Ziyad Basheer is the founder and CEO of Aide, based in Toronto. He started Aide out of a frustration he could not shake: as a product designer he had fought for every user conversation he could get, then watched companies with thousands of customers writing in daily treat that same signal as a queue to be cleared.
Background: designing by listening
Before Aide he was a product designer and engineer, building 0-to-1 products at startups, the United Nations, and the Internet Archive, organizations whose products exist to serve people. Early-stage product work runs on one discipline above all others: talk to your users. Interview them, watch where they struggle, and treat every complaint as a specification for what to build next.
That practice taught him where the real signal lives. Not in dashboards or surveys, but in what people say, in their own words, when something matters enough to reach out about.
The front line of the business
Then something strange happens. The moment a company actually has customers, thousands of them, writing in every day, the part of the business that faces them most directly gets treated as a cost center: a queue to shrink, deflect, and forget. The conversations early-stage founders would beg for now arrive unprompted, at volume, with the candor no user study can buy, and they go unread. The wasted insight is only part of the loss. What is really being neglected is the front line itself.
Customer conversations are the front line of the business — the most customer-facing work there is. The insights are part of it. The relationship is the whole of it.
Aide exists because the front line deserves front-line resourcing: every customer met with the attention a 0-to-1 team gives its first users. Understand what each person is actually saying, resolve it, and keep the insight instead of glossing over it.
Aide: listening at scale
Aide is the governed agentic AI platform for customer experience. It classifies every conversation by intent, resolves issues end-to-end, and continuously analyzes the operation to surface what to automate, fix, or improve next — turning the support queue from a cost center into the company's sharpest feedback loop. Read more on the about page or what Aide is.
See what Aide can do for your operation
Governed agents. Tested before they reach a customer.