and increasing the effectiveness of negotiations with clients. This startup raised $2.5 million in its first investment round.
A similar issue arose in IT companies, as the average time a programmer spends in one position in a company is 1-2 years. It’s tough to understand code written by previous employees without documentation – yet programmers very much dislike writing documentation.
This problem was taken on by the startup Augmend, which I wrote about last summer. They developed a tool that allows programmers to document their work simply by recording their voice and screen, and a platform that breaks down these videos to create a knowledge base. This startup raised $2.2 million in its first round of investment.
Where to Run
I will remind you again of the fact that 1 in 7 companies in the world is a franchise. In other words, franchises represent almost 15% of all B2B clients – meaning you can earn well by solving problems specific to franchises.
Consequently, this is the first direction for possible movement – creating specific B2B platforms for franchise businesses.
The model of today’s Ezee Assist is one of the ready examples of such a platform, which not only solves a problem relevant to the market but is also in the trend of the growing popularity of AI platforms.
What other specific problems do franchises have? How can their resolution be facilitated and automated? What kind of platform can be created for this purpose?
The second direction for possible movement is the creation of AI platforms for preserving and transferring corporate knowledge, including preserving and transferring knowledge both within the company and between the company and its counterparts.
The examples with salespeople, customer support services, and programmers are clear. But what other areas are there where the need to preserve and transfer corporate knowledge is acute?