The faces behind Ai-Assist
Delve into the journey of two trailblazers who combined their expertise in technology and business to launch AI-Assist, a pioneering platform designed to enhance productivity and creativity through cutting-edge AI solutions. Discover how their passion for innovation and commitment to excellence are shaping the future of artificial intelligence assistance.
Mees Wijnants
Mees Wijnants lives in the beautiful city of The Hague, the Netherlands and has graduated from the University of Leiden with a Bachelor of Science in Public Administration and Economics. He and Joep grew up together living in the same street for many years. He started his first e-commerce business at the age of 18, back in 2020. This business grew into a big e-commerce and media company by late 2022. Mees is known in Holland for being quintessentially entrepreneurial and embodies the Dutch stereotype of being very direct. You always know what you’re up to. Due to him always being straightforward, also when giving his opinion, he appeared in multiple Dutch newspapers, late-night talkshows and even the main news-broadcast on the first dutch channel NPO1 for defending the Tate brothers when they had just gotten imprisoned back in January 2023.
Joep van Wijk
Joep van Wijk also lives in beautiful The Hague, and went to the Avans Businness School in Breda. Joep started an e-commerce business at around the same time as Mees, and grew it into an extensive operation by early 2022. Due to Joep’s extensive experience in e-commerce, making deals, finding the right clients and building a superb network, he’s responsible for everything that comes before the deal has been closed in AI-Assist.
How did we end up here?
AI-Assist was founded in late 2022, when our founders Mees Wijnants and Joep van Wijk witnessed a “eureka-moment” with the unveiling of the first public beta of GPT-3. We knew right there and then that this was the future, and we needed to do something with AI. And here we are, over 1.5 years later (written 14 March 2024) with our own AI business which answers over 50.000 e-mails monthly from customers all around the globe. From Canberra in Australia to Trøndheim in Norway, we are active 24/7 around the entire planet to ensure thousands of customers have an enjoyable customer experience.
We ended up here because of our own experience in e-commerce and our vast network of e-commerce heavy-hitters. We asked them, what would help your e-com store the MOST if you could use AI for anything?
All of them told us that using AI in the customer service desks would not only save them a lot of headache, it would probably also be better than the current offshore-teams they had all working for them. Translating from languages they didn’t speak at all using google translate, sending back templates and overflowing inboxes were something that could easily be tackled with a suitable AI solution. They told us this wouldn’t just save them money, it would actually be better service for their customers.
This was primarily for Shopify dropshipping and e-com stores.
So we set to work in January 2023 to create this AI model. And sure enough 10 months later, in October 2023, we reached a production-ready product. This product, the AI customer service employee, is now active in over 40 mailboxes servicing thousands of clients worldwide. But this is just the beginning, we want to scale to over 1.000.000 answered emails each month within the next 15 months, so before summer 2025. And eventually, everyone needs to use our AI.
We can proudly say we have never lost a client after they’ve started using us, nor have we ever had to use our money back-guarantee because our service is that good, and we plan to keep it that way.
Watch more of us
When we do something, we do it well. Mees & Joep are not only the founders of AI-Assist, they also have their own podcast called “Nieuw Geld”, which translates to “New Money”. We recently launched our first English podcast ever, with Hamza. If you speak dutch however, you should definitely check out the podcasts with Joel Beukers and Jasper Lijfering. Over the years, Nieuw Geld has built a vast community with thousands of listeners, all trying to build a VERY big business, just like ourselves. We’ve constructed an international network with politicians, businessmen, influencers, professional athletes and more.