Announcing VB Transform’s Innovation Showcase winners

The Innovation Showcase at VentureBeat Transform 2023 featured 10 companies offering cutting-edge products in the generative AI, machine learning (ML) and data analytics spaces. Eight were chosen by VentureBeat, the other two by VB Transform attendees at the event’s Innovation Alley. 

All nominees presented their products before a group of hundreds of industry decision-makers and were questioned by a panel of analysts, brand executives and other experts.

In the end, the judges could pick only three winners, but we would be remiss not to highlight the runners-up as well.

Here are the seven honorable mention companies that enterprise leaders should keep an eye on, including two chosen by VB Transform attendees.

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Answer AI

AnswerAI uses generative AI to integrate data from numerous platforms into one accessible location. 

The company’s AI Sidekicks — tailored to a number of roles, from leadership to engineering to customer support — extract and analyze data, create content and help to spark creativity, according to Answer AI CEO Bradley Taylor.

For instance, a Sidekick could transcribe a customer service call, convert notes into user stories and make suggestions for next steps. An open-source repository, D.A.I.S.Y, also offers Journeys for collaborating with AI.

“There’s a Sidekick for everyone,” Taylor told the audience at Transform. “You can craft a Sidekick that truly talks to you.”

Armilla AI

Armilla AI is a quality assurance platform for model testing and evaluation that provides bias prevention and security controls.

Armilla AutoAlign Enterprise detects bias-related issues and automates fixing those issues to help create safe, fair and effective models, according to company CEO Dan Adamson. 

“We all know that generative AI can be stunning,” he said, “but it’s not without its own risk.”

The out-of-the-box tool can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud and provides built-in monitoring. Enterprises can ingest their own content with a range of adaptors and referencing to help ensure explainability, security, toxicity and personally identifiable information (PII) and bias controls. They can build their own custom alignment controls.

Clear ML

Clear ML is an open-source AI-as-a-service tool. The company’s ClearGPT allows enterprises to train multiple models internally, own the process end-to-end and have full governance over their data and models, according to cofounder and CEO Moses Goodman. 

Enterprises no longer need prompt engineering, he said; they can provide direct feedback to models and deploy them for different use cases. They can train on any model of their choosing on top of their own data and fully own the entire pipeline. 

Clear ML also offers a cost center management dashboard and operates on 100% green GPUs to help organizations reduce their carbon footprints.

SupportLogic

SupportLogic provides a generative AI-powered continuous service experience management platform. Using natural language processing (NLP), the tool provides translation and response assistance for customer agents.

SupportLogic monitors support issues, captures customer requests and sentiment, retrieves documents, creates workflows, transcribes calls, creates reminders and actions, summarizes next steps and helps to ensure consistency with tonality, formality and branding. It is built on top of Salesforce with no software installation required.

“Agent experience equals customer experience,” SupportLogic founder and CEO Krishna Raj Raja told the crowd at Transform, calling the platform a “central nervous system for companies.”

Yellow.ai

Yellow.ai is a customer lifecycle automation platform that aims to provide human-like experiences for customers and employees. 

Supported by large language models (LLMs), the tool can be used in retail, legal, finance and other environments to help customers navigate to the right products, engage with them and personalize offers. It also creates customer lifecycles based on past purchases, usage and order history and suggests proactive reach-outs, according to Yellow.ai CTO and cofounder Jaya Kishore.

Enterprises sync their ecommerce platform with Yellow.ai to stitch experiences end to end, “taking the customer throughout their journey,” Kishore told the Transform audience.

Innovation Alley nominee: AI Squared

AI Squared is a no-code platform that integrates machine learning into web-based applications. It blends generative AI and predictive AI to help users ask questions, get answers, give feedback, experiment and iterate in a fully governed way, according to CTO Michelle Bonat. The tool offers contextual info and provides enterprises with information on ROI.

Bonat said that in one case, the tool helped reduce time to integration from eight months to eight hours and increased conversion by 50%.

As Bonat emphasized, “your enterprise data is your biggest asset.”

Innovation Alley nominee: Answer Rocket

Answer Rocket is a copilot for data analysis powered by NLP and natural language generation.  

Ryan Goodpaster, the company’s enterprise account executive, called its new product, Max.AI, an “AI-powered analyst for businesspeople.”

The chatbot extracts intent and parameters to generate an article about unstructured data. This offers insights and narratives about organizational performance. Users can also ask follow-up questions (for example, on trends or forecasting) and the engine provides deeper-dive answers and recommendations. It also provides the sources of data for those answers so users can determine if it is legitimate. 

Finally, the winners…

Now that you’ve read about the honorable mentions, here are the winners:

Best Presentation Style: Skyflow, a privacy API built on top of an enterprise’s data vault to help secure sensitive data. 

Best Technology: Arize AI, an ML observability platform that uses AI to troubleshoot AI. 

Most Likely to Succeed: Unstructured.io, which uses natural language to transform data from its raw form to learning-ready.