Microsoft is releasing a new version of Office this week, designed for people that don’t want to subscribe to Microsoft 365. The standalone Microsoft Office 2024 release is now available for both consumers and small businesses, and includes locked-in-time versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook across both Mac and PC.
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Numa raises $32M to bring AI and automation to car dealerships
Sometimes, a pivot ends up being the smartest decision company leaders can make. See Netflix’s pivot from DVDs to streaming, or Corning’s pivot from lightbulbs to touchscreens.
The list of extremely successful startup pivots goes on. And on. And on.
A less-prominent (but by no means failed) pivot is Numa’s. Its co-founders killed the startup’s original conversational AI product to instead sell customer service automation tools. Not just any tools, though — these tools are targeted at auto dealerships.
That sounds like a highly specific niche, but it’s been profitable, according to Tasso Roumeliotis, Numa’s CEO. The company closed a $32 million Series B round in September.
“We were early to build AI and conversational commerce,” Roumeliotis told TechCrunch in an interview. “But we decided to focus our AI entirely on the automotive vertical after identifying enormous opportunity in that space.”
Roumeliotis co-founded Numa in 2017 with Andy Ruff, Joel Grossman, and Steven Ginn. Grossman hails from Microsoft, where he helped ship headliner products like Windows XP, as well as a few less recognizable ones like MSN Explorer. Ruff, another Microsoft veteran, led the team that created the first Outlook for Mac client.
Numa is actually the co-founders’ second venture together. Roumeliotis, Grossman, Ginn, and Ruff previously started Location Labs, a family-focused security company that AVG bought for $220 million 10 years ago.
What rallied the old crew behind Numa, Roumeliotis says, was a shared belief in the potential of “thoughtfully applied” AI to transform entire industries. “The market is full of AI and automation point solutions or broad, unfocused tools,” he said. “Numa offers an end-to-end solution that prioritizes the needs of the customer: car dealerships.”
The U.S. has more than 17,000 new-car dealerships, representing a $1.2 trillion industry. Yet many dealerships struggle to manage customer service requests. Per one survey, a third of dealers miss at least a fifth of their incoming calls.
Poor responsiveness leads to low customer service scores, which in turn hurt sales. But Numa can prevent things from getting that bad — or so Roumeliotis claims — by tackling the low-hanging fruit.
Numa uses AI to automate tasks such as “rescuing” missed calls and booking service appointments. For example, if a customer rings a dealership but hangs up immediately afterward, Numa can send a follow-up text or automatically place a reminder call. The platform can also give customers status updates on ongoing service, and facilitate trade-ins by collecting any necessary information ahead of time.
“Many dealerships still rely on legacy systems that are inefficient and lack integration with modern, AI-driven platforms,” Roumeliotis said. “Today’s consumers expect fast, seamless interactions across all platforms. Dealerships struggle to meet these expectations, especially in areas like real-time communication, service updates, and personalized experiences, which AI can help address.”
Other small-time automation vendors (e.g., Brooke.ai, Stella AI) provide products designed to ease dealerships’ customer service burdens. Tech giants, meanwhile, sell a range of generic solutions to automate away customer service. But Roumeliotis argues that Numa stands out because it understands how workflows within dealerships impact the end-customer experience.
“Dealership service leaders and employees are running around constantly, handling customers in person, going out to check on cars and parts, dealing with ringing phones, and balancing coordination with co-workers,” Roumeliotis said. “Numa brings that all together in a way intentionally designed with AI and the user inside the dealership to drive how the platform works rather than the other way around.”
Roumeliotis asserts Numa has another advantage in its in-house models, which drive the platform’s automations. He said the models were trained on datasets from OEMs and dealership systems as well as conversation data between dealerships and clients.
Were each one of these clients, OEMs, and dealerships informed that their data would be used to train Numa’s models? Roumeliotis declined to say. “Numa’s models are bootstrapped by a feedback loop between dealerships, customers interacting with dealerships, and the usage of Numa to facilitate this,” he said.
That answer probably won’t satisfy privacy-conscious folk, but it’s seemingly immaterial to many dealerships. Numa has 600 customers across the U.S. and Canada, including the largest retail auto dealership in the world. Roumeliotis claims Numa is “just about” cash-flow break-even.
“We don’t need capital to continue scaling revenue,” he added. “Instead, Numa is using its money to accelerate product development by expanding our team of AI and machine learning engineers, including investing in building AI models for the automotive vertical.” The company currently has 70 employees.
Benefiting Numa in its conquest is the willingness of dealerships to pilot AI to abstract away certain back-office work.
According to a survey by automotive software provider CDK Global last year, 67% of dealerships are using AI to identify sales leads, while 63% have deployed it for service. Those responding to the poll were quite bullish on the tech overall, with close to two-thirds saying that they anticipated positive returns.
Touring Capital and Mitsui, a Japanese conglomerate that’s one of the largest shareholders in automaker Penske, led Numa’s Series B round. Costanoa Ventures, Threshold Ventures, and Gradient, Google’s AI-focused venture fund, also participated in the round. The funding brings Oakland-based Numa’s total raised to $48 million.
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Traditional retailers have a pressing problem. Fast-moving like Shein and Temu are eating their lunch by leveraging purpose-built, end-to-end supply chains. Meanwhile, incumbent retailers are still stuck on legacy platforms, juggling a myriad number of data sets, and struggling to respond to a punishingly fast market.
A London-based startup thinks it has the solution to this problem. Ameba claims to be able to the unstructured data in a retailer’s supply chain systems, sprinkle in some generative AI, and make the whole thing more efficient.
