We spoke to founder, Rachel Curtis about the company’s next steps and how the AI Accelerator and her involvement with the DDE Programme and University of Edinburgh has helped Inicio.AI achieve major milestones.
Having worked in financial services for nearly 30 years, I’ve seen a lot of the problems users and advisors face first hand. I think this has made me a real problem solver. I undertook a digital transformation project and along with some of the people I met on that project, we developed the concept of Inicio.AI.
Inicio.AI is an affordability tool that helps people document their income and expenditure. We aim to reduce the stress, worry, and shame around debt. During the pandemic lockdowns, there were two and a half million people considering suicide because of debt. Figures from December 2022 suggest this has since worsened, with one in eight of those in debt now attempting suicide. We want to give people the tools to engage with financial management and take control of their debt and the first critical step is to understand their current financial position.
Data is key for us as our customers complete income and expenditure forms or have conversations with our AI. We use this data to further train our virtual agents to work with customers in real time. We also use external data to pre-populate or validate the information, to make the process easier and more accurate
Focusing on something we can make a real difference in. We’re not solving problems on just the consumer side or the business side, because the challenges are linked. On the business side, call centre agents are under pressure and on the customer side, with the cost of living crisis, the numbers of people struggling are going up. We want to reduce the pressure on both sides.
The AI Accelerator programme helped us understand and express our value proposition. This allowed us to speak to different audiences and has transformed our messaging and negotiations. For example, we were close to agreeing a contract with a client and after receiving negotiation training as part of the AI Accelerator, I used those skills to secure a six month contract for £20,000 instead of three months’ work at £5,000. You can’t get better than that.
The AI Accelerator gives smaller enterprises like Inicio.AI access to resources we would only usually get if we had hundreds of employees and thousands of pounds! For example, we’ve worked with trainers and mentors who deliver courses to the likes of Amazon and Twitter. It has enabled us to punch above our weight and now our team is trained at a level that we couldn’t have previously imagined.
We weren’t aware how much working with the university or the AI Accelerator would be able to offer us, but it has transformed our business. Engaging with the AI Accelerator and the cohort has opened many doors for us and helped us be more effective and efficient.
We’re building on the foundation we established during the AI Accelerator and in the last six months, we’ve been focusing on growth through sales, contracts and taking in investment.
