AI-Powered Office Assistant Jane Launches, Raises $8.3 Million
Jane is an AI-powered office assistant which officially launched today following a $8.3 million funding round. The company was founded by David Karandish, former CEO of Answers.com and had previously raised $1.5 million in January 2017. Jane’s purpose is let organization’s easily retrieve company information, whether it be onboarding new employees for HR or helping customer service locate specific account information from CRM systems. Eight organizations have already hired Jane to work with their teams, including Washington University in St. Louis, recruiting firm Kelly Mitchel and Schaeffer Oil.
The Jane Difference
As Karandish pointed out in an interview today on Vator.tv, Jane is somewhere in the middle between Amazon’s Alexa for Business offering and Microsoft’s Watson solution for the enterprise. Jane is both an out of the box solution like Alexa and a customizable intelligent assistant like Watson. The intelligent assistant already integrates with dozens of office platforms like Microsoft Office, Gmail, Slack and Salesforce and uses that information to provide custom information for its human team members. Jane can also be configured to meet an organization’s specific needs. And like any artificial intelligence assistant, the company claims Jane will get smarter over time.
One key difference between Jane and other office chatbots however is the Copilot feature. If Jane doesn’t know the answer, for instance, “Where are the coffee filters?” it will send the question to an office “Copilot” who can type in the information. Jane will then remember the answer and never have to ask it again. “Our goal is to make it so that you never have to respond to the same inquiry twice. We want take the questions and the ideas and the inquiries you’re already getting and, rather than have to keep responding to them over and over again, we want to make it so that if you respond to those in Jane, Jane learns it and it now becomes part of the knowledge base for the whole organization,” said Karandish.
