In the AI Startup of the Week, the editorial staff of ai.nl is featuring promising AI startups, their innovations, solutions and challenges. In this sixth episode, we are taking a look at the Netherlands-based Supplai, a startup building cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms for all kinds of businesses.
Every company wants to be its most efficient self and it is a constant quest for business leaders to remove redundancy in business processes. AI, the science behind building intelligent computer programs, is extremely capable of removing such redundancies and streamlining repetitive tasks in a way that frees up valuable human time. However, what if you are a business leader or a company unable to implement such an AI application at scale.
Supplai – link between AI and business
Meet Supplai, a Dutch startup that aims to act as the link between business and AI. Supplai is focused on implementing AI algorithms at companies to make their existing processes more efficient and effective. It does this with the help of extensive work it has already done in the field of implementing AI across industries.
The expertise in AI allows Supplai to understand how processes work in different industries. Whether you are a software company or running a food and beverage company, Supplai is able to not only understand the possibilities of AI in the space but also translate that expertise into a meaningful business outcome.
In October last year, Deloitte had released its 4th State of AI in the enterprise report. The report based on a survey of 2,875 executives from 11 top economies showed that only few organisations are completely AI fueled right now. One of the hurdles facing companies wanting to be AI fueled is the lack of knowledge or expertise in implementing AI. Supplai helps such companies and here is how it does that.
AI and Robot Process Automation (RPA)
The cornerstone of Supplai’s successful implementation of AI across industries is its reliance on the latest technologies. The startup focuses on implementing AI algorithms and Robot Process Automation (RPA) to make existing processes more efficient and effective. The implementation of AI allows Supplai to create smart applications while RPA helps to automate those applications.
Supplai says RPA allows relieving people of repetitive tasks, one of the common problems at businesses of all scale and size. The startup further says relieving people of repetitive tasks increases the “quality of work and frees up time for strategic and challenging tasks.” We have already seen how chatbots were used by hospitals to relieve their staff amidst the shortage faced by them due to COVID-19 hospitalisations.
The first step in Supplai building an intelligent process is creating an AI algorithm that takes all the data from existing processes. However, it does not stop at intelligence and goes a step further to create a so-called workhorse to execute this intelligence. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) allows businesses to simulate processes currently done by people.
Using RPA, Supplai creates software robots (or bots) that can learn, mimic, and execute rules-based business processes. These bots are created by observing and repeating human digital actions.
Applications and industries where Supplai’s AI for companies works
Supplai calls itself a company offering AI for every industry. So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it caters to a large number of industries including logistics, manufacturing, process industry, finance, healthcare, retail, and construction. However, to really understand what Supplai does across these industries, we must look at the applications where its AI and RPA are transforming existing business practices.
- Reading: One of the common repetitive tasks at every industry is maintaining and extracting data from documents. AI and RPA can be easily implemented here by using traditional OCR software. Supplai implements this in a way that its bots are able to read documents with different layouts and users can decide what gets read across each document. With over 450,000 documents analysed, Supplai claims to have saved over 150,000 hours for businesses.
- Visual inspections: Supplai is also able to help companies automate human visual inspections by using AI to analyse any kind of image. Whether it is RGB, IR, thermal, lidar, radar, or laser, the AI can read and visualise these images and offer data points such as damage inspection, asset inspection, soil inspection, construction site analysis, warehouse inspections, access controls, and more.
- Speech: Supplai also helps businesses with using AI to speak directly with customers and learn what their customers want before they talk to them. Think of it like AI being used to screen the customer’s requirement and then speak to them. The startup uses natural language processing (NLP) to automate conversations by analysing content and speech. This allows businesses to reduce administrative work and increase the quality of their service.
- Analysis: Supplai strongly argues in favour of moving from business intelligence to artificial intelligence. It makes this argument to help businesses unlock valuable insights from their data and of course, it uses AI to analyse the data and make informed business decisions. The startup also helps its clients rethink their core processes when implementing AI.
- Prediction: One of the cornerstones of AI is its ability to analyse data and offer insights that can truly transform the business landscape. Supplai not only helps with analysis but also helps businesses with the prediction possible from that data analysis. The strength of this AI prediction is that it can handle a large amount of data and find hidden patterns that humans might miss in their analysis.
- Decision making: All of these process transformations powered by AI culminate in the form of decision making. Supplai helps clients to use AI to make decisions and it does this by taking into account ethical aspects at play. It claims to have made over 1,000 decisions, which have translated to savings of over 5,000 human hours and are often 10 times faster.