Tailored Buddies

Most small/mid size companies don't have the funds to hire additional employees to scale. However, without hiring additional employees, companies fail to grow and thrive. This is the proverbial chicken and egg dilemma. This problem is especially acute in the Black and Brown communities. According to Crunchbase, Black-founded startups in the United States raised 0.48% of all venture dollars in 2023, or about $661 million out of $136 billion.

At Avatar Buddy, we demystify GenAI for small/mid size companies to help them sustain and scale without adding headcount. We use GenAI to combine job skill and interpersonal development in a seamless solution.  Even mildly learning impaired individuals can understand and trust these “skill (IQ) and will (EQ)” learnings. The resulting solution of tailored buddies help employees be more effective and efficient. There's a professional buddy to help employees with tasks, a coaching buddy to help employees navigate interpersonal workplace relationships, a chat buddy to provide natural language customer service, and an expert avatar that allows employees to interact with a digital version of senior staff. We augment existing staff's capacity by providing them with a cost effective GenAI powered buddy. Here's video demo-ing the expert avatars -

Our solution serves Black and Brown owned small businesses that don't have the capital to bring on more employees but need to growth in order to survive. The owners and employees receive GenAI powered buddies that help them amplify their effectiveness. At some companies, employees have reduced the time to complete tasks by 66%; a task that took 3 hours is now taking an hour with the help of professional buddy. Senior staff are using the expert avatar to train, support and mentor junior staff. This means junior staff have 24/7 access to the digital persona of senior staff and senior staff have more time to focus on revenue generating activities. By using GenAI powered buddies, companies are able to increase their throughput without increasing headcount. One company reported a 300% increase in revenue after they started to use coaching buddy to help their staff unblock their resistance to selling. There's an increase in revenue and company valuation, and employees are more engaged because they are having a greater impact.

At Avatar Buddy, we are using the tailored buddies to help us scale. We hired a business development consultant to help us grow our sales, we took the resulting strategy and fed it to professional buddy. Professional buddy then created an implementation plan including what artifacts we needed to use to be successful. We noticed a reduction in our sales cycle timeline. We went from 9 months to 3 months, we can better qualify a lead after two meetings instead of not being able to qualify a lead at all. In one month, we generated more revenue than we did in all of 2023. We are a Black owned small business and we are using the GenAI powered buddies to grow our business. Our customers are mostly Black and Brown led organizations and they provide us with feedback that helps us refine our service offerings. We have quarterly user group meetings to share our wins and challenges of using GenAI powered buddies in our organizations. Finally, we ensured that our solution was culturally sensitive. For the past 8 years, 90% of the people defining and developing Avatar Buddy identify as either Black or Brown.

Our product is complete and while we continue to evolve it, it works perfectly and is having the intended impact. We have a solid small language model, its been trained to provide empathetic responses and we can create digital personas of any living person over the age of 13. We have 19 paying customers representing 2,850 users. And we have a pipeline of 73 customers representing approximately 19,000 additional users. We have raised almost $1 million in cash, grants and in-kind services.

With the MIT logo on our product, we gain market credibility which will allow us to scale faster. We believe the race between the haves and have-nots has got faster and without solutions like Avatar Buddy's GenAI powered buddies, small/mid-size companies will vanish and with them the jobs that keep the vast majority of workers employed. According to the International Labour Organization, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) account for more than 95% of all businesses and 70% of employment globally. SMEs also contribute about 40% of the national income (GDP) in emerging companies.

Most products that help with employee effectiveness and efficiency focus on one part of the problem - building EQ (will) or building IQ (skill). At Avatar Buddy, we combined both into one solution because we understand that both are needed to truly have an impactful development of employees. We hope that the results we are garnering will inspire others to switch to a holistic approach (will + skill) to employee development.

with minimal input (GenAI powered buddy) plus the prescribed tasks results in an output that is of higher quality done in a shorter period of time. The the outcome is employee productivity increases which is directly tied to increased revenue. A recent Visier survey reports that employees who are currently using GenAI tools at work are saving 1.75 hours on average per day (Visier, 2023). 

We have two impact goals:

1. Measuring the increase in revenue after using GenAI for 3 months, 6 months and a year. We anticipate that in as little as 3 months, there will be a noticeable increase in revenue.

2. Measuring the level of employee engagement at 4 month, 8 month and a year. We anticipate that employee's agency will increase after 4 months and with it their job satisfaction and engagement.

We use OpenAI's GPT 4.0 engine to power our large language model. We couple that with our proprietary small language model and ability to create digital personas. Users access their buddy via a progressive app that is optimized for smart devices.

We employ an organizational structure that utilizes contractors. We have 6 C-suite contractors, 2 junior staff contractors, 2 interns and our GenAI powered buddies.

We have been working on our solution since summer 2016.

Since our beginning, at least 90% of our team identifies as either Black or Brown. We intentionality engage organizations that provide services in Black and Brown communities to recruit our contractors and interns. This approach ensures that we maintain our 90% Black or Brown mix. This approach has helped us be more forward thinking with our solution. For example, in marginalized communities, privacy is paramount! Our interns from marginalized communities were insistent that we include the ability to delete conversations with the buddies. When we went to market in Jan 2023, that functionality existed. It took OpenAI 4 months after going to market to release that functionality.

We focus on small/mid-size companies that don't have the IT acumen to create GenAI powered buddies but understand the importance of using these buddies to scale. We provide the buddies at a cost effective price so that their increase revenue isn't consumed with paying Avatar Buddy. We reach our target audience through a channel partnership program where we partner with industry experts to sell Avatar Buddy on our behalf to industries that we don't have any expertise in.

Our plan is to continue selling our buddies. We don't give away access to our product the way other SaaS companies give away their product. This means that we provide a cost effective, reliable solution to those who most need and can benefit from it. We have generated $58K in revenue in 2023 and we closed $100K in revenue in Jan 2024. We have a goal of $2.5 million in revenue for 2024. Given our current pipeline, we meet that target.