ELEVATOR PITCH
With its explainable AI named Ana, Datanautix helps companies to interpret high volumes of customer feedback—often in the form of online comments—within minutes, enabling those companies to turn customer feedback into profitable insights.
OUR STORY
Orlando has always been a magical place. A place where the impossible becomes possible. A place where you can see, today, what the future is going to look like. A place where imagination can take you anywhere. So imagine a world where you could make a simple request: “Tell me what you think about us.” Its simplicity starts a conversation with your stakeholders. Rather than using a multi-question survey that comes across like an interrogation, you make it simple for them to respond. Three weeks later, on a Thursday evening, your vendor sends you a database of millions of comments. Friday morning, your phone rings and your boss says, “The Board wants to know what the survey found.” You leap out of your chair, run to the printer and grab the report that has the answers. Fortunately, you had sent the data over to Ana before you went home on Thursday. While you slept, Ana magically processed the data, uncovered the hidden patterns, and, in a neat little package, handed you the answers to what the positive and negative perceptions about your organization are and how they vary based on demographic characteristics.
You ask, “Who is this Ana? How can I have her work for me?” The answer is simple. Ana is the future of how organizations will ask for and interpret feedback from their stakeholders. Ana is an artificial intelligence engine that uses the most advanced machine learning and natural language processing technology to make life easier. Ana was born in Orlando and learned all her magic here.
“I’ll tell you a scary story,” says Sanjay Patel, CEO of Datanautix. One day, his team of developers said they had something to show him: the system they’d built had organized online comments about a restaurant chain into related words—in this case, “shrimp, lobster, and crab.”
“I said, Yes, these are similar words,” recalls Sanjay. “What’s the big deal? And the developers said, ‘We haven’t told the system that those words are related.’ The system had just figured it out.”
The company shifted focus from consulting to technology exclusively when Sanjay’s son Neel, now Datanautix’s CTO, was reading data and reports over his father’s shoulder and announced, “Dad, I think I can build a system that can do this.” Sanjay says he laughed; he had fifteen years of experience— and his college-aged son was going to replace that with algorithms? It was laughable until it turned into what it is today: the ability to cull and analyze huge amounts of data and distill it into recommendations to improve the customer experience. The system even has a name, face, and personality: Ana, short for analyst.
“The personification has helped in making AI accessible,” Sanjay says. “When you look at AI today, there are two types: that of deep learning—you have no idea what it’s doing in the background, but it’s spitting out results— and then there’s what we’ve built.”
Ana is a form of “explainable AI,” which means that every algorithm Ana contains can be interrogated and understood on its own. “If she makes a recommendation or draws a conclusion, you can ask her for her logic of how she did that,” Sanjay explains.
Anthropomorphizing their system and ensuring that Ana’s logic can be interrogated makes Datanautix different from other companies that use similar AI. It is also different in the kind of leverage it can provide its clients.
“Ana is language and domain agnostic,” explains Sanjay, “so the challenge becomes: we cannot be 100% specific, but we can get 80-85% of the way there—within minutes.” This reduces the time and money spent by the client and provides them, at the very least, an understanding of where they should focus their attention and analysis going forward.
“It’s about understanding what’s on people’s minds from a customer-centric perspective,” Sanjay says. “The idea that, short of reading someone’s mind, the next best option is to ask them, ‘What’s on your mind?’”
Today, Ana includes amongst her clients the largest university in the country, the nation’s largest full-service specialty dining restaurant as well as our very own Orlando Magic Basketball team, and Orlando International Airport. What can she do for you?
