How iKVA enables digital transformation with AI insights

Jon Horden, CEO and Founder of iKVA outlines how his company supports its customers' digital transformation journey through data, analytics and AI insights

Can you tell me about iKVA?

iKVA is an early-stage company creating AI-enabled knowledge management software solutions relevant for organisations in multiple sectors. The company was founded out of the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory and The Alan Turing Institute, with our core intellectual property, concentrated on AI knowledge management using multi-dimensional vector mapping techniques. 

We have taken that technology, which was historically too cumbersome and used too much computer power to have been useful in an enterprise environment and innovated with it in a way that works at an enterprise scale. Our solutions can index unstructured data, across millions of sources, before collating it in one accessible place and intelligently and proactively serving up insight to users when, and where, they need it in milliseconds. iKVA’s innovative solutions give organisations access to more knowledge and more accurate information, saving them time, reducing costs and reducing business risk.

How does your company utilise AI to help customers transform data into business insights?

The amount of information being generated by organisations is huge, increasing rapidly, and is in different formats and repositories, which may not even have search interfaces, making it difficult to access. Organisations are increasingly discussing business decisions and essential knowledge via email, video calls and chat sessions, as well as traditional channels. Our solution to this challenge is based on vector mapping technology which, along with leading-edge semantic and NLP techniques, enables us to index highly unstructured data from multiple systems, in multiple formats, and with conflicting or non-existent taxonomies or meta-data. Once in a common index format, the information can then be retrieved from a single source, enabling users to access significantly more knowledge.

Typically, information searches are restricted to keywords or short sentences which is adequate for a Google search but less useful when working with complex technical information such as product specifications, contracts, or proposals. Our solutions use a greater context of information as a search query up to, and including full multi-page documents. Using this additional context of information, our AI tools can considerably increase query accuracy and relevancy compared to simple keyword-based searches. By integrating our solutions into the user’s workflow, our solutions can also continually analyse the context and content of users’ work and proactively provide them with information in real-time. 

iKVA’s solutions use vector mapping to index information ingested from an organisation, converting each item into 300-dimensional vectors, making it language agnostic and providing access to source information, no matter which language it was created in, without the need for expensive translation. This is particularly useful for large organisations which create knowledge in multiple languages on a daily basis, or for individuals, such as patent attorneys, who access information from databases across the globe, saving them time and energy, eliminating the need to think of synonyms or translate documents to aid data discovery. 

How does your technology facilitate digital transformation?

One of the challenges that digital transformation aims to solve is the problem of accessing knowledge stored on legacy systems, where the information may be distributed across different archives, in multiple types and formats, and in many geographical locations. It does not matter how data is stored, our tools enable information to be extracted, indexed and made available to users quickly while they work. 

Harnessing the power of new technology to improve efficiency is at the heart of digital transformation. One way that iKVA solutions can be deployed is in assisting commercial managers to identify and prioritise opportunities for efficacious bids. Our Bid Builder technology can review incoming opportunities, analyse historic successful submissions combined with the organisation’s strategy to prioritise contracts and rank them by order of potential success, as well as proactively provide relevant information while the tender is being completed, based on the subject, without disrupting the user’s workflow. This improves organisational efficiency and optimises for success. 

How does your technology serve different industries?

Our technology is applicable to all industries, especially those in which people are creating large, complex documents such as the legal, engineering and construction, software engineering, pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors. It can even be used for library knowledge management in the academic industry - we are currently supporting Cambridge University Library in this way. 

What can we expect from iKVA and its use of AI-enabled technology in the future?

As well as expanding into new sectors and geographies, we are continually developing our core technology to improve the overall customer experience, and our close links with the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and the Alan Turing Institute are a great support in doing this. 

We are currently exploring several new ideas to expand our technology including looking beyond human languages to computer languages, such as C++, Python and Rust, to help software developers be more efficient and write better code. And, although we don’t want to compete with Google for consumer search, we are considering how we can support individuals, such as students, researchers, or sole legal practitioners, working with, or researching, complex information.

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