Adam Smith is Co-Founder of Wrangle.io, an AI-powered ticketing and workflow engine built for how work gets done in Slack. Prior to founding Wrangle, Adam was COO of Automated Insights (Ai), a pioneer in generative AI that turned data into human-sounding stories at scale. The company produced billions of personalized stories a year for Fortune 500 customers. Ai was acquired by private equity firm Vista Equity Partners in 2015.
Prior to joining Ai, Adam was SVP at Square 1 Bank, a venture bank where he served as director of a national division called Square Roots, serving early-stage founders. Before his work at Square 1 Bank, Adam was vice president of the Center for Entrepreneurial Development (CED), where he led the program team and was responsible for strategic relationships.
Adam is a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill.
1.) What is in your pockets?
Nothing right now. I used to carry a Leatherman multi-tool all the time, but as I’ve gotten older, it’s just a wallet, keys, phone, and sometimes earbuds.
2.) What exciting thing has happened recently for you or your organization?
Wrangle is an AI-powered ticketing and workflow platform in Slack. Wrangle’s conversational help desk automates a company’s internal and external ticketing—automatically tracking work, notifying people to act, and making sure nothing slips through the cracks.
Everybody hates ticketing, since it can be a black hole where you can’t see where things are. As such, we’re building [an option] that works the way people want to work today. When you go to ask for help, you are typically in Slack or Teams. We believe the future is based on conversations.
What we’ve done with Wrangle is essentially embed the ticketing system where people work, which is in Slack. We turn any message into a ticket that is tracked, audited, and reportable, making sure nothing slips through the cracks.
What’s exciting is that we’re based around the conversation. We can leverage AI to do all kinds of exciting things like answer questions for people when they’re asking for a help request. We mainly work with internal teams looking for help, such as IT, operations, HR, CX, sales, and legal. For many common requests we can leverage AI to not only deflect those tickets but essentially answer them.
We’ve launched AI Ticket Deflection and Copilot to allow the agent to leverage their knowledge base, documents, and past tickets to answer the questions so that their team can focus on the tough problems. The AI is going to power the conversation.
We started this company during COVID. But the world has changed even more as far as how people communicate. So, it’s an exciting time to be in a natural language conversational-related platform like Wrangle.
What’s exciting personally is to step back and think about my career in entrepreneurship. When I was graduating from UNC and interviewing on campus, I was interviewing with major companies, like Black and Decker. And then I talked to Jeff Reid who connected me with Monica Doss with CED (Editor’s note: Monica Doss is a past subject of The Download). Monica hired me for a position where I was writing about VC impact reports, which grew into training and mentoring programs and working with many amazing people on her staff.
It changed my entire life. It got me not only interested in entrepreneurship, but I met hundreds of entrepreneurs, saw what they did, and tried to learn as much as I could. CED led to Square 1 Bank, and then I met Robbie Allen while he was still at Cisco and joined StatSheet, which became Ai. It all started at CED with Monica Doss.
3.) What is your favorite coffee spot?
Guglhupf near downtown Durham. I’ve been loyal to them since my Ai days. Good food, good coffee, I’ve had hundreds of meetings there, so it’s a great spot to connect with anybody that’s in Durham.
4.) What keeps you up at night?
Staying ahead of where things are going. From COVID, which started the week after we started, to working from home and building a remote company, to a tech recession for B2B companies and now AI, which is changing constantly. So just staying ahead of where things are going and prioritizing all the things that a founder thinks about, from money to sales to everything else.
We also raised money from a great group of VC and angel investors. So, I worry about being a good steward of their capital.
5.) What’s your favorite restaurant or happy hour?
Hawthorne and Wood. It is a great spot with the best food. For happy hour, I like Haw River in Carrboro.
6.) What is next for you or your organization?
We’re a conversational ticketing platform, and the next phase for us is expansion and becoming that conversational layer that no one else in the industry has achieved.
Most companies of a few hundred employees have 5-10 ticketing systems, and they’re all siloed. You’ve got your data in all kinds of different places. Some teams are on one platform, customer experience is in another, IT is in another, and so on. So much of the data that’s core to an organization’s institutional knowledge is locked in these places, and then you go to one place to chat about it, such as Slack or Teams.
We believe that we can be that connective tissue layer to capture that information and knowledge and get it back to the systems of record—scaling into that by leveraging AI and the platform we’ve already built. We want to grow from a start-up to a true service management platform and leverage AI and conversations to make ticketing something people don’t dread… and maybe even enjoy.
