Meet Amelia, the AI Platform That Could Change the Future of IT
Her name is Amelia, and she is the complete package: smart, sophisticated, industrious and loyal. No wonder her boss, Chetan Dube, can’t get her out of his head.
“My wife is convinced I’m having an affair with Amelia,” Dube says, leaning forward conspiratorially. “I have a great deal of passion and infatuation with her.”
He’s not alone. Amelia beguiles everyone she meets, and those in the know can’t stop buzzing about her. The blue-eyed blonde’s star is rising so fast that if she were a Hollywood ingénue or fashion model, the tabloids would proclaim her an “It” girl, but the tag doesn’t really apply. Amelia is more of an IT girl, you see. In fact, she’s all IT.
Amelia is an artificial intelligence platform created by Dube’s managed IT services firm IPsoft, a virtual agent avatar poised to redefine how enterprises operate by automating and enhancing a wide range of business processes. The product of an obsessive and still-ongoing 16-year developmental cycle, she—yes, everyone at IPsoft speaks about Amelia using feminine pronouns—leverages cognitive technologies to interface with consumers and colleagues in astoundingly human terms, parsing questions, analyzing intent and even sensing emotions to resolve issues more efficiently and effectively than flesh-and-blood customer service representatives.
Install Amelia in a call center, for example, and her patent-pending intelligence algorithms absorb in a matter of seconds the same instruction manuals and guidelines that human staffers spend weeks or even months memorizing. Instead of simply recognizing individual words, Amelia grasps the deeper implications of what she reads, applying logic and making connections between concepts. She relies on that baseline information to reply to customer email and answer phone calls; if she understands the query, she executes the steps necessary to resolve the issue, and if she doesn’t know the answer, she scans the web or the corporate intranet for clues. Only when Amelia cannot locate the relevant information does she escalate the case to a human expert, observing the response and filing it away for the next time the same scenario unfolds.
Amelia’s unprecedented ability to process natural language and comprehend complex problems is what sets her apart from rival AI breakthroughs like IBM’s Jeopardy!-winning Watson, which specializes in data analytics. It’s also what brings her closer to humanness than any technology before her. Amelia doesn’t simply mimic human thought patterns—she mirrors them.
“A large part of Amelia’s research over the years evolved into whether we can simulate and emulate the outcomes of neural activity—how thought is formed—as opposed to reverse-engineering the human brain itself,” explains Dube, founder and CEO of New York City-based IPsoft. “Amelia learns with every transaction and builds a mind map on the fly. As more incidents come in, this mind map is rapidly building, just the way humans build their mind maps. Soon it represents the cumulative intellect of all the different [employees] who have been fielding these different calls.”
IPsoft unveiled Amelia in late 2014, and she is currently in trials across a handful of enterprises, including Shell Oil, Accenture, NTT Group and Baker Hughes, tackling everything from overseeing technology help desks to supporting financial operations to advising remote workers in the field. IPsoft contends that because Amelia learns the same way a conventional employee does, she fits comfortably into virtually any business environment, and since she’s cloud-based, she can be deployed any time and anywhere, exploiting her fluency in more than 20 languages to communicate with customers and staffers across the globe.
Technology research firm Gartner forecasts that by 2017, autonomics-based managed services and cognitive platforms like Amelia will fuel a 60 percent reduction in the cost of IT solutions by automating repetitive tasks currently tackled by humans. Experts say Amelia’s arrival could even herald the end of outsourcing as we know it. Dube’s vision is much more grand.
“A large part of your brain is shackled by the boredom and drudgery of everyday existence,” he says. “You have to drive a car, vacuum the floor or take the garbage out. But imagine if technology could come along and take care of all these mundane chores for you, and allow you to indulge in the forms of creative expression that only the human brain can indulge in. What a beautiful world we would be able to create around us.”
Adaptive learning
In addition to Amelia, there are some 700 carbon-based life-forms toiling away at IPsoft headquarters in lower Manhattan. The company occupies four floors in 17 State Street, a 42-story commercial building overlooking the Statue of Liberty and New York Harbor; by year’s end, IPsoft will take over three more floors to accommodate its growing staff.
“People argued with me, because this is almost double the price of per-square-foot real estate compared to Midtown. They said this is the stupidest move to get seven floors in this building,” says the 46-year-old Dube, clad in a designer blazer and bow tie, his sartorial signature. “I said to our board, ‘The quality of life of our staff is very important to us. These people are our brainpower. They’re our engine. We need to provide them an environment for creative thinking.’”
Born in New Delhi and raised in Paris and London, Dube came to the U.S. to pursue a doctorate in theoretical computer science at New York University. While at NYU he began exploring the artificial intelligence principles and philosophies that form the basis of the Amelia platform, convinced that his research into cloning human thought processes would stretch no longer than a couple of years. That was close to 20 years ago.
“My advisor, professor Dennis Shasha, who knew a lot more about this than I did, just looked at me and shook his head like, ‘Oh, fool, don’t you know?’ The person who invented the term ‘artificial intelligence,’ [computer scientist] John McCarthy, himself said that the problem turned out to be a lot harder than anticipated,” Dube chuckles. “But you have certain advantages if you are coming in with profound ignorance of the challenges that lie ahead.”
Dube launched IPsoft in 1998. With Amelia still little more than a gleam in its founder’s eye, the fledgling company built remote infrastructure management solutions designed to automate a range of IT environments and business processes. Years of R&D culminated in IPsoft’s flagship product, IPcenter, an autonomic IT operations management platform that integrates into an organization’s existing architecture, consolidating systemwide information into a single view. IPcenter set the stage for Amelia by incorporating “virtual engineers” that communicate with each other to brainstorm solutions to dynamic problems.
Today IPcenter processes 56 percent of all events across millions of infrastructure devices and services, sans human input or intervention.
According to IPsoft, one client, a large financial services firm, adopted IPcenter and cut the mean time to resolution of failed trades from 47 minutes to less than four minutes.
“The question we would ask is, ‘Does all infrastructure need to be managed by people? Or is the infrastructure capable of self-managing, self-governing and self-healing?’” Dube says. “My father used to have some power plants, and I would go there, and they would have almost nobody managing them, because almost all the processes of remediation were built in. The technological maturity curve that almost any industry goes through has a level of evolution. At some point, can the systems, the network and the servers become self-aware and self-governing? IPcenter was the product realization of adaptive learning systems that would be able to self-govern. That was our first big steppingstone toward cognitive technologies.”
IPcenter vaulted IPsoft to the forefront of the IT infrastructure services segment. The company now boasts offices in about a dozen countries, with a worldwide head count pushing 2,000, and serves hundreds of leading brands as well as more than half of the largest IT outsourcing service providers. This April, IPsoft acquired Swedish IT professional services firm ab1 Group to help keep up with demand for IPcenter implementation.