Curtis Northcutt

Curtis Northcutt headshot
Cleanlab logo
CEO, Co-Founder
Cleanlab

Presentation Title:

Practical Strategies with Guarantees for Building Trustworthy Customer-facing AI Support Agents

Presentation Summary:

As customer-facing GenAI support systems move from prototypes to production, reliability is no longer a nice-to-have—it’s a hard requirement. Just ask the teams behind NYC’s MyCity chatbot, which advised businesses to break the law; Air Canada’s support AI refund assistant, which hallucinated non-existent policies and cost the airline real money; or Cursor’s AI-powered support agent, which confidently fabricated a login policy and triggered a wave of user cancellations. These public failures aren’t edge cases. They’re symptoms of a deeper reliability gap in how we build and monitor AI-driven support.

In this session, we’ll explore common failure modes in customer-support GenAI systems—from factual mistakes and hallucinations to deeper reasoning and alignment issues—and walk through practical strategies for detecting and remediating them. We’ll demo how to integrate real-time trustworthiness checks into Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Agentic systems, and show how Cleanlab AI platform can be used to deliver expert-verified, zero-hallucination responses; enforce guardrails for safety, compliance, and helpfulness; surface root-cause insights to diagnose retrieval failures and documentation gaps; and route customer intent to the right support channel. We’ll also discuss how to incorporate human-AI collaboration to strengthen accountability and trust.

If you’re building GenAI customer-support agents that users or businesses rely on, this talk will help you close the gap between promising prototypes and production systems you can stand behind.

Picture of About | Curtis Northcutt

About | Curtis Northcutt

Curtis Northcutt is CEO and cofounder of Cleanlab, an AI software company that helps enterprises build reliable AI applications.

He completed his PhD at MIT, where he invented Cleanlab’s algorithms for automatically finding and fixing label issues in any dataset. He was a recipient of MIT’s Morris Levin Thesis Award, an NSF Fellowship, and a Goldwater Scholarship, and has worked at several leading AI research groups including Google, Oculus, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and NASA.