“Humley platform enables 60% accuracy within three weeks of briefing,” says Angela Meadows, SVP Client Development
“Humley platform enables 60% accuracy within three weeks of briefing,” says Angela Meadows, SVP Client Development
September 23, 2016
AI Business recently caught up with Angela Meadows, SVP Client Development at Humley.
Humley is a cloud-based platform provider specializing in the rapid deployment of enterprise-grade customer engagement solutions powered by artificial intelligence. They are focused on improving end users’ experience of technology, ensuring the solution scales across industries and within any customer engagement channel.
Angela has over 12 years’ experience within the technology sector and before joining Humley worked for the major UK mobile operator EE, delivering consumer facing products, services and propositions. Angela has seen a huge amount of change over the 12 years within tech and AI is the next big revolution she is proud to be working on.
Humley are not only proud sponsors of The AI Summit in San Francisco on 28-29 September, they have also provided the event with their AI powered intelligent assistant, iQ. iQ is available now on The AI Summit website to help users understand more about how AI is transforming business and provide information both before and during the Summit.
We begin with Humley’s key proposition. Angela explains how Humley “are focused on improving the end users experience of technology, and build this into positive commercially viable and deployable AI solutions”. She elaborates on this further:
“Humley is for businesses struggling with how to deploy, test and scale AI solutions, which create rich end-user experiences, which are not scripted.
“Our solution is for any business striving to improve the experience for any end user. This could be improving a customer’s ability to self-serve and lowering the cost of servicing that user, which has the additional benefit of improving customer satisfaction, or it could be a solution which creates efficiency within a business by speeding up processes or tasks for employees. Or it could be an IoT partner who wants their hardware to be able to engage with an end user in a natural language way”.
So where exactly are we seeing Humley’s technologies find application in the enterprise? Angela describes a couple of use cases in the telecommunications sector, as well as their role at The AI Summit:
“In the last six months, Humley has deployed a customer-facing pilot for a UK mobile carrier, closely followed by a global multi-language solution for a smartphone manufacturer. We are proud to say we have put the AI into The AI Summit in San Francisco by launching the AI Smart Assistant to support future and existing delegates and sponsors on the run up to and during the event.
“Humley have also put their money where their mouth is and launched their own smart assistant on www.Humley.com”
In the short term, Angela says that Humley’s strategy is to continue to expand existing partnerships:
“The Humley solution works at grass roots as well as at the infrastructure level, meaning businesses can launch a service and grow organically and in parallel work towards a larger scale enterprise solution”.
And there are new opportunities beyond this, she continues:
“We are also very proud to say we will soon be announcing other partnerships and launches, the end of 2016 is looking to be a busy and exciting time”.
Another one of Humley’s strategies is “not to limit who we work with” – Angela explains that because their solution scales, and because of the unique way they mesh external and internal AI APIs, Humley is truly agnostic:
“This means we are looking at partnerships with other AI providers who are struggling to make their solutions scale, as well as digital agencies who have several partnerships to service where speed to market becomes of key value. We will continue to work with directly with businesses or via agencies who have been either looking to test the AI solution with end users or have tested it and now want to deploy a mass market solution”.
Longer term, Angela reveals that Humley is focused on expanding further across Europe, outside Europe and beyond, increasing their capabilities with languages as they do so:
“Our first deployment being across Europe means we have the skill set and an ambition to become a global player”.
Being industry agnostic means that Humley is very much focused on the horizontal and not specific industry verticals. Their end goals are very clear, with their efforts concentrated “on the end user experience and ensuring our tools are scalable across industries and commercially viable and deployable for businesses”. Angela expands on this by sharing their company philosophy:
“We have a philosophy of build, manage, automate which means we take our learnings forward and ensure they power our platforms evolution. We are proud of the deployments we have announced and the breadth of conversations we are having, the diversity of these conversations shows the real power and value behind our platform”.
Humley clearly have high and widespread ambitions for their solutions, but in a hugely competitive startup ecosystem, what else sets them apart? Angela shares her initial thoughts:
“Humley’s platform has significant heritage – Humley incorporated AI into the platform in August 2015.
“Unique to Humley is our ability to apply AI to real world applications and deploy enterprise-grade solutions rapidly. As an emerging technology AI can struggle to find its home in a real world environment. Humley does not just use AI, it has successfully applied AI for end users.”
But this is not without the help of the toolkit created around the Humley platform, which enables the quick and efficient deployment of solutions. Angela outlines the key elements of this:
“First is the ability to manage the training material which makes up the AI knowledge base and in real time curate the knowledge base, which in turn enables users to manage information which does not stay static.
“Secondly, the Humley platforms focus on accuracy and through the ability to see this in the tools, we can show our partners how well the knowledge base is performing and identify the quickest ways to improve that performance. This really keeps the focus on the most important parts of the knowledge base and ensures the operational effort is kept to a minimum.
“Another key element is scalability: we are built for scale – the platform already had what was needed to ensure our solution could be used across industries. Octavo, our in house language AI API, builds on our platform capabilities to create industry specific dictionaries and overlay industry terms taken from many sources to train the knowledge base, building an industry expert solution.
“Our speed to market is down to the team experience and the tools created to launch and manage services, which is key for the rapid deployment of services and proof of concept deployments. The Octavo API platform has enabled us to deploy powerful solutions that hit 60% accuracy within three weeks of being briefed.
“And finally, our flexibility in partnering stands us apart. We are happy to partner with digital agencies, solution providers and direct with customers. We are dedicated to improving the end user experience with AI and solving some of the intrinsic issues with AI around scalability and practicality.”
Humley are sponsors of The AI Summit in San Francisco on 28-29 September, where the most exciting startups, together with the long-standing giants of the tech industry, will meet with 600+ CxOs from the world's leading enterprises. To find out more, visit: theaisummit.com
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