INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Even as AI assistants delve deeper into consumer hardware, companies still seem a bit reticent to bring them deep into their office software
workflows.Jane.ai is aiming to bring natural language processing and intelligence into an employee-facing solution that lets people query a
digital assistant to give them information about documents, meetings and general company knowledge.The St
Louis startup announced today that it is raising an $8.4 million Series A from private investors to power this vision.Jane lives inside apps
like Slack and Skype for Business (in addition to its own web app) where users are already chatting with co-workers and may need to surface
information quickly that they don’t have ready access to
With Jane, employees can just message the assistant directly and the system will comb through information and apps that were uploaded and
connected to the system in order to find answers
You can ask for a file by name and quickly get a link
You can ask for a specific department’s phone number and Jane will slack it to you.The startup currently supports integrations with Office
365, Slack, Salesforce and Zenefits, and has more partnerships “on the horizon.”The big focus will be outsourcing some of the more basic
questions that you would ordinarily ask HR or IT so you don’t have to bombard the same person’s email to get the latest phone number for
the workaround for a particular problem.The Jane.ai teamThe basic goal of the system is to learn over time and give appointed admins the
ability to be called on to answer certain questions when Jane doesn’t have an answer so that Jane will learn from the company experts and
get more informed over time.“Pitting humans against machines is one of the big design flaws of a lot of AI systems,” Jane.ai CEO David
Karandish told TechCrunch.The startup will also have a general knowledge base where users can call on some quickly available info that will
It takes time for these solutions to gather the information to be accessible enough to turn to, but Jane.ai is hoping that by ensuring that
data is cleaned up for every customer, a lot of employees’ frequent questions are answered on day 1.
