If Levity creates an artificial intelligence DIY boom, we’ll all be laughing

Yext uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help companies with their digital transformation in response to the Covid-19 lockdown. Its biggest customers are mobile phone operators such as Three and Verizon.

It helps these communications service providers (CSPs) by improving the digital experience of customers. For many mobile phone users, the customer journey often starts with a search for information about one supplier and ends with them going to a rival which provided the answers more readily.

“If they want customers to help themselves, they need to structure their information so the answers are readily available,” says Jon Buss, managing director of Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) for AI company Yext.

In other words, Yext uses a branch of AI – natural language processing (NLP) – to help CSPs to get their information in order.

There is a resurgence of the have-a-go spirit emerging among people who want to use artificial intelligence, but who don’t want to be beholden to some glorified computer programmer calling themselves a data scientist.

For this reason, the demand for digital transformation has created a huge boom in DIY AI systems, according to Gartner. In February, it predicted a surge in the use of low-code development of AI systems, which is already a $13.8bn market. And these low-code systems are so simple that even I can understand them.

Berlin-based Levity launched into the UK in January in a bid to make AI less elitist and expensive. It achieves this by making it really easy to train your machine – all you have to do is gather samples of data you want the machine to analyse, and then drop them into a folder. If you want to train your machine to recognise a disease when it sees it, show it lots of picture files of the disease.

A simple framework has streamlined the repetitive steps involved in training an AI system, says Levity CTO Thilo Hüllmann. Now anyone can collect, label and store unstructured data in Levity’s cloud. It’s as easy as dragging and dropping.

I’m preparing to train a robot dermatologist to recognise pyoderma gangrenosum by showing it lots of pictures. I haven’t yet met Dr Robo-Derm, partly because it lives in the cloud, but mostly because I haven’t got onto the next stage, which is the actual training – the tricky part.