Tradespeople spend an inordinate amount of time on tasks like sales and following up with customers—time taken away from their core business. BIRDIA interviewed more than 300 small independent contractors in fields like home repair, roofing, and more to better tailor the solution to their unique needs. The company used the information gathered to gain a deep understanding of the logic unique to each kind of business, and the complex set of rules used to make decisions.
CEA-List’s symbolic AI experts rapidly modeled the natural-language interviews, transformed them into rules, and integrated them into ExpressIF®. ExpressIF® simulates human reasoning, and can use heterogeneous data—especially spatio-temporal data—to arrive at explainable decisions. The partnership yielded an automated solution that replicates business-specific logic.
BIRDIA is now commercializing an end-to-end data-processing solution: information is gathered online or from databases, prospects are screened automatically using ExpressIF®, and the results are displayed via an intuitive, user-friendly graphical interface.
A knowledge-based approach was used to solve the problem of cold starting without any data. This advance will create a number of potential new avenues, whether it’s refining the business rules with new criteria, improving them with new data, or providing the reasons for the recommendations made.
Productivity increase reported by small businesses using the solution
This partnership marks the first practical use case for our screening technology for a start-up. It demonstrates our commitment to transferring technology to economic stakeholders of all types and sizes.
ExpressIF® has allowed us to encapsulate a small business owner’s reasoning in an AI. Traditional independent contractors can now delegate their customer analysis and focus on their core business.
