“Due to high call volume, callers are facing extraordinarily long hold times. To receive a callback without losing your place in line, press #. Or, if you prefer, you can remain on the line and listen to a loop of pointless messaging…”
Said no human support agent, ever.
“People are the most important asset of any company. AI should make those people more capable, not make them less important.”
Full disclosure: I don’t like AI.
ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Muse, Gemini, Copilot. It doesn’t matter which platform or which new model. They all behave about the same. Like most people, I was basically using AI as a new Google. The more I used these tools, the more alike they felt. They aren’t intuitive. They’re hard to use. And when I do use them, they take way too many liberties.
I’ve spent more 90-minute sessions trying to save 15 minutes than I care to admit. That’s time I’ll never get back, and I would rather have spent it with my family or doing just about anything else. I’ve watched it think, make mistakes, confidently make things up, and then tell me it’s concerned about my wellbeing after it just wasted an hour of my day.
For me, time and money are the two things that matter most in business, and they’re connected. Wasted time is wasted money, and that money supports my family. So anything that eats my day and leads to a dead end is a problem.
My skepticism goes beyond frustration, too. The fear that AI can replace people, or be used for things it should never be used for, is real. You can’t wave that concern away, and I won’t.
So when I say Peeva is now using AI, I want to be clear about how and why. This isn’t a story about replacing people. It’s the next step in something Peeva has always done: using technology responsibly so our people can deliver better service.
Where We Started
When I started Peeva, my first hires were a small group of UB grads who built the early versions of our technology. Honestly, I was just glad they showed up to work every day.
When we started taking calls, it was just me. Then my buddy Steve. Then my buddy Geoff. For a while it was a fake-it-till-you-make-it call center, a game of musical chairs where whoever was free picked up the phone. We were all juggling a dozen other jobs while calls from pet owners, shelters, and rescues trickled in.
The trickle turned into a steady stream. We hired as the volume grew and bought back our time one hire at a time. Today it’s a firehose. The phones ring nonstop, and most of those calls are about microchips found in lost animals.
Through all of it, one thing never changed. I’ve always been proud that anyone who calls Peeva can reach a person, day or night. I believe we provide the best customer support in this industry, and that doesn’t happen without good people. It takes real support staff, someone to manage them, and someone to manage her.
We can sort calls by type and route them to the right place. But no two calls are ever the same.
Technology Has Always Been the Plan
Technology changes. Business models evolve. Competitive advantages come and go. But companies are built by people: their judgment, experience, creativity, empathy, and ability to solve problems when the answer isn’t obvious.
Peeva has always used technology to streamline how we work so our people can focus on what matters. AI is the next step in that progression, not a break from it.
A lot of the business conversation about AI starts with the wrong questions:
- How many people can we replace?
- How many tasks can we automate?
- How much faster can machines do the work people do now?
That framing misses the bigger opportunity. The better question is:
How can AI make good people dramatically more effective at the work that matters?
Peeva is built around permanent pet identification, pet recovery, centralized pet information, and pet medical records. For a company like ours, AI can help connect information faster, cut administrative friction, improve customer support, and lead to better outcomes for pets and the people who love them.
The Research Backs This Up
There’s solid academic evidence for this approach. Researchers from Stanford and MIT studied 5,179 customer-support agents who were given a generative AI assistant. On average, the agents resolved about 14% more issues per hour, and the least experienced agents gained the most. The tool also helped spread the habits of the best agents across the whole team.
Read the research from the National Bureau of Economic Research →
The takeaway for me: AI’s real value isn’t doing the job instead of people. It’s getting people the knowledge they need faster so they can spend their time where it counts.
Where the Time Actually Goes
A huge amount of time goes to work that’s necessary but repetitive:
- Looking up microchip numbers
- Answering common questions
- Navigating records
- Documenting conversations
- Routing requests
- Figuring out which system has the right information
- Deciding what should happen next
All of that has to get done. But it’s the grunt work nobody wants to do, and it pulls our people away from actually supporting our customers.
