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Sifting through old files is laborious enough for one person, but for large-scale organizations and enterprises with thousands of employees, it’s nightmarish. That’s why former Answers.com CEO David Karandish founded Jane.ai, an artificially intelligent platform that indexes data from cloud storage providers, teams, and more.
Jane.ai, which allows employees to search through its corpus using conversational language, launched today with $8.4 million in funding from a Midwest network of private and angel investors.
“We created Jane to help everyday workers be more successful by eliminating the wasted time and effort that comes from searching for basic workplace information,” Karandish said in a statement. “We’ve all grown accustomed to the convenience of on-demand, personalized services and voice-controlled speakers at home, but we have yet to benefit from these same conveniences at work. Jane is an intuitive, intelligent AI-powered Teammate who gives employees instant access to the information they need to do their jobs well.”
Jane.ai is a service in two parts. The aforementioned backend mines information from email and calendar apps like Gmail and Exchange, customer relationship management (CRM) software like Salesforce and Oracle’s NetSuite, health information and resource services (HIRS) like ADP and Sage, service desk platforms like Zendesk and ServiceNow, and cloud drive providers like Box and OneDrive. The second part is a chatbot with natural language processing that integrates with popular messaging apps such as Slack and Skype. With Jane.ai, users can say things like “I need the Centene contract from August 2017” and “How much PTO do I have?” or even instruct it to schedule appointments (“Schedule 15 minutes to meet with David and Josh”) and update the status of sales leads (“Update the status of the Express Scripts deal to ‘won'”).
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Above: Jane.ai in action.
It’s customizable, too. Jane.ai can facilitate company-wide announcements, like daily news and event notifications, and onboard new hires by providing access to forms that need to be completed. For companies with websites that have FAQ sections, it can be made publicly available to help speed up the search process.
But the real value of Jane.ai is its ability to improve over time, Karandish said, thanks to its CoPilot feature. When the chatbot doesn’t know the answer to something, it flags that item for a team member to review. Once an answer is provided, it’s stored in a knowledge base.
“We talk to companies every day who struggle with the number of applications their team members need to do their jobs and the resulting amount of information that stems from using those tools,” Lisa Nichols, CEO of Technology Partners and a Jane.ai investor, said in a press release. “Jane is an intuitive chat interface that helps employees find information faster and more easily focus on their jobs, versus having to hunt through various applications or interrupt a colleague.”
Jane.ai was founded in St. Louis, Missouri in 2017 by Karandish and cofounder Chris Sims. Customers include Washington University in St. Louis, electric utility company Ameren Corporation, USA Mortgage, Schaeffer Oil, and Kelly Mitchel.
