WIZ.AI Co-Founder Jianfeng Lu sat down with Bloomberg’s Saritha Rai to talk about WIZ.AI’s story on becoming a global company. Started in Singapore in early 2019, WIZ.AI was ideated out of strong market potential, mature voice AI, and rapid technological developments. Fast forward to today, the company’s offering expanded to a large language model (LLM) powered platform and a comprehensive suite of generative AI-powered applications servicing Southeast Asia, the United States, Latin America, and the Middle East.
A global AI company in the blueprint
There is a strategy behind why WIZ.AI was founded in Singapore, rather than in more mature markets like the USA or China. Apart from favorable geography and strong government support, choosing Singapore was driven by starting a global company from the get-go. “If you want to become a global startup, you must begin as a global startup”, Jianfeng quipped. He added that instead of allocating resources to beating competitors, WIZ.AI was laser-focused on serving global customers, and Singapore provided a conducive environment for the company’s aspirations.
Operationalization in Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia became the learning playground of WIZ.AI. In the earlier days, the company was eager to find a success story. It was important that the business could replicate its solutions outside Southeast Asia while addressing the gap in its customer environment. Technology-wise, WIZ.AI discovered that the available Voice AI technology had an error rate of almost 40% in their customers’ use cases. This realization led WIZ.AI to develop its own Voice AI technology with superior performance.
The journey, however, was not smooth sailing. One important hurdle was data collection to train its AI models. The turnaround time for data annotation took 4 months, which was considered lengthy. To make this more efficient, WIZ.AI developed its crowdsourcing platform and recruited people from different countries to handle data annotation. As a result, this practice reduced the turnaround time to less than 3 weeks, which made language and market expansion more realistic.
A fully-realized company with generative AI capabilities
In 5 years, WIZ.AI expanded its horizons into Southeast Asia, the United States, Latin America, and the Middle East, enabling solutions in Banking, Finance, E-Commerce, Telecommunications, and Healthcare, to name a few. WIZ.AI also expanded its technological competitiveness by leveraging generative AI in its applications and launching a domain-specific 13-billion parameter large language model, a first in Southeast Asia.
As WIZ.AI continues to grow and evolve, it remains committed to its core mission of leveraging AI to solve real-world problems and drive technological advancements across industries.
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