Partnering with Decagon: A New Customer Experience

Customer Support Today.

Remaining on the line… to speak to a human...

A week ago, I moved into a new place in San Francisco. One of the things my wife and I splurged on was a microwave. This morning, I hit the start button to heat up my dog’s breakfast (I know) and the microwave flashed: “Demo Mode.” 30 minutes of ChatGPT support later, and Chat correctly diagnosed it as a manufacturer issue.

My cortisol spiked as I geared up for the inevitably compelling customer support experience of a microwave manufacturer. It was as bad as you’d imagine - more than an hour before I was able to schedule a technician to come get me out of demo mode. And good luck trying to reschedule…

We’ve all had the this problem: with a phone carrier, our utility, or in trying to return that T-shirt. Getting support is a universally frustrating consumer experience. And the history of customer service is long. We thought we had it solved in the 2010s - companies shifted to chatbots to scale support beyond what humans enabled. However, this change ended up providing companies leverage while degrading our experience. Remaining on the line… to speak to a human…

Customer experience functions engage ~250B times a year with customers [1]. Constraints - people and cost - prevent all but the most premium products from having a delightful experience in real time… but no longer is this the case.

Enter a New Customer Experience.

AI is catalyzing a superior customer experience while driving ROI for companies. LLMs understand human language, synthesize context across touchpoints, and deliver rapid answers with minimal human involvement. Particularly, advancements in voice and text models are enabling more real time, personalized experiences for customers.

Enterprises agree. In a survey of ~500 CIOs, we discovered that customer service is the top function where AI can materialize over the next 3 years.

AI can measurably improve ticket deflection rates, inquiry response times, and customer satisfaction. By 2030, we expect 50-70% of customer support interactions to be automated as AI adoption increases and underlying models improve.

We believe this will transform one of the largest pools of enterprise spend today. Companies spend ~$600B globally each year on customer support, primarily on in-house and outsourced call center services. Software is a tiny fraction of the broader spend; our view is that AI should turn this upside down.

But the promise of AI is much bigger. It’s not just addressing labor spend - it’s the opportunity to dramatically improve the customer experience by offering personalized support at scale. Exciting, right? But who will solve this?

As we evaluated AI’s role in customer support, one company consistently stood out.

Enter Decagon.

Decagon has emerged as a leader building an intuitive, reliable, and AI-native customer experience platform. Their product deploys quickly, integrates cleanly into existing workflows, and delivers value without months of customization. And it can scale from small, fast-growing companies to the largest enterprises in the world.

Decagon is turning customer support on its head, moving it from a cost center to an opportunity for maximizing real engagement with customers. The feedback we’ve heard across Decagon’s customer base is incredible:

• “Decagon has been phenomenal to partner with, and they’ve transformed our customer support within the past 8 months. We’ve been able to build an end-to-end workflow to handle our largest customer support cost in <2 minutes. Our CSAT has increased by 3x since we started using Decagon. ”

• “Decagon acts like a concierge – it understands everything with the same or better accuracy than a human agent. It currently deflects 85% of our website requests (e.g., returns, backorders) and is expanding into more complex Tier 2 tasks. I really appreciate how customizable it is, because we’ve been able to customize logic and flexibility surrounding our policies.”

• “Decagon has shown eagerness, partnered well, is hungry for business, and has proven to us that they’re in it for the long term. We launched them about a month ago, and we’re already seeing >50% resolution rates on our chat channels. Decagon has earned my trust.”

Dave and I have spent our careers working with companies from growth to IPO, and we meet hundreds of teams per year. It’s rare to find the talent density that Jesse and Ashwin have assembled. From Jesse and Ashwin on down, the culture is consistent: humble, hungry, and customer-first.

We’re thrilled to support Decagon and lead their Series D alongside our friends at Index and many prior investors.

Remaining on the line… no more.

[1]: Coatue estimate based on Gartner, OMDIA, and proprietary industry research. Calculation assumes ~17M contact center agents taking ~60 contacts/day for 250 days/year. Actual figures may vary.

Disclosures

The information herein reflects Coatue opinion and analysis as of January 2026. The information herein is not investment advice or a recommendation to purchase, hold, or sell any particular security or invest in any fund that may be managed by Coatue. Neither Coatue nor its affiliates guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information.

Certain information contained herein is attributed to third parties based on statements made by such persons, and those such opinions are solely those of that person and Coatue does not necessarily endorse such statements and has not verified the accuracy of such statements. They are being provided solely for informational purposes. User data and third-party opinions are based on a limited sample size and are not necessarily representative of all users’ experiences.

The above contains forward-looking predictions regarding AI and its potential impacts and opportunities, all of which are subject to a number of factors and uncertainties. Any characterization of AI herein is the opinion of Coatue, is subject to change. Given that AI is an emerging technology, assessing the future trajectory of the AI industry is inherently challenging, and Coatue’s views on its success or failure can be subjective and based on incomplete information, limited perspectives, or speculative assumptions. Coatue makes no suggestion or guarantee regarding the future outcomes or performance of the company herein.