For everyone from students and researchers to entrepreneurs and regulators, grappling with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) products this year has fueled an endless array of questions.
But it’s exactly in AI technology that Kogod ‘15 alum Ben Hills, saw an opportunity.
“What’s neat about AI is that it has perfect memory, it’s available 24/7, and it doesn’t complain when it gets asked the same thing over and over again,” Hills explained. “Those are all the biggest pain points we hear from employees; these are the things that cause them the most frustration.”
Hills himself experienced frustration during an eight-year run as an executive at Full Measure Education, an online communications platform created by one of Blackboard’s founding members. (The company recently merged with StudentBridge).
During his time there, and in talking with staff at other companies, Hills learned of the immense amount of time workers spend answering questions—equal parts critical and tedious—related to security, data, and compliance.
“I thought this would be a really good use case for AI,” Hills said.
His solution: Hey Iris AI, which he and co-founder Sagee Moyal, SPA ‘17, launched in June.
The online business-to-business platform uses AI to automate and streamline some of the most repetitive and time-consuming aspects of operating software in fields with stringent data and privacy requirements, such as health, finance, government, and education technology.
“With our platform, when you get something like, ‘answer these 100 questions about our security posture,’ rather than putting them in a Google Doc and tagging your co-workers and such, our platform automatically drafts response to those questions,” Hills explained.
Hey Iris’ approach may be a potential answer to the larger question of how AI could be incorporated into our economy—a new frontier Google executives likened to fire and electricity, as pointed out during an on-campus summit with the tech giant’s executives last winter.
A recent Gallup survey found nearly three-quarters of chief human resource officers anticipate AI replacing jobs at their company within the next three years.
Indeed, Hills said, the recent, rapid growth of AI was entirely responsible for Hey Iris’ existence, with AI being “at the core” of its product—a result of it becoming a more widely usable technology and dramatic reductions in its cost.
Hey Iris’ tailored models learn solely from a particular client’s information ecosystem rather than more broadly incorporating information from the internet.
“This platform couldn’t have existed more than a year ago,” Hills said.