Omilia: Conquering the peak of the artificial intelligence conversation

It took about a decade for the Greek market to reach Omilia’s vision, according to its founder and CEO, Dimitris Vassos. The technology company is active in the automation of customer service based on artificial intelligence and when it was founded in 2002 there was no mature ecosystem of startups in the world, except in Silicon Valley which at that time was something distant and unknown.

As he explains to Outliers, the podcast of Endeavor Greece, Dimitris Vassos, together with the partner and financial director of the company, Pelia Ioannidis, identified a big gap in the Greek market and tried to “bridge” telephony with IT. According to him, this is a place “that still scares a lot of people.

Dimitris Vassos is a graduate of the computer science and electrical engineering department of Imperial and has a master’s degree in telecommunications. His first job was at IBM, which he notes gave him the tools to create Omilia, especially in his business ventures. Omilia “has not lost a single client to date”, he says, attributing this success in part to the particular way in which he closes the partnerships.

Crucial point

From Omilia’s first steps in 2002 until 2013, the company was essentially reselling the technology of an American company, making modifications and offering additional services. However, the cooperating American technology provider, which was then a monopoly, began to make some competitive moves. Specifically, it requested a list of all Omilia customers and then contacted them trying to sell them its own products.

Omilia’s cooperation with this American company was terminated at the end of 2013, as a result of which the company was left without parts of the necessary technology. However, he managed in a very short time and by allocating only a few resources to create something even better with a very high quality of voice recognition. In fact, as Mr. Vassos himself states, it was something “emotionally better”.

The company was then absorbed by the US market in 2016, which was a utopia for its leaders. Its executives, including Mr. Vassos himself, believed that the American market was something very distant in the future of Omilia. However, thanks to a Ukrainian bank, which presented Omilia’s product to an American audience, it immediately and effortlessly garnered huge interest.

What it offers

Omilia’s customers include large banks, insurance, telecommunications and health services. In Greece, it cooperates with Blue Star Ferries and Vodafone. It offers, among other things, a dial up manager service that offers freer dialogue with the user, as well as natural language comprehension technology. Also, in recent years it has adapted its technology to keep up with cloud technology.

According to its founder, this was a move that was made at a very good time, that is, before the pandemic, when the cloud began to be used even more.