Fixie and Conversational AI Sidekicks

In March 2023, Fixie Co-Founder and Chief Architect Matt Welsh and co-founders had the kind of meeting no founders want to have. The president of leading artificial intelligence (AI) research and deployment firm OpenAI, which had catapulted into fame with its ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) products, briefs them on a new product that represents an existential threat. OpenAI is launching ChatGPT plugins, which would transform ChatGPT from a base layer tool into a platform, where third-party application developers such as Expedia, InstaCart, or OpenTable could leverage OpenAI’s underlying models to build useful applications.

This move threatened to derail Fixie’s nascent cloud-based platform that leveraged large language models (LLMs) to build and customize conversational AI systems for enterprise. Fixie aspired to be the middleware standard that connected underlying models with AI-facing applications. Now they had to decide if their product was still relevant, whether a pivot was possible, and how to play their next move in the fast-paced Gen AI chess game.