As we kick off the new year with excitement for what is ahead, it also feels like a good time to reflect a little on the past year. 2023 was a big year for AI and Vianai, and our flagship product, hila Enterprise. We announced new partnerships, rolled out a steady stream of capabilities in the hila Enterprise platform, and introduced our generative AI application for finance organizations, Conversational Finance powered by hila Enterprise.
Here is a brief look back at some of Vianai’s business-shaping events from the past year.
hila Enterprise Platform
The launch of hila Enterprise was an exciting milestone at Vianai amidst the overall interest in AI and specifically generative AI. We’ve taken a unique approach that is resonating with customers, focused on making GenAI useful, accurate and grounded in how enterprises actually work across their wide and varied landscapes of systems and technologies, and focused on their need for rock solid reliability to support mission-critical work. Non-hallucinating, domain-specific (eg for finance professionals), and secure within the walls of the enterprise.
With hila Enterprise, we minimize and prevent hallucinations that are well-known but not easily solved in LLM outputs via our proprietary tools and techniques. With Conversational Finance, we bring these techniques to finance users within the CFO organization, enabling them to directly query structured and unstructured data (systems of record, documents, public data, etc), to do financial planning, forecasts, reporting, expense management and other core functions of the finance organization.
hila.ai
In April, Vianai unveiled hila.ai, the first AI-powered chat assistant for institutional and retail investors, investment banking analysts, and other investment professionals as a showcase of hila Enterprise. With hila, Vianai sets a new standard for enterprise applications of conversational AI, addressing a real-world business need while ensuring the resulting AI-generated insights are based on reliable, trustworthy data and information. We made hila.ai available for anyone to get a sneak preview of our hila Enterprise capabilities, and we have thousands of users on the system.
New Partnerships
2023 was a big year for our partnership strategy. As one of the leading professional services firms, KPMG in India came to Vianai to put reliable, conversational AI directly into the hands of finance users with hila Enterprise. Explicitly targeted at finance professionals, Conversational Finance enables finance users to ask questions of their systems of record, internal documents, public data, and other data in natural language to get immediate responses as text, dashboards, charts and more.
We also partnered with Cognizant. Our hila Enterprise platform works alongside Cognizant's Neuro® AI to create a seamless, unified interface to unlock predictive, AI-driven decision-making.
2023 Expectations vs. Reality
In late 2022, our CEO, Dr. Vishal Sikka, had high expectations for the AI space. In a conversation with VentureBeat he predicted that in 2023 -
Looking back on the past year, many of these predictions were proven true. The rate of AI adoption indeed continued to increase, and the demand for tangible enterprise use cases has accelerated. Cost continues to be a key challenge, creating a barrier of entry that needs to be solved. There also was a more significant increase in the public debate about AI oversight, and we saw the introduction of many new regulations related to AI. And, the gap in AI education continues to be a significant barrier to unlocking the full potential as well as driving widespread adoption.
Looking forward to 2024
Looking ahead to 2024, we think the focus on reliable, safe and purposeful development and use of AI – will take center stage. This focus will drive attention on issues such as hallucinations, performance, user experience and more. Read more about how Vianai is bringing reliable, useful, domain-specific AI to enterprises with hila Enterprise.