Ushur Forms AI Research Group to Power the Future of Customer Experience Automation

Ushur, the leader in AI-powered Customer Experience Automation™ (CXA), today announced the launch of Ushur AI Lab, a research group dedicated to tackling some of the most pressing issues in natural language processing (NLP), document processing and no-code conversational intelligence. The AI Lab aims to develop innovations that will make it even easier for enterprises to deliver automated, omni-channel, hyper-personalized customer experiences.

Over the last few years, Ushur’s AI and machine learning (ML) team has developed key breakthroughs already integrated into Ushur’s Customer Experience Automation platform. These include NLP and ML components for conversational tasks, document processing engines and a feature-rich, no-code MLOperations platform. Ushur has filed multiple patents in representation learning for documents, information retrieval from unstructured data, forms processing and tabular information extraction areas.

Customers benefit from these innovations every day when they use Ushur to train and deploy state-of-the-art NLP models. Ushur’s no-code AI technology gives business users everything they need to build customer experience automation workflows: data anonymization and privacy protection tools, pre-trained language models, domain-specific datasets and more.

Mike Simmonds, COO at Unum, has said: “The ability to rapidly prototype and automate customer journeys has provided Unum with a competitive edge, delighting our customers while allowing our employees to focus on higher-value work.”

Now, with the launch of Ushur AI Lab, the company is formalizing its effort to pursue more challenging frontiers in knowledge processing. Positioned with real-world insights from its years of building accessible AI products for the customer experience, the group will aspire to solve industry problems that can only be approached with expert application of artificial intelligence. The AI Lab’s charter will include collaborative efforts with the research and academic community, including participation in top AI/ML conferences and tech talks and a dedicated blog for sharing insights. The research group will also incorporate an open-source program to share relevant models, tools and datasets with the larger ML ecosystem.

Ushur has appointed Vijayendra (“Viju”) Shamanna to lead the initiative. Previously Ushur’s Senior Director of Engineering and Data Science, Shamanna has led all of the company’s key ML innovations over the past three years.

Shamanna brings almost twenty-five years of experience in software and systems engineering, much of it spent in leadership positions spanning domains such as data center infrastructure, cloud-native applications and applied machine learning. Prior to Ushur, Shamanna bootstrapped the India engineering team for Vexata, a disruptive enterprise storage startup acquired by StorCentric. At Sandisk India, he led the emerging systems group that developed hyper-scale, disaggregated flash storage systems optimized for big data.

“I believe that larger trends in ML research, such as self-supervised learning (SSL), multi-modal and representational learning, have the potential to deliver on the cornerstones of intelligent automation: Straight-through processing (STP) and hyper-personalization. That’s just the beginning of what Ushur AI Lab will explore,” said Shamanna.

“The AI Lab will serve as the connective tissue between fundamental and applied research to ‘usher in’ the transformative power of AI for knowledge automation. AI-powered experiences are the way of the future, and I encourage ML scientists and data engineers who want to mobilize a category-defining company to join our efforts.”

“Ushur AI Lab represents our promise to continue creating scalable and accessible AI products as we grow from being a small startup to a customer experience solution provider with a global presence,” said Simha Sadasiva, Ushur CEO and Co-founder. “We’ve seen real traction around innovations that have come out of Ushur AI Lab, such as our data intake and data linking technology. Our customers have learned that they can depend on us for solutions guided by the latest academic insights, but designed for the enterprise.”

About Ushur
Ushur delivers the world’s first AI-powered Customer Experience Automation™ platform that has been purpose-built, from the ground up, to intelligently automate entire customer journeys, end to end. Designed to deliver delightful, hyper-personalized customer experiences through rapid issue resolution and unified, omnichannel engagement, Ushur is the first-of-its-kind system of intelligence. It combines Conversational Automation and Knowledge Work Automation in a No-Code, Cloud-native, SaaS platform to digitally transform every step of the complete enterprise customer experience – from Micro-engagements™ to entire customer journeys. Backed by leading investors including Third Point Ventures, 8VC, Pentland Ventures, Aflac Ventures, and Iron Pillar, Ushur’s Customer Experience Automation(™) solutions are currently in production at some of the leading insurance providers across the globe including Irish Life, Unum, Aetna, Cigna, and Tower Insurance.