Any business owner who’s watched a call ring out during the lunch rush, or lost a booking because nobody picked up after 5, is exactly who Burchell Gordon and Bevon King have in mind. The Jamaican founders launched MORE Workforce from Miami on October 19, offering businesses in the United States and across the Caribbean AI “digital employees” that answer phones, talk to website visitors on live video and greet customers at the front counter.
Picture a hotel putting Shannon, a video greeter, on a tablet at check-in, while Simone, a phone hire with a Jamaican accent, takes the calls that come in after the front desk closes. Each hire comes with a role, a name, a face and a voice, all of which the business can change. It learns the job by reading the company’s website and documents, then books appointments straight into Google Calendar or Outlook.
The prices are on the website, which is rarer than it should be in AI. The entry plan costs US$149 a month for 400 minutes, roughly 160 calls, and the top tier runs US$599 for 2,000 minutes and 2 hires. Adding live video costs another US$150 a month. For comparison, the company puts the cost of a human front-desk employee at about US$4,600 a month. Every hire speaks English and Spanish, and businesses can try one on a free 3-minute call before paying.
The bots do have a job description with limits. They can’t take payments or send texts, and in healthcare, hiring, claims and finance, the final call stays with a human. Businesses keep ownership of every recording and transcript.
The founding team splits neatly down the middle. King, the CTO who builds the AI, won the 2017 Google Global Impact Challenge Caribbean and later went through Singularity University’s Global Solutions Program at NASA Ames Research Park. Gordon, the CEO, spent more than a decade in marketing, communications and business leadership on engagements involving Microsoft, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and the United Nations, and studied AI for government at Oxford’s Saïd Business School.
Gordon said the goal is to spare businesses the trade-off between “growing their operations and giving their people the support they need.”
The company, a subsidiary of Rio Cobre Holdings, lists offices in Miami and Kingston and is privately financed, though it hasn’t said how much it has raised. Next on the map are Canada, the United Kingdom and Africa. Businesses can meet a hire now at moreworkforce.com.
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Stephen Stanberry
