Saskatoon’s Vendasta hitches its wagon to the rising star of AI

Saskatoon technology company Vendasta is playing its part in the global arms for artificial intelligence. Keenan Sorokan has the story.

That is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods themselves.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Civilization

Saskatoon technology company Vendasta is playing its part in the global arms race for artificial intelligence.

The business-to-business software firm launched its latest tool Wednesday that it says will go far beyond earlier tools or features announced in recent years.

Known as the AI Reputation Specialist, this “AI Employee” is designed to solve one costly and time-consuming problem for small and medium-sized businesses: unanswered customer reviews.

“Managing reviews for small businesses on the internet is a big deal. It’s not just your reputation; it actually leads to revenue bringing customers in,” Sanjay Manchanda, Vendasta’s chief marketing officer said.

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The AI Reputation specialist can respond and engage with customer reviews in real time. With trained branding and company language, it can follow up with customers, keep track of information and track trends that can help businesses make effective change — all while freeing up employees’ time and energy.

With a majority of consumers searching online before heading out the door, focusing on customer reviews could be a crucial way to saving and earning new money.

“You don’t have to press a button to do it. It monitors. It responds,” Manchanda said.

The new AI era is part of a fundamental shift in the company.

With the speed of AI breakthroughs changing at a rapid pace, Vendasta couldn’t afford to sit idle and instead has put every effort into embracing AI internally and using its power and advantages for its external customers.

With a wealth of knowledge about its customers, Vendasta feels AI can make its offerings to small businesses similar to what a large enterprise would have.

“It’s everything that we do,” Manchanda said.

David Gerhard, the department head of computer science at University of Manitoba, said the embrace of AI is impossible to ignore in all fields of commerce, usually coming in two forms: using AI to solve problems, or hearing all the talk about AI and getting on board without fully understanding how to implement it.

“They’re not necessarily sure how it’s going to improve whatever it is they’re trying to do, they just know that AI is good in that they should be doing AI,” Gerhard said.

While experts have spent much of the last two years debating the benefits and drawbacks of AI at length, Gerhard isn’t convinced AI in its current form can replace human employees en masse.

“For one thing, they still hallucinate,” Gerhard said of the technology’s ability to generate misleading or false information.

That also leads to what Gerhard called the “significant imbalance of trust” for new adopters of AI, forcing humans to check the work.

“The really big challenges [for] companies who get rid of employees with the expectation that artificial intelligence will be able to fill that capacity, are finding that it can do 65 to 85 per cent of a person’s job. But then there still is that extra work that can’t be done by the machine, so they still need the people,” he said.

Manchanda isn’t shying away from what’s possible, or even unimaginable, with AI at our fingertips. From daily tasks to workflows and even having employees not trained in coding or technology build AI tools of their own, the new technology is reshaping Vendasta.

“I think people started out by saying six, eight months ago that, ‘hey, this is like the internet. It’s transforming everything,’” he said.

“I actually think it’s orders of magnitude bigger than the internet, orders of magnitude bigger than the mobile revolution, because not only is it changing everyday tasks for consumers... it’s actually making possible things that were never possible before.”

Gerhard cautions that optimism with historical promises of the internet and social media, which were once advertised as an age of enlightenment or meant to bring people together.

“Years later, once they are mature and stable and everybody knows what they are, we find that the end result is somewhat different than we expected,” Gerhard said. “The amazing stuff that’s happening now may not fully predict the kind of challenges we may have in the future.”