Content collaborator Egnyte has introduced specific AI/ML services to trigger workflows for images and documents in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) market.
Egnyte is a file-based collaboration services company founded in 2007 and funded to the tune of $137.5 million. It has a less prominent position in the cloud file services market than CTERA, Nasuni, and Panzura but has built up a solid roster of 17,000-plus enterprise customers such as Red Bull, Yamaha and Balfour Beatty, with more than 3,000 AEC customers. In July it added a generative AI chatbot to its content intelligence software engine to summarize documents and create audio/video transcripts.
Ronen Vengosh, SVP of Industry Solutions at Egnyte, stated: “Our AEC customers upload millions of photos to the Egnyte platform every week as a means to report on progress updates, create safety documents, support RFIs, and more. The new AI services will help our customers simplify and automate all manner of business processes that surround these images.”
In an August 2022 blog, Egnyte’s Joëlle Colosi, product marketing lead for AEC, said: “Egnyte’s AEC customers have, on average, nearly quadrupled their data storage in recent years – increasing from 0.9TB in 2017 to 3.5TB in 2021.” That’s a lot of paperwork and images to handle.
Customers will be able to use the AI models in the new services to label job site photos and documents based on their contents. They will be able to tag pictures with labels such as “roofing