That’s where Grace comes in.
Meet Grace
Grace is not an off-the-shelf, plug-and-play chatbot fed a handful of help articles. She’s a purpose-built tool, engineered to handle repetitive tasks and answer common questions so our customer team has more time for the problems where human judgment matters most.
Grace is one of our first major steps in bringing AI into the Peeva customer experience, and her job is deliberately simple. She helps customers:
- Find answers to routine questions
- Navigate Peeva’s services
- Surface relevant information
- Gather what’s needed to resolve a request
- Figure out what should happen next
The bigger idea goes well beyond a chatbot.
Traditional customer service runs on a queue. A customer asks a question. It goes into a queue. An employee picks it up, figures out what’s needed, finds the information, responds, documents the interaction, and moves on to the next one.
Some of those interactions absolutely need a person. Many don’t. AI lets us tell the difference.
Every routine interaction Grace handles is time our team can put toward situations where a person adds real value. In our business, those situations matter a lot.
Peeva provides 24/7/365 pet recovery support. When someone’s pet is missing, that’s not just another support ticket. There’s a scared, anxious person on the other end. That’s exactly where we want our people focused.
The goal isn’t to put AI between Peeva and our customers. It’s to remove the friction between our customers and the help they need.
AI With Guardrails
None of this means handing every decision to an algorithm. Companies using AI responsibly have to be very deliberate about where automation stops.
Here’s how I think about it at Peeva:
And we put real limits on it. Grace works in a closed loop. She runs on specific instructions, her functions are intentionally limited, and she has no access to sensitive systems or vulnerable endpoints. AI isn’t running Peeva. It’s a tool that helps our people serve customers better.
That line matters even more in animal health and pet recovery.
The veterinary profession is working through the same questions. The American Animal Hospital Association has looked at emerging uses of AI in veterinary practice, from administrative automation to medical documentation and, increasingly, AI-assisted pet identification. That includes image recognition that compares photos of lost and found animals to suggest possible matches.
Some of that is a little ridiculous. There are only so many ways a German shepherd can look. That’s exactly why a photo match can be a lead but never the final answer. A person still has to verify it.
That’s our philosophy at Peeva: AI should strengthen human capability, not remove human accountability.
Why AI Matters to Peeva
Grace matters, but she’s only the beginning.
Peeva sits where several historically disconnected parts of the pet-care world meet:
- Pet identification
- Pet owners
- Veterinary practices
- Animal shelters and rescues
- Pet medical information
- Lost-pet recovery
- Communication
- Data
Our central pet registry and Peeva Fetch platform are built on one idea: pet identification becomes far more useful when information can move securely between the people and organizations who need it.
Our pet medical records platform builds on that by linking permanent identification to important health information.
Our lost-and-found pet database helps people report and search for missing and found pets.
Our microchip lookup gives people another way to check whether a microchip is registered with Peeva.
And our recovery infrastructure can send lost-pet alerts and notify enrolled owners when their pet’s microchip is scanned in Peeva’s connected network.
AI gives us a way to make all of that much smarter.
From Artificial Intelligence to Recovery Intelligence
Think about what happens when a pet goes missing.
There may be a microchip. There may be photos. There may be a vet record, a shelter intake, or a lost-pet report. There’s a last-known location. There may be sightings afterward, or several descriptions of the same animal written by different people. There may be hundreds or thousands of records that could be relevant.
For a long time, people have had to connect those dots by hand.
Machines are getting very good at helping us do it. AI can bring up what a team member needs, when they need it, and the decision still stays with them.
That’s institutional knowledge on demand. It isn’t a replacement for our people. It’s what lets them do their best work, faster, for the people who need them most.
Faster Answers When You Need Them. Human Support When It Matters.
Grace is Peeva’s AI-powered support agent. She helps you find information, navigate Peeva, and get to the right answer faster, and our team is ready whenever you need a person.
AI-powered support. Peeva-powered people.
