With all the hype around generative AI and its text-to-image capabilities throwing the art world for a loop, it may be easy to forget that you can write code with it, too.
Seek AI, a new data intelligence platform that uses generative AI, specifically large language models, has just been launched. The company is the creation of CEO Sarah Nagy, a data professional and entrepreneur who felt the available data tools were not adequate for helping her less technical colleagues access needed data. Nagy and co-founder Sarah Smith decided to look to these newest advances in AI for a solution.
“For anyone that has worked with generative AI like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, or GPT-3, you have experienced the power of these models, which work like magic. But did you know that generative AI can also write code? When I first saw this in action, I knew instantly that it would change the way people would work with data,” Nagy said in a company mission statement.
Data access can be challenging for business users less familiar with coding, which can add hours of work to the already heavy workflows of the data professionals that assist them. As part of her data career, Nagy says she spent a significant amount of time each day writing manual code by hand to pull data for her colleagues.
Seek AI has launched its SaaS platform to automate these repetitive tasks. According to the company, Seek AI allows data teams to automate and oversee database query projects to improve productivity, with a focus on sales and marketing purposes.
“We’ve built a platform that uses artificial intelligence to reduce inefficiencies in accessing data,” says Nagy. “Currently, data scientists and business analysts waste time manually writing repetitive code. We’ve automated that process with sophisticated natural language processing and machine learning.”
The complex deep-learning models behind OpenAI’s DALL-E and GPT-3 are also behind the Seek AI platform’s technology and form the basis for its natural language interface that allows users to ask questions and obtain immediate answers. The models understand natural language commands and generate the necessary code for instantly querying databases.
Seek AI’s natural language interface can be accessed through email, Slack, text, and several CRM systems. Available as a monthly or per user subscription, the company says its platform allows data teams to automate the generation and maintenance of code for answering ad-hoc questions, as well as generating and maintaining semantic models.
“By helping to remove some of the mundane coding and waiting from both the data team and the business-facing teams, I hope that Seek will make knowledge workers happier because they will be able to pursue more meaningful work. Not to mention the value it adds to organizations by allowing them to make better use of the data they work so hard to compile and maintain,” said Nagy.
“Giving fast, high-quality answers to our customers’ questions is the difference between winning and losing over our competitors,” said Tim Harrington, CEO of financial dataset supplier Battlefin, in a release. “Seek AI played a critical role in our company’s 2023 strategy because of the edge that it gives us in accessing and analyzing our 2,400+ datasets in response to customer questions. I’d estimate that our ROI on Seek AI is about 10x based on what we would have spent to achieve this level of efficiency without the platform.”
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This article originally appeared in Datanami.