Artificial intelligence (AI) is a trending topic not just regionally but globally. The hype around AI, however, is not just because it’s the latest and greatest technology out there, but also because there is something immensely significant about what it can offer.
“AI allows computers to do many of the repetitive human tasks more efficiently, and come up with insights that are very difficult for humans to achieve,” explains Tarek Kabrit, the co-founder of Seez, a mobile app that employs AI in the automotive space.
While many people tend to think that AI may eventually replace people, resulting in an increased unemployment gap, industry specialists beg to disagree.
“AI can enhance the quality of life, and I am personally very convinced that AI can lead to the goal of having basic income to every citizen in the world,” says Mohamed ElGamal, the co-founder and CEO of Adam.ai, an AI-powered virtual meeting assistant service. He further explains: “AI will utilize machines to do a lot of work instead of people, hence people can have more time to spend with their families and with learning new things.”
Here are four AI-driven startups from the region you should know about.
SEEZ
Founded in 2015 by Lebanese brothers, Tarek and Andrew Kabrit, Seez currently operates in the UAE and Kuwait.
While a search engine for new and used cars might not seem like the most likely candidate for an AI-driven startup, Seez is trying to differentiate itself from the competition through unique features that use advanced AI algorithms. The “Car Valuator” feature, part of their mobile application, uses image recognition to identify a car’s make, model, and overall cosmetic condition. The processed information is then used to estimate a fair market value for the car.
Cesar (Seez R) is an AI-driven chatbot that handles negotiations between buyers and sellers. The bot scans a wide range of online car marketplaces for featured new and used cars for a certain criteria set by the buyer, and communicates with sellers to negotiate a deal on his behalf for the cars of his choice.
“We use AI in almost all features in our app. We use it for our image recognition, for our car price prediction algorithms, and obviously for our AI chatbot Cesar that negotiates with sellers on behalf of interested buyers,” says Kabrit.
ELVES
Founded in December 2016, by an Egyptian couple, Karim Elsahy and his wife, Abeer Elsisi, Elves is an AI-powered personal concierge service that works out of a Facebook messenger window. The service allows users to ask real human agents for help on anything including travel, hotel bookings, scheduling meetings, etc. The human agents, however, count on AI bots to help them perform these tasks on behalf of users.
ADAM.AI
This virtual meeting assistant service enables businesses to transform all random data generated from and around daily meetings, to organised knowledge assets where AI can add a value in the easy retrieval of these data when needed.
For example, during a meeting when the manager wants to know if there are any pending actions from previous meetings or wants to have the presentation or excel sheet that will be used in this meeting, all he or she needs to do is simply text “Adam” with their own natural language and the AI-powered assistant will respond immediately.
Adam can also utilise all past meetings’ content to prepare handover sessions to newly hired project managers and bring them up to speed with where a project is going.
The company was founded in November 2017 by two Egyptian computer engineers, Mohamed ElGamal and Ahmed Kamel.
“I believe that AI will have a great impact in the near future in two main areas; customer service, where intelligent chatbots may replace most human customer service channels, and the second area is the future of work environment where assistants like adam.ai will support people in most of their daily work routine,” says ElGamal.
NEOTIC
Based out of Tripoli, Lebanon, Neotic was launched in 2015 by Samir El Zein, an entrepreneur with a PhD in numerical analysis from the University of Lyon. The company develops smart machine learning tools that aim to replace humans in assisting stock traders in making educated market decisions.
Neotic is an online platform that offers traders a customizable AI-driven engine for backtesting, daily forecasting, and automated trading. Traders can use the platform to develop their own trading strategies, without the need for any coding background, and then test their strategies in a simulator with virtual money before proceeding to actual live trading.
The machine learning platform can learn winning trading practices, traders can set their customizable trading strategies, and then - through a number of partner stock exchange brokers - choose to let the AI platform do actual real money trading on their behalf if they wish to.