277 : Deflection Done Right: Building AI Support That Customers Actually Love with David Karandish

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Can AI answer your customers without pushing them away? David Karandish has automated support for 20,000 companies, and he says deflection should make the experience better, not worse.

David Karandish, founder and CEO of Capacity, joins Yanique Grant to unpack how to bring AI into customer support the right way. After selling Answers Corp for $960 million, David built Capacity into an omni-channel support automation platform serving roughly 20,000 customers. In this episode he shares the design principles that keep automation human, why your first AI project should be a small, provable win, and how AI agents are now running entire companies from finance to marketing.

In this episode:

– The design principles that make AI deflection improve the customer experience instead of frustrating people, from great escalation paths to leading with empathy
 – Why human behavior is largely universal across regions, and where support questions actually differ
 – What the $960M Answers.com journey taught David about people who are truly stuck and have nowhere to turn
 – The single most practical first step for any support leader: go get your small win, then iterate
 – How builder agents let a complete novice spin up workflows, integrations, and CSAT surveys just by asking

Featured resources:

Book: Principles by Ray Dalio — a first-principles breakdown of how Dalio built one of the most successful investment firms of all time.
Foundational AI models — Google Gemini, OpenAI, and Anthropic's Claude, used across the business.
Jira — for tracking development tickets; David uses LLMs to analyze time-in-stage when off-the-shelf plugins fall short.
Capacity — an AI-powered support automation platform that deflects emails, calls, and tickets across voice, SMS, WhatsApp, web, and email. ~20,000 customers, 250+ app integrations.

Connect with the guest:
 Website: capacity.com
 Email: david@capacity.com

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