Colega AI is an AI marketing company based in Silicon Valley. One of its co-founders and CPO is Kaiden Sin, a Macau local and graduate in Computer Science from the University of Macau. CLOSER spoke with Kaiden and fellow co-founder and CEO Eric Fung.
We’re on a mission to apply AI towards non traditional industries, specifically in the restaurant industry. Very traditional small business owners don’t know what ChatGPT or Open.ai is. We want to help them apply AI towards meaningful problems that small business owners face everywhere in the world.
Social media is probably the most crucial marketing channel for restaurants. Some recent research showed that Instagram surpassed Google as the most used search engine for Gen Z to find local businesses. But current social media marketing tools were designed for professional marketers. We know that small business owners are spending hours on their feet, not behind a laptop, so a lot of solutions are not really made for them. And as great as ChatGPT is, it’s still a general use purpose tool, and not built to manage social media.
We are essentially building an AI that can automate the job of a human social media manager, and most importantly, it requires zero technical experience to operate. It can create content and post it at the most opportune times on social media, respond to comments and analyze reviews.
When a user first signs up to Collega, we ask them for permission to access their Instagram and Facebook accounts. Then we analyze all the previous posts to get a really good understanding of how they talk as a human being. We’re trying to replicate that. We also connect to their Google profiles so we know all about their business and what the online customer sentiment is. The AI is customized to each restaurant individually because of this data that we’re training it on. That’s how we’re able to respect their tone and, most importantly, their brand voice. We want Colega to respond in correct tone and voice of the owner and have all the information about the business readily available all the time.
When it comes to communicating with customers, the most important thing is cultural nuances. We want to make sure that we respect the cultural nuances of Macau and Hong Kong, especially in Cantonese, so it takes time for us to localize the product. Restaurant owners are very concerned about this issue. We are talking with some restaurants owners in Macau, almost on a daily basis to get feedback, and they are all super excited about it. For now though, the majority of our customers are in Taiwan and also in Japan.
It’s not just about doing the job of a social media manager, but also about doing the task in the most optimized way possible. So Colega takes things a step further by analyzing and understanding what’s happening in the local business environment. If there’s a big event happening or even just the weather, Colega can create posts to capitalize on what’s going on in a way that has the most traction. At the end of the day, it’s about driving traffic to the restaurants.
