Saving time with AI models

A lot of the discourse around AI in the past year has been on the topic of human jobs being replaced by AI – and quite understandably. After all, for all the marvels that most novel technologies introduce, it’s only human to ask “how will it affect me”.

If you happen to work in customer service or similar, then that question has probably kept you up at night a couple of times. Most studies suggest that customer management, particularly entry level, will slowly become automated and performed entirely by AI.

But it’s not all bad news. In many cases, the increase in productivity and freed-up resources might lead to opportunity for businesses and individual employees alike. Younet, who we spoke to at CES, is one good example of that. The company’s AI models are designed to provide answers that would, otherwise, have to wait for humans to address. Yet, it still depends on those same humans to train the models and keep them up to date – while freeing up their time when they’re not busy addressing routine questions.

One particular teacher in Canada seems to be pretty enthusiastic about it… read the interview below to learn why (edited for clarity).

Related reading: Is the worst over for tech job losses?

Could you please start by introducing yourself and the company?

My name is Rohit Lall and I work at Younet, based out of Toronto, Canada.

We enable companies to create AI models that are customisable depending on the departments and employees they have. Our goal is to help streamline and expedite processes, reduce the amount of time spent to get things done, and cut down the time it takes to contact other departments within the same company. Ultimately, it’s all about helping businesses streamline their workloads.

And how does Younet do that?

We create AI models that are tailored to the business as a whole and also personalised to individual employees within each department.

As an example, let’s say that a company has its sales and marketing function in one part of the world, and the customer service elsewhere, in a different time zone. Instead of waiting for hours or days for a response, the sales and marketing team can load up the Customer Service AI Model, ask the same question they would ask a human colleague, and get an answer instantly.

When you think of that use case and how it can be applied to other departments, you quickly realise that there’s a lot of time that can be saved from getting answers across quickly.

Another example of where we can help is file management. Customers can upload pretty documents into our AI model, be it PDFs, Word docs, Google spreadsheets or whatever it might be, and it all goes in our “AI Brain”, as we call it.

From there, users can “speak” to the AI with prompts and ask it anything they want. They can also ask the AI to perform tasks. Say it’s the end of the financial year when finance and accounting departments typically do a lot of reporting; with our model, you can feed the AI past reports and then ask it to build the latest report using those past examples.

While it might take time to train the AI model, ultimately, it will still save time compared to having a human perform those tasks.

How much of the AI model training is done by Younet versus its customers?

It can be done either way. Typically we have clients upload all the necessary files into the Younet brain as a starting point to personalise it to the company and then to each department using the model. For example, with HR departments it might be better for them to upload the files directly, as there are likely company policies, government regulations and similar that need to be abided by – and that might vary from country to country.

How long has Younet been in business?

Our product launch took place last month, in December 2023. We’ve been in R&D for about two years. It’s great to be at CES showcasing all our capabilities.

Congratulations. Any clients yet?

Yes, we are working with the University of Toronto and also with Dalhousie University. We’re a Canadian company so our clients are there. Right now we are trying to break into the US market because there’s a lot of potential. Companies are quickly adopting AI into their businesses and we are hoping to capitalise on that.

What has the feedback been from those clients so far?

They really like it. We actually have a use case of a Professor who’s slightly older, around 70 years old, but really savvy with Younet. You’d think someone of a more advanced age might have trouble with this kind of technology, but he hasn’t had any trouble at all.

He has created an AI model of himself as a teacher, into which he has uploaded his curriculum, the content he teaches and all the info he had pertaining to his classes. He then shared his model with his students, allowing them to ask questions of the model instead of himself.

The result has been that students get answers a lot quicker and with all the information they need, which is pretty awesome.