By Riley Kaminer
OutRival, the latest venture from Career Karma founder Ruben Harris, is pushing the boundaries of AI by enabling customer experience teams to take charge of their own AI solutions. In an interview with Refresh Miami, Harris explained how the leap from Career Karma’s workforce development platform to OutRival’s AI-driven product was a natural progression.
“We’ve always been about empowering people,” he said. “With Career Karma, we helped individuals break into tech. Now, with OutRival, we’re empowering businesses to create the kind of personalized experiences their customers demand, without needing technical expertise.”
OutRival is designed to simplify the creation of AI-powered agents that can handle everything from routine inquiries to proactive customer support, all without requiring teams to know how to code. “It’s about removing the barriers,” Harris shared. “We’re giving teams the ability to build solutions themselves.” This is especially important as companies across industries are being forced to rethink how they manage customer interactions in the face of growing expectations and shrinking resources.
The idea for OutRival emerged from Harris’s experience at Career Karma, where the team implemented AI to assist with student coaching.
“We needed a way to scale our personalized coaching without burning out our human teams,” Harris shared. “That’s when we started building AI tools that our coaching teams could use to handle routine student inquiries. Over the last two years, we realized that this solution wasn’t just useful for education – it could help any business looking to improve customer experience.”
OutRival, which Harris co-founded alongside chief product officer Timur Meyster, is the parent company that now owns Career Karma. This platform, originally founded in 2016, is still active and is focused on education and workforce development.
The duo launched OutRival to focus on businesses across industries, offering them a no-code platform to create AI agents that mirror their brand’s voice and values. This AI solution is flexible, allowing teams to customize their AI models and easily integrate them with existing systems. “We’re not trying to replace engineers,” noted Harris [pictured above with Meyster]. “We’re empowering non-technical teams to collaborate with them, creating an ecosystem where everyone contributes.”
“Imagine a concierge agent that remembers your preferences, answers your questions, and follows up with you proactively. That’s what we’re making possible,” Harris said. “And it’s all done in a way that feels personal, even though it’s powered by AI.”
OutRival’s Miami headquarters reflect Harris’s strategic thinking. “Being in Miami puts us close to the majority of Fortune 1000 companies on the East Coast and Midwest,” he said. “It’s the perfect place for us to build strong relationships with enterprises, especially as they begin adopting AI at a larger scale.”
Harris also shared that the company is moving from a fully remote model to an in-person office in Miami, a shift driven by the need for faster collaboration. “There’s something special about being in the same room with your team,” he explained. “The feedback loops are quicker, and the chemistry is just better when you’re working side by side.”
With 60 employees and growing, OutRival is working across industries as diverse as HR, education, and real estate. As Harris put it, “AI isn’t just a trend, it’s the future. And businesses that don’t start embracing it now are going to be left behind.” The platform’s advanced workflow builder, one of Harris’s favorite features, allows users to design AI-driven processes that can be tailored to specific business needs. “It’s like building a custom solution without needing to know how to code. The possibilities are endless.”
OutRival is poised to lead the AI revolution in customer experience, and Harris is ready to keep pushing the envelope.
“We’ve always bet on what’s inevitable,” Harris said. “Just like when we believed there’d be a PC in every home, we believe AI will be at the core of every business. We’re here to help companies not just survive this shift, but outrival the competition.”
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