The startup has now raised a $7.1 million seed round led by London-based VC firm Hedosophia, which has gained a reputation for rarely revealing which companies it invests in. TechCrunch reached out to the latter for further comment, but did not receive a response before publication.
Ameba’s platform uses generative AI on top of existing supply chain software to give retailers insights into their global supply chains, extracting data from a wide range of sources in order to predict disruptions and react to bottlenecks. The company claims it can reduce manual data input by 30%.
“In supply chains, particularly in the fashion consumer space, a lot of very important data is currently not being captured,” Ameba’s founder, Cedrik Hoffmann, told TechCrunch. “A lot of times, the things that are in the shops are sold at the wrong cost or they’re out of stock, or whatever.”
He said Ameba captures these unstructured data points that cost systems don’t: “We release that information from the information silos, bring them to a central source and surface the insights that are developed from them to the relevant parties within your organization.”
Co-founder Craig Massie said their underlying AI mixes a range of foundational models, including Open AI’s: “It changes depending on the task at hand and what performs best in our benchmarks for that task. The underlying constant across our AI usage is our multi-step agents — they can take actions, explore your ontology and its connections, read your supplier emails, WhatsApps and attachments.”
So far, British interior hardware and lighting company Plank has used Ameba to generate 140 alerts highlighting critical production and delivery delays that would have previously been missed or overlooked.
Before Ameba, Hoffman was the former supply chain director and co-founder of e-commerce company VALOREO, while Massie is a former Palantir engineer.
Also participating in the funding round were Visionaries Club, which previously led Ameba’s pre-seed round, and Anamcara Capital.
Isabella Yamamoto, principal at Visionaries Club, said in a statement, “After speaking to many supply chain owners, we were convinced that Cedrik and Craig had the experience to build a disruptive business using AI to eliminate fragmentation in supply chains and unlock competitive advantage for brands.”
Office 2024 includes a lot of the updates that Microsoft has been delivering to Microsoft 365 subscribers over the past few years. Microsoft last released a standalone version of Office in 2021, and this new Office 2024 release includes improvements to the core apps, as well as accessibility and UI changes.
Office 2024 has a new default theme, with Microsoft’s latest Fluent Design principles that match the visual changes to Windows 11. Microsoft has also added accessibility-focused improvements to help Office users find potential accessibility issues in documents, slideshows, workbooks, and emails.
The biggest changes in Office 2024 can be found in Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Microsoft has added new functions in Excel to use text and arrays in worksheets, alongside a new IMAGE function that can pull pictures from the web. Excel 2024 can also now reference Dynamic Arrays in charts, which can automatically update rather than being fixed to set data points. Microsoft claims the overall speed and stability of Excel 2024 should also be improved.
In PowerPoint Microsoft has added the cameo feature, allowing you to insert a live camera feed into slides. PowerPoint also has a new recording studio feature that includes recording features for narration, animations, transitions, and inking. You can also add closed captions or subtitles to videos and audio files in slides, making presentations a lot more accessible.
Outlook 2024 includes improvements to search so you get more relevant results for messages, attachments, contacts, and calendar entries. This latest Outlook release also includes more options for meetings, including the ability to automatically shorten them. Mac users can also customize swipe left and right gestures in Outlook.
In Word, Excel, and PowerPoint you can now insert a picture easily from an Android mobile device, and Microsoft is also supporting version 1.4 of the OpenDocument format (ODF) which includes a variety of new improvements. Word and PowerPoint also include the ability to like and react to comments in documents.
Word 2024 users will also be able to recover a session if your PC crashes. Word will automatically open all the documents you had open before your PC crashed, you lost power, or Word simply closed unexpectedly. OneNote 2024 users will also get access to the new inking and drawing experience.
Microsoft says Office 2024 will require a Microsoft account and an internet connection, but if it’s anything like Office 2021 then you’ll only need an internet connection to install the suite, activate it, and get any security updates. Office 2024 will run on Windows 10 and 11 as well as the three most recent releases of macOS.
Office 2024 will be available in two different editions. Office Home 2024, priced at $149.99, includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for PC or Mac. If you want Outlook, you’ll need to purchase the $249.99 Office Home and Business 2024 version, which also includes the rights to use the apps for commercial purposes.
Despite ongoing interest surrounding artificial intelligence technologies embedded into work environments, UK businesses are still prioritizing hiring workers with basic technical skills.
New research by Indeed found only 2.6% of job postings in the UK mentioned AI skills, with basic skills like Microsoft Office and generic IT expertise coming up more frequently.
According to the report, the most common technical skills sought by UK employers include generic IT skills (10%), Microsoft Office (6%) and Microsoft Excel (5%). Moreover, demand for basic IT skills has remained pretty consistent over the past five years, both in the UK and in other markets like the US.
UK businesses need basic IT skills more than AI
Besides tech skills, Indeed found that UK employers are also prioritizing human skills like communication (30%), leadership (9%) and organization (7%).
Moreover, Indeed’s research into the current state of the UK jobs market tackles ongoing concern that AI could replace human workers. The analysis of over 2,800 work skills found that two-thirds (68.7%) are ‘very unlikely’ or ‘unlikely’ to be replaced by generative AI.
“While AI and other advanced technologies are likely to shape the future labour market, the current reality is that many employers are simply seeking workers with basic computer skills,” commented Indeed Senior Economist Jack Kennedy.
“While AI may eventually necessitate a broad upskilling across the workforce to embrace advanced technologies, there remains a more pressing concern around closing basic digital skills gaps and allowing everyone to fully engage with work in the digital age.”
This is despite Britain’s Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer’s ambitions to make the UK a global AI hub.
Despite the Prime Minister’s efforts, the current jobs market suggests businesses are not yet aligned with the vision, with employers still seeking fundamental tech skills and human competencies.
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