AI Keeping The B2B Pulse

For those that are new around here, this is weekly newsletter where I highlight new and innovative AI products that are worth exploring.

Hey hey!

Happy Friday! We’re back for another issue.

In this week’s issue:

• Product of the Week

• Other AI Things Happened

• What I’m Reading

PRODUCT OF THE WEEK

After testing dozens of AI products this week. Here’s my report!

We’re back at work this week! We’re crossing t’s and dotting i’s. 🏦

Times sure have changed, because yes, you can securely have a chat about your total security stance with an AI, through a SaaS UI.

Let’s face it, in today’s work life, so much of the modern workforce lives in SaaS solutions. Corporate data rests at many  places, so tracking what’s where and the risk profile of it all is somewhat of a white-collar nightmare. This week’s product pick is Viso Trust, a solid third-party verification SaaS. Its use of AI to sniff out the nonsense, and outline each vendor’s credibility profile is frankly my main draw to it!

So what does Viso Trust actually do? It scrutinizes, authenticates, and certifies the credentials of all your providers (negotiating a few batches of uploads for players that aren’t already in their pre-baked list). Ensuring the integrity and reliability of their services, Viso dives in depth for what provisions are in place (or lack thereof) in your providers to keep you in the loop for exactly what safety shape your business’ data security is in. This thing goes as far as subcontractors, and identifying a number of other key security factors like special notes on physical security of servers.

For the most part this is primarily a SaaS solution, and where it gets interesting is how it’s got backend AI bits that come into effect during your vendor intake process, and during the analysis phase of your documentation.

Why do I think the use of AI in this is noteworthy? Because enjoying the benefits of tech happens on a good, secure, foundation. So as a resilience & security nerd, watching a cornerstone of digital security like knowing your risk profile at (at least) the business level is a huge step in making the complex dry world of compliance that much more accessible, digestible and understandable!

The mix of tools I’ve sniffed out are: Character recognition, Document analysis using (what I presume to be an LLM), and a means of communicating an at-rest dataset of information to a LLM/conversational AI for some of its Q&A features.

In terms of processing speeds, I was able to grab a coffee between my batches of uploads, but still could get some verification outcomes within a few seconds and sometimes within a few minutes from hitting the go button.

In conclusion, by automating huge chunks of the verification process, Viso Trust makes security officer’s lives that much easier, and keeps businesses out of hot water by calling out potential points of friction when it comes down to compliance with international laws and regulations, like GDPR.

OTHER AI THINGS HAPPENED

Some other notable news and product launches from this week

• Live translation faster than ever? Count me in! What out for the iFLYTEK Multilingual Simultaneous Interpretation System (mouthful I know) at some of your european events in the near future. Keynote speakers are about to get a huge bumps in reach. 

• Forget templates, AI is here to help with all matters of user engagement. Involve.me is here with a whole suite of customizable price calculators, surveys, quizzes, forms, landing pages, and pop-ups, all without the need for coding skills.

• Industry specific ERPs & specialist systems? Let’s make it a business. Bringing in an unseen amount of rigidity and maturity to hyper-specialized sectors and industries comes this new SaaS provider, Cogna, lifted by a hefty raise to back up their target of not one, but many unique B2B niches.

• Many of the tech giants (over 200 signatories) are actually quite looking forward to AI regulation, and consortium standards coming into play to better define what some would still call the late stage Wild West of AI.

• You want chatbots to stop spewing the occasional nonsense? There’s a reward system for that! New science has come out of Cornell University expanding on GPT’s ability to increase the correctness of its responses. This has very real potential to help reduce risks related to, and increase the use case focus of LLMs in conversational, client facing areas - the comedic timing of this comes on the tails of a 1$ Chevy. This is a particularly cool advancement since the later stages of developing GPT 4 were actually using reinforcement learning as part of the tuning phase of the R&D. Awesome to see someone took the time to dive deeper, and see what could be done there. 

  Raises & Mergers Recap:

• Ideogram, an AI image generation startup, is raising $80 million in a Series A to advance its technology that tackles generative AI challenges, including producing images with readable text, while expanding hiring and computing resources.

• Startupdaily explored what makes investors tick when it comes to an AI-powered  products emerging from startups looking to raise capital and scale. Answers: Be intentional with the use case, mitigate risks in material manner, and look to use it to make complexity into accessibility.

• The HR giant Workday plans on acquiring HiredScore, an AI driven solution for talent orchestration & mobility.

• Healthy together is well.. Coming together with Kinsa health and growing into the exciting field of AI-powered illness forecasting. “Kinsa customers like CVS, Clorox, Mucinex, Proctor & Gamble and others have utilized real-time and AI forecasted data to predict up to 8 weeks out where illness is on the rise and where demand for doctor visits, vaccines, and medicines will surge.” 

WHAT I'M READING

"Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them"

- Albert Einstein

Hooked by Nir Eyal

I’m having a read this week about an interesting book discussing user experience design in software, shaping the way users interact with products, and where products fit into the context of use cases. Hooked is an amazing book about how intelligent and sometimes creative product design can lead to very intentional behavior patterns.

Stay well, and until next week.

-✌🏽 Sam

P.S. Interested in private feedback about a product you’re building? Send me an email: [email protected]