Cairo cab drivers are not aggressive, but they are crazy. When I go to that great city, I hold on to the side of the taxicabs and pray.
The fact that I didn’t have to ride in the typical Cairo taxis was one reason my visit there last December was a pleasure. I went to the RiseUp Summit, which is a gathering of entrepreneurs from across the world at the GrEEK Campus. On call instead of the cabs: a company called London Cabs, which had clean and comfortable cars.
Cairo-based Elves, a personal concierge app, had arranged the cabs. The company, one of many in the crowded personal concierge space, has already come a long way since December. Founded by an Egyptian couple, Karim Elsahy and his wife, Abeer Elsisi, Elves has become a featured app on Messenger. Facebook generates about 30,000 hits a month for 40-employee Elves, which allows people to ask human agents for anything from travel, to hotel bookings to help find my luggage, or schedule a meeting for me. (By far most of the requests are related to travel). The human agents rely on bots to search for information and perform transactions.
Elves is interesting for three reasons. It’s a sign of how fast the Egyptian ecosystem is evolving; it offers a window into how Facebook’s Messenger is evolving as a platform for third-party software, and it offers a (somewhat disturbing) window into the way artificial intelligence is evolving.
I wasn’t the only one who noticed how well it did during RiseUp.
Zak Fassi, who works on strategic partnerships for Facebook from Dubai, reached out after the event, said Elsahy. “He recommended us to HQ and after an onslaught of SF based FB engineers using us they asked us for an hour-long deep dive with the entire M for Messenger team,” he said. “That went really well, because the console we had custom built is very similar to what they’d been building for the last couple of years.”
The connection with Facebook means Elves’ engineers have access to new features and code Facebook’s engineers are creating, and that when users in the Middle East open up Messenger, a plus sign leads to the Elves app.
Though it’s just 18 months old, Elves is already generating about $80,000 in revenue a month (though most of that comes from buying airline tickets to supply to customers, an extraordinarily low profit-margin business). With about 15 investors that have put in a combined $700,000, the 40-employee company is now raising a seed round of $1.25 million.
Elsahy and Elsisi both have entrepreneurial experience. Their first company, E Group Corp, which now employs 250 people worldwide. Elsahy went on to found Genius Ventures, a VC firm that was acquired by Cairo-based Sawari Ventures.
Egypt's ecosystem
Egypt has been in the throes of a currency crisis and a tourism recession for years. But entrepreneurs there are still growing their businesses, and they are drawing new support from government agencies. The International Finance Corp., for instance, investing in the fund affiliated with Flat6Labs. Egypt’s economy of more than 90 million people is relatively stable, and it’s in the world’s interest to keep it that way. (Many civil society leaders in the United States and Egypt have been disturbed by the human rights record of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, though U.S. President Donald Trump has chosen to embrace Sisi.).
Elsahy and Elsisi, like other entrepreneurs I know, kept their business in Cairo there because the labor costs for the skilled engineers are a fraction of what they’d be elsewhere.
How Messenger is evolving
Elves is also interesting for the window it offers into the way Messenger is evolving, as a home for bots that help push people to human agents employed by brands advertising on Facebook. About 60 companies are featured on the platform; about 10, Elsahy estimated, have been involved in building out Messenger so far. This app-human-bot world is known as “conversational commerce.” Facebook vice president Dan Levy noted how much of an emphasis the company is putting on it.
It’s interesting to see the way Facebook automates part of the sales process.
Brands, which increasingly rely on Facebook for traffic, are responsible for the high-cost portion of the sales process, which is where human agents are required to complete orders for customers. Publishers are caught in a similar vice.
I asked Elsahy and Elsisi if they were concerned about changes to Facebook’s platform that could make Elves irrelevant. There is always a risk in tying yourself to a big company, which is like holding on to an elephant’s leg: It can take you far, but it can also crush you.
Not really, they said. They think of their app, not as a personal concierge service, but an AI learning tool.
“There was a lot of hype around bots and then a little disappointment,” Elsahy said. “Pure bots are still failing a lot. It will eventually fail to understand your intent. Where we’ve gotten lucky or smart is using the humans.”
The ease of working with the 40 humans, means that people are willing to use the Elves’ app. Each time a person uses it, they help train the underlying bots. When the company first started, the human employees were able to chat with three or four users at the same times.
Now, “each elf can handle 25 simultaneously. That is in-line with Facebook’s end team,” Elsahy said.
What Elves say about AI
At this point, I have to admit something that is going to sound slightly heretical. When Bill Gates and Elon Musk issue dire warnings about artificial intelligence, I scoff. This is because of my own experience with the Siri on my iPhone.
Every week, I ask it to call the local pizza shop, Café Pizzaiolo, and every week, it gives me options including Café PTO (what could that be??) and my friend Cathi’s phone number. (Why I keep stubbornly, hopefully asking my Siri to help save me time is another question).
So, with all due respect to their great business accomplishments, it seemed to me that Gates and Musk could be exaggerating AI's dangers. Being mislead by our own hubris is more common than developing civilization-ending technologies.
Elsahy and Elsisi, and no doubt others, have hit on a different way to progress on AI: luring me in more frequently with the human-aided interactions, like the one that found me a better cab in Cairo and that will help me get the cheapest plane ticket.
Now that the tech community has figured out how to teach AI, it’s only a matter of time before it learns all we have to know.
