San Francisco company founder says AI-powered platform Instabase will be great time saver
SAN FRANCISCO -- While there are real concerns about the impact of artificial intelligence on the job market, AI can also help workers ramp up their productivity. One Bay Area company is working on a huge time-saving tool when it comes to documentation.
Anant Bhardwaj is the founder and CEO of Instabase, an AI-powered platform that looks to change the way people and companies process documents.
"It can basically allow them to make decisions and do more important things at much, much, much faster pace," said Bhardwaj.
It may sound like a simple idea, but Anant believes it will revolutionize how people work.
"Just think of a calculator and if we didn't have calculators, is it worth people spending like ten hours multiplying two large numbers? No, right? Because you can do much better work. And I think this AI can do a lot of things where humans don't need to spend that time," said Bhardwaj.
With Instabase, users input whatever documents they are hoping to analyze, whether it's an identification card or a 100-page instruction manual. Then the user simply asks the AI whatever question they want to know about the documents.
"If I had somebody's passport, you can ask the question, 'What is this document?' And this is a picture of, you know, somebody's passport. This will be able to answer, 'This document is a passport for a traveler from the United States of America,'" explained Bhardwaj.
While he admitted that was an example of a relatively simple question, Bhardwaj said the AI is also capable of answering much more complex questions, covering anything from financial transactions to translating answers into different languages.
By way of demonstration, Bhardwaj pulled a random news article from the CBS News Bay Area website and dropped it into Instabase.
"Let's say I want to ask a question, like basically say like, 'What are the key points in this news article?' And I have never seen this before and it will read the whole thing and tell you. 'Mosquitoes in Sunnyvale and Santa Clara have tested positive. The infected area will be treated with insecticide this week. The insecticide will be applied using truck mounted equipment.' It basically read the whole thing," said Bhardwaj.
Miriam Kim, a lawyer and partner with the legal firm Munger, Tolles & Olson who specializes in technology and AI, says Instabase will really help employees streamline their work. However, she is also worried AI technology like this could help people with more nefarious motives.
"I worry that scammers will increase their efforts to you know call them, trick them and use voice recognition now," said Kim.
Bhardwaj said Instabase has security and privacy protections built into it. For now, it's only available to a select number of customers.
He does hope to eventually get it into the hands of everyone and really believes it will have much more of a positive impact than a negative one.
"I currently believe that there is a huge, huge value in the AI for mentally accelerating innovation and the human productivity and productivity of the whole world," said Bhardwaj.
It's a software he believes has the power to permanently change how people work and will hopefully become as common a work tool as the calculator.
