Leading the Way to the Future of Work

What a difference a year can make! As I (Rohit Vashisht) sit back and reflect on our key accomplishments and highlights at whiz.ai, I realize just how formative 2019 was for our market and the business.

Advantage – Conversational AI

Conversational AI is providing new ways for business users to interact with enterprise applications and in fact, it will become a C-Suite Priority in 2020. Gartner’s latest Hype Cycle for AI reflects the growing popularity of AutoML, intelligent applications, and AI PaaS/cloud services as enterprises ramp up their adoption of AI. A recent Gartner report finds that by 2022, 70% of white-collar workers will interact with conversational platforms on a daily basis. These are all revolutionary findings and very inspiring for our team as we gear up for the years ahead.

Fueling customer success in life sciences

In 2019, we greatly expanded our footprint within the Life Sciences industry.  We have built platforms for 2 of the 5 largest global pharmaceutical organizations; one of the world’s largest medical device manufacturers, and are currently working with 14 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies in the world. We believe our key differentiator is the vertical focus that helps us train our AI, rapidly deploy the product, and ensure quick ROI for our clients. For instance, one of our customers engaged us to build an entirely new use case for the whiz.ai platform and has retained us for additional therapeutic areas beyond the initial deployment. We plan to continue this strategy in 2020 with a goal to be the #1 conversational AI platform for Life Sciences.

BonJour, WhizAI! Building a scalable, responsive, multilingual platform

Our AI platform now supports augmented interfaces on IOS/Android Apps, browser-based access, text messaging and Microsoft Teams. We built machine learning models to predict the right visualization format based on a user’s questions, eliminating the need to create predefined dashboards. We enabled French language support following a request from one of our key customers. We worked with a client to set up whiz.ai on their 350M record set, and they were thrilled [as were we] to see split-second responses to their complex questions. The next goal is to scale it to 1B+ records. Lastly, we built and trained an AI engine focused on FAQs content. Our goal is to become a single interface for business users to consume all the information they need in one place. We will be significantly investing in our IP and product in 2020.

Three new offices, a growing team

As a rapidly growing startup that is defining the conversational AI space, we are constantly looking out for and hiring experts in AI, ML and enterprise software. We added several talented professionals in the United States, Ukraine and India and continue to fill open positions to help us meet our goals. This year we established our own offices in three locations – Somerset, NJ, Kiev and Pune and incorporated our India subsidiary. All three offices are equipped to support our growth, both in terms of hiring and accommodating top talent. We built a global team of 16 engineers, a VP of Sales, head of client success, and a domain expert. We plan to double our team size next year as we expand our client portfolio.

Getting the word out – a renewed focus on marketing

This year we participated in key industry events like SOLC, Pharmaforce and FuturePharma to showcase the whiz.ai brand and product offerings. We met industry leaders who presented strong market intelligence and offered us new perspectives on our brand positioning. We re-launched our website and consolidated our thought leadership platform, Whizdom as a valuable voice on topics around Conversational AI for life sciences. We kickstarted our video series and collaborated with organizations like PM360online to expand our digital presence and introduce the brand to a wider audience. For 2020, we plan to ramp up our marketing efforts further by presenting at top industry conferences, partnering with analyst firms like Gartner and Forrester, and investing in PR. 

What lies ahead

2019 was a formative year for our market and the business. We saw increased interest in Conversational AI for enterprises from the analyst and investor communities. We expect to see more startups entering the space, but with our head start over new entrants and a truly differentiated product, we are confident we can capture key wins in the life sciences arena. We believe we have a real opportunity to create a large enterprise software company in our space. We have validated problem scenarios with multiple customers and are getting closer to market fit with every deployment of our product. We have the expertise, ambition and commitment to build our company and look forward to a stellar 2020. Happy New Year!