In an exclusive interview with Shreyas Webmedia Solutions (SWS), Animesh Samuel, Co-founder and CEO, E42 discussed the potential of AI, E42’s prospective product development projects, market expansion plans, partnerships and many more…

SWS: The adoption of AI is growing across sectors, what’s your view on this?

Animesh: Enterprises are increasingly leveraging the power of AI to address challenges and enhance their operational effectiveness, leading to a transformative impact on their business practices. AI has the capability to detect patterns and uncover opportunities to streamline business processes such as appointment scheduling, candidate selection for interviews, resume sorting, and enabling self-service options for customers, among others. By automating repetitive tasks, businesses can enhance their productivity and free up employees’ time. Furthermore, AI empowers enterprises to proactively adjust their plans in response to shifts, trends, errors, and anomalies in data, enabling them to make better-informed decisions in a timely and cost-effective manner.

SWS: Can you tell us about your E42’s journey? Any roadblocks you might have hit and how you overcame the challenges?

Animesh: We started with a seemingly impossible dream in 2012, to teach machines how to understand human language. Initially, we faced skepticism from many who didn’t believe in our vision. However, we persisted and invested everything we had, including support from the likes of Microsoft, Times Group, and Reliance Industries. For any AI-powered development, two critical components are necessary – computational power and data. To acquire the necessary computational power, we utilized GPUs from major tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, and Oracle through their startup programs and the advancement of Moore’s Law. However, obtaining training data posed a challenge for us. Our competitors, such as IBM, hired human beings to generate data for their AI models. Unfortunately, we did not have the financial resources to do the same. As a result, we developed a creative solution to obtain the data we required. We created algorithms and small generative AI models on transformer networks, and then launched the world’s first answering engine via SMS. This innovation went viral and garnered millions of question-and-answer pairs, which we then used to bootstrap the data needed to construct E42. Our ingenuity in acquiring data garnered recognition in the form of awards and selection for the Jio Gennext Hub’s first cohort.

Today, E42, with its ability to significantly save costs and manpower, is benefiting businesses from different sectors and of all sizes, including Fortune 500 companies, SMEs, and startups. We are disrupting the enterprise automation space by delivering a seamless user experience with scalability, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.

SWS: Could you provide an overview of the products, services, or solutions that E42 offers, and how they benefit your customers?

Animesh: E42 is a no-code platform that allows users to create AI workers to automate business processes across different functions and verticals. Its unique “All for one and one for all” approach means that every AI worker built on the platform can be combined with other AI workers. This enables enterprises to leverage intelligence like never before, such as using the interaction of an AI customer care executive to suggest changes in campaign messaging to an AI marketing analyst. E42’s multifunctional capabilities, omnichannel interface, and ease of management set it apart from other technology-specific platforms that heavily rely on coding.

The advantages of E42 extend beyond its unique approach of enabling the creation of AI workers that can work together across the enterprise. As a no-code platform, E42 eliminates the need for scripting and enables quick deployment. It can process both structured and unstructured data, allowing for greater flexibility in data management. With drag-and-drop APIs and the ability to be deployed on-prem or on any cloud, E42 is easy to manage and scale.
Through our partnership network, E42 equips system integrators and original equipment manufacturers with AI capabilities, enabling them to compete with industry leaders.

SWS: Tell us about some interesting use cases of your platform and capabilities across different industries

Animesh: We serve a wide range of industries and clients, and one area where we’ve seen a significant value addition is E42’s intelligent document processing (IDP) capability. With IDP, our AI workers can read and understand unstructured documents, allowing for more accurate and efficient processing of data. One of the use cases of this is invoice processing which is an integral part of the Accounts Payable function of any enterprise and can have serious repercussions if not run efficiently. Our AI Accounts Payable Executive is skilled at automating invoice processing by reading invoices from varied formats (emails, portals, et al), running n-way matches, checking for duplicates and discrepancies, communicating with vendors for corrections, and feeding the data into any ERP, and so on. This means handling a load of several AP Executives single-handedly without any human intervention.

SWS: Could you tell us about E42’s plans for future product development, market expansion, partnerships, hiring, and funding? What are your goals for both the short and long term?

Animesh: E42 is currently preparing for its series B funding round while simultaneously working on the next iteration of our platform to streamline the development, training, and maintenance of AI systems. Our focus is on enhancing model accuracy through advanced algorithms, as well as expanding our intelligent document processing capabilities by incorporating natural language understanding and layout analysis features. In addition to our internal efforts, E42 has partnered with Beetel in India and large systems integrators such as Beyondsoft in the U.S. and Alpha Data in the Middle East, in order to increase our global footprint and enable more partners to leverage our AI capabilities. Looking ahead, we’re committed to sustaining our growth momentum in both the medium and long term, through strategic collaborations, exploring new markets, and driving innovation in our product development.