New Delhi: India’s artificial intelligence (AI) bot platform, E42, which specializes in generating code -free, automated AI bots for various services, has launched a marketplace to help businesses hire such bots. The marketplace will be a store for E42’s own clients to put up their own AI bots, which can be licensed or hired by other businesses to deploy on their own services.
Animesh Samuel, co-founder and chief executive of E42, told Mint that the platform’s bots, which he refers to as “AI workers”, are more developed and complex than just chatbots. The latter are services deployed on various websites to automate customer queries, in a bid to increase human-driven customer services.
Samuel said that while E42’s AI workers include chatbots, they are more advanced in terms of the tasks they can perform. These “complex” tasks include AI bots that can automate the workflow of a company’s human resources and account departments-and also work as an analyst by processing data.
E42 currently has approximately 20 clients, which include the likes of Tata Consultancy Services, Hindalco and Mahindra & Mahindra. Samuel said these clients, who used E42’s AI platform to build their bots, can now offer application programming interfaces (APIs) of developed bots through the newly launched marketplace -from which third party companies can “hire” them for a fee.
The process, according to Samuel, eliminates the need for smaller companies with limited resources to go through the process of building and deploying their own automated bots-which can be complicated for those without access to sufficient data to train these services.
To be sure, the E42 marketplace is not the only click-to-deploy AI bot marketplace in India. American software firm Automation Anywhere already has a similar AI bot store, offering automation packages developed by the likes of Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft, Google and others.
Large tech companies also have their own AI automation marketplaces. For example, Amazon has the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace, which offers services like Accenture’s Conversational AI Platform as click-to-deploy tools for business. Microsoft, similarly, also has the Azure Marketplace that offers similar services.
Samuel of E42 added that the question about replacing AI “workers” with people in current jobs is not out of the question. “This moment will be similar to the advent of the personal computer, which has replaced many human tasks such as physical book-keeping accounts. While some jobs will become obsolete, it will make way for people to take on more advanced roles, and raise their profiles, ”he added.
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