Building Lorikeet: How AI Humility and a Dual-Agent Architecture Are Redefining Customer Support

Guests:

• Jamie Hall, Co-founder & CTO, Lorikeet
• Xharmagne Carandang, Product Engineer, Lorikeet
• Rona Wang, Product Engineer, Lorikeet

In this episode:

• How Lorikeet evolved from failed ops tools to a full AI customer support concierge
• The dual-agent architecture: Concierge for customer tickets, Coach for configuration and ongoing improvement
• Why "AI humility" — defaulting to human handoff when uncertain — is a core design principle
• How Lorikeet integrates with Zendesk and Intercom instead of replacing them
• The UX evolution from workflow builder to conversational interface — and why the blank chat box is still hard
• "Resolution in the loop": how human agents unblock the AI without taking over a ticket
• Why guardrails need to be domain-specific — the cannabis company story
• How customers define their own evals and guardrails through the Coach interface
• Using AI to diagnose failure modes in traces and automatically suggest fixes
• Lorikeet's product engineering culture: every engineer asks weekly what they learned from a customer

Resources & Links:

• Lorikeet — AI customer support concierge for enterprises in regulated industries
• Gradient Labs on Just Now Possible — another AI agent team in regulated financial services
• Neople on Just Now Possible — AI digital coworkers with a similar training-by-conversation approach
• Incident.io on Just Now Possible — AI SRE with multi-agent hypothesis investigation

Chapters

00:00 Meet the Team
01:05 What Lorikeet Builds
02:34 Origin Story and Early Missteps
06:42 Finding the Real Support Pain
07:37 Why AI Fits Support Work
11:16 First Prototype and Early Evals
14:42 Design Partners and Selling the CLI
16:30 Product Mindset and the Real Moat
19:47 Rona Joins and Scaling Up
21:02 Milestones Voice Actions Escalation
23:48 Integrations with Zendesk Intercom
25:59 How the Agent Works Today
28:30 Coach Agent and Configuration UX
32:58 SOPs to Test Cases
34:35 Refund Flow Setup
36:12 Coach Conversational UI
38:12 Hybrid UX Guidance
40:46 Resolution in Loop
43:17 Collaboration Middle Ground
49:40 Process Maturity Limits
53:30 Confidence and Guardrails
55:59 Customer Defined Guardrails
01:01:14 Trace Diagnosis Agent
01:03:14 Product Engineers Culture
01:07:46 Closing Thoughts