Every year, when the Muslim Tech Fest event day draws closer my inbox is flooded with several hundred emails all requesting some kind of support.
It varies from "Can I get a refund?" to "What time do doors open?" and "Where is the schedule?". All this information is obviously posted on the website, and perhaps I don't do a good enough job of socialising it amongst ticket holders.
Anyway, Muslim Tech Fest is the premier event in a league of it's own. That means the customer journey and attendee experience from the very first ad they see, to the emails the send and the event day experience they have needs to ooze premium quality. So, if an attendee sends an email, they deserve a thorough response within minutes - not days.
So, I built an AI Agent to handle all in-bound requests that I would otherwise have to manually respond to myself. As the days roll on, more niche requests are made that require greater and deeper knowledge of the event, brand and location.
The Agent needs to learn and train itself.
Haris, as the Agent is now called, takes an initial markdown file as knowledge and then iterates on it over time using feedback from it's conversations with users. At any point, you can email Haris directly and steer it on how to tackle conversations as well as give it feedback on where it went wrong.
For example:
"Thanks Danial, It seems like Haris (cc) made a mistake and didn't attach the draft NDA. I'm resending it now."
And Haris will adopt the feedback, and privately acknowledge the change to his "knowledge".
The name Haris
At Anterior there was an obsession with having personal assistants, executive assistants, Chief of Staffs and Founder's Associates. I never really understood why.
But, when you look around the VC industry, you see it's the norm. Every investment associate seems to have one. And the path to discovering their Personal Assistant (PA) is almost always like this:
1) A warm conversation on LinkedIn
2) Move to emails
3) "My assistant (cc) can help find some time in my calendar"
And then a Haris was hired, and one day I saw this Slack exchange:
Plz email me between 8:30 and 9 tomorrow or tues
Haris, Remind me please
Yes, sir! 🫡
Boss!!!!! 🚨🚨 Reminder to email Vladimir. He'll be free in 2mins for the next half hour!
wtf bro, aren't you overqualified to be a human alarm alarm clock?
But.. 🍆
A real conversation. Names redacted to protect the innocent.
I stared at my screen. Haris was a fully qualified doctor. Years of medical school. Clinical experience. The kind of person who could be saving lives. And here he was, being asked to act as a human reminder service.
It wasn't anyone's fault. Startups are chaotic. People wear multiple hats. But something about that moment stuck with me.
Why are we wasting human intelligence on tasks that don't need it?
So, I named my solution in honour of Haris.