"Your AI is vaporware if it can't get into your customers' systems." Ayan Barua wrote that last Tuesday launching Ampersand. They raised $15M from Bessemer for the unglamorous part of AI: integrations so agents can read and write inside Salesforce, SAP, NetSuite, Workday. In a few hours the post crossed 370K views. Clearly hit a nerve. It hits me too, because in customer service it's exactly like that. An agent that answers in chat or on the phone without seeing the order, the shipment, or the customer history is just a prettier FAQ. Fine for "where's the size chart?". Then comes "my package has been stuck for three days, can you reship?" and it stalls. You need to open the order, check the carrier, create the return, update the CRM. You need to act. And in real companies the data is a mess. Custom fields, renamed objects, different permissions per team, duplicate contacts. Barua is clear: an agent needs integrations that read and write every object, custom fields included, and building those takes an order of magnitude more engineering. You don't see that in demos. You see it on day one in production, when a customer writes at 11pm and the agent has to do something concrete for you. At Spoki that's the least photogenic work we do, and it's what makes the difference when a customer actually writes. For me a customer-service AI agent is judged by what it can do inside your systems. How it talks comes after. How do you judge them? Reply quality, or the actions they finish?

What a great experience at #WebSummit we crushed all our best expectations! #spoki #WhatsApp so many investors and customers interested in us 🤩🚀 #startup – at Lisbon, Portugal