Putting AI to Work
Today’s featured startup is rethinking how teams interact with AI — not through chat, but through structure.
Project Overview
Inner AI is a workspace designed for company employees, allowing them to quickly and easily create content for their work using AI.
Upon entering the platform, users immediately see the available options for content creation. This is made possible by the set of pre-built templates that come with the platform, which simplify completing common tasks. If a company requires employees to create something more specific, administrators can add new templates to the catalog.
Using these existing templates, employees can generate reports, proposals, employee training programs, business process guides, articles for the company's website or blog, job descriptions, launch ad campaigns, respond to user inquiries from chats or emails, and much more.
When creating any content, users can request the AI assistant to pull data from internal company sources integrated with Inner AI. For instance, when creating a guide for employees, the AI can pull frequently asked questions from the corporate chat and insert them into the guide, along with AI-generated responses.
Generated or manually created text can be edited by asking the AI to shorten or lengthen a paragraph, make it simpler or more persuasive, simply by selecting the desired action from the menu.
Similarly, images generated by the platform or manually inserted into documents can be edited—backgrounds can be changed, a T-shirt color altered, facial expressions modified, or any other adjustments made.
The platform can generate not only text and images but also videos, which can be easily edited, such as modifying the text a character speaks.
Documents can be worked on in team mode, inviting others to edit or comment on the content.
At the core of the platform, third-party AI models from OpenAI, Mistral, Stable Diffusion, and other developers are integrated. Platform administrators can select which models to use for specific tasks.
The individual version of the platform costs $8 per month. Pricing for the corporate version is available upon request.
Inner AI was founded in Brazil last year, securing $2.4 million in initial investments. Since then, it has launched the platform, gained early clients—including major Latin American companies—and has now raised an additional $2.4 million in funding.
What’s the Gist?
More and more people are using AI in their work. The typical AI use case—open ChatGPT, ask a question, or request an action—works well for occasional tasks or new challenges. However, when AI is to be used in business, it must be integrated into routine processes rather than requiring employees to learn how to work with various chat platforms, create prompts, and master other nuances.
This is where Inner AI comes in, completely rethinking and redesigning the process of creating content with AI—resulting in their platform. The startup hopes that once users try their platform, they’ll be surprised at how they ever managed without it.
A similar direction is being followed by Zylon, a startup I wrote about in February. They raised $3.2 million for the beta version of their platform, which uses AI to automate routine tasks for employees. Their platform also serves as a single entry point for various tasks, requiring no interaction with chatbots or mastery of prompt creation. Employees simply select the task they need and follow the platform’s guidance.
These prompts are a key component of Zylon's concept. The founders believe that using AI shouldn’t be “magic”—where users expect perfect results with a single click. It’s much simpler, faster, and more reliable to proceed step by step, providing the platform with the information that ultimately leads to the desired result.
A similar role in Inner AI is played by templates—users fill them out, either sequentially or all at once, to predictably achieve the desired outcome.
Another startup in a similar field is Twin, also from February. They’re creating a platform to automate routine tasks for small and medium-sized businesses using AI. Though their basic interface is still a chat, they’re training the AI assistant to perform typical business tasks and are currently gathering business partners. Their platform has yet to be released, but they’ve already raised $3 million.
Key Takeaways
There’s a saying: “Revolutions are conceived by dreamers, carried out by fanatics, and enjoyed by the villains.” In technological revolutions, it’s not as harsh. You could say that the inventors design the revolution, the technologists make it happen, and skilled marketers sell it.
Most startup founders want to be inventors or technologists, which leads them to dismiss creators of “wrappers” around AI models, assuming that they must build the AI models themselves.
Today’s Inner AI and other startups mentioned here are essentially creating “wrappers” around existing AI models. But this doesn’t make their products less valuable—quite the opposite. Because 99% of users don’t need the technology, they need simple and effective tools to solve their everyday tasks.
The general direction is clear: creating tools that take existing AI technologies and adapt them for specific, common tasks in certain fields.
Inner AI, Zylon, and Twin are targeting business process automation for small and medium businesses. But similar approaches could apply to more niche and unexpected areas. Take Fora, for example, another startup from February. They’ve built an AI platform to simplify the work of managers and executives and raised $3.8 million in early-stage funding for it.
What business processes can you simplify and make more efficient using existing AI technologies? How can you formalize and break down the process of using AI into manageable steps? How should it integrate with other business processes and corporate platforms? What might the interface for such a platform look like?
Don’t reinvent the wheel. Instead, make use of the innovations already created by others. This is often a far more profitable approach.
Company info:
Inner AI
Website: innerai.com
Last Round: $2.4M, April 2, 2024
Total Investment: $4.8M, Rounds: 2