SAN JOSE, CA, Jan. 13, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NewMediaWire – Sonasoft Corp. (OTCQB: SSFT), creators of the innovative Sonasoft AI Bot Runtime Engine, SAIBRE, closed out 2021 in a strong position. Highlights include tremendous progress in developing SAIBRE, a new strategic partnership, and a renewed focus on end-to-end AI projects. Taken together, this ensures that companies who engage Sonasoft will achieve a successful AI transformation, from data exploration and data science, through to delivery of a productionized AI solution. Sonasoft finds itself in a great position for 2022, ready to deliver new OEM partnerships that will help other companies overcome the challenging conditions created by COVID.
SAIBRE Platform
2021 saw the announcement of SAIBRE, Sonasoft’s newly developed AI engine. SAIBRE cements Sonasoft’s position as a pioneer in AI platform technology, delivering rapid, enterprise-grade production AI bots focused on large, global OEM partners. This new AI engine has been developed from the ground up and focuses on rapid iterations and experimentation, enabling faster development and deployment of AI bots. This is backed up with a zero-effort AI approach that simplifies the scaling, monitoring and maintenance of these bots in production. “SAIBRE is perfect for teams that don’t want to invest in building million dollar data science teams but still want to leverage AI transformation,” said Mike Khanna, Sonasoft’s CEO. “These teams can outsource their AI initiatives, letting Sonasoft handle the end-to-end creation of their AI bots from ideation to production and beyond. This ensures they can eliminate their AI debt completely.”
One of the key aims with SAIBRE has been to develop a UI that is clean, efficient, and flexible. SAIBRE encourages collaboration within and between teams to find the best possible AI solution for a given dataset. Datasets can be built by combining data from multiple sources. Every dataset can then be leveraged for different use cases and multiple approaches to solving those use cases. AI bots are built in an inherently logical fashion, bolting together different pieces to create a full workflow. Once you are happy with the results, deploying the bot just takes a couple of clicks. At the same time, the SAIBRE UI allows more technical users to capture their insights into simple building blocks that can be leveraged by all users. As SAIBRE continues to grow, there will be a strong focus on simplicity, team collaboration, and even gamification.
New Partnership
In the fall of 2021, Sonasoft increased their roster of strategic partners by signing a new OEM partnership with Information Visibility Technology (IVT), a pioneer in healthcare IT solutions. IVT will leverage SAIBRE to uncover key business insights and intelligence. IVT and Sonasoft will initially collaborate on deploying two AI bots designed to address the inflexibility and old-fashioned approach to business often found in the healthcare market. The first of these is an inventory management bot for supply and demand forecasting. This is something taken for granted in many industries, but healthcare is lagging far behind. The second is a dynamic pricing bot, allowing a move away from old-fashioned contract pricing, which dominates today’s healthcare industry.
Avoiding Common AI Pitfalls
In 2019, VentureBeatAI reported that 87% of AI projects never make it to production (https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/19/why-do-87-of-data-science-projects-never-make-it-into-production/). There are numerous reasons, including:
- The introduction of bias due to preconceived ideas within the development team.
- Data quality issues arising from poor data science and inadequate data exploration.
- A failure to focus on developing end-to-end AI solutions that can actually be deployed in production.
One of Sonasoft’s key focuses over the past 12 months has been to address these issues head on. This initiative is being led by Caroline Zaborowski, promoted to Chief Data Officer in 2021. Key elements include:
Data-driven discovery. AI projects are only ever as good as the raw data they are built with. Sonasoft takes a rigorous approach to data-driven discovery in any new AI project. The client is asked for their high-level business intelligence and theories. But Sonasoft’s data science team validates that the data supports their suppositions. Allowing the data to be the final arbiter mitigates against any potential bias that might be injected into AI exploration. Caroline sums this up best, “The success of an AI initiative is in no way contingent on previous experience in the same industry or even use case. Success requires a team with the ability to use limited domain understanding to conduct an objective, unbiased exploration.”
Data is king. Many AI projects fail because of mistakes made during data exploration and feature engineering. All too often, people skip this vital step and go straight to developing new neural networks or other AI models. But this is a sure-fire recipe for failure. Other times, companies over-engineer the data, allowing significant bias to creep in thanks to the team’s pre-conceptions about the expected outcome. By contrast, Sonasoft takes an iterative and consultative approach. This ensures the quality of the data and guarantees that the resulting AI bot is unbiased and robust.
AI is an end-to-end problem. Possibly the biggest problem for companies developing AI solutions is their failure to work out how the results will be deployed. All too often, the team developing the AI solution focuses on creating a perfect model at the expense of making it deployable. However good the AI model, it is worthless if it cannot be deployed in production. Sonasoft has a more pragmatic approach. As Caroline says, “At Sonsoft, we spend time understanding what the business requirements are, communicating what options are available given the requirement and then use the feedback from the client to make the appropriate decisions. This includes a frank open discussion about risk. Risk mitigation often comes at the cost of some level of success which is far more palatable.”
Looking ahead to 2022
2022 is set to be the year when AI debt really starts to hit companies. This growing problem sees many companies losing out to competitors who are able to steal more and more of the market thanks to AI. But when companies try to solve this problem naively, they can end up wasting money on AI solutions that don’t deliver and actually worsen the AI debt problem. But with SAIBRE, Sonasoft has ushered in the era of zero-effort AI. That means zero-effort data science, thanks to our leading team of experts. Zero-effort deployments on Sonasoft’s infrastructure, so there is no impact on engineering teams. And zero-effort maintenance, thanks to advanced monitoring, customizable dashboards, and one-click retraining. “I continue to be excited about the possibilities created by our SAIBRE platform,” says Max Lee, Sonasoft’s VP of Engineering. “We are constantly striving to simplify the creation of AI pipelines and data analysis, both for ourselves and for others as SAIBRE expands into the future.” Ultimately, Sonasoft’s aim is to allow companies of any size to eliminate their AI debt and reap the benefits of successful AI deployments.
Notes
- Sonasoft was founded in Silicon Valley in 2003. For more information about the company, please visit: https://www.sonasoft.com
- Sonasoft SAIBRE is an end-to-end AI platform that can generate, monitor, and maintain AI bots. For more details, see https://sonasoft.com/products/saibre/
- For investor-specific information, please visit: https://www.sonasoft.com/investors/
Investor Contact:
Mike Khanna, CEO Sonasoft Corporation
Phone: (408) 708-4000 X7104
Forward-looking Statements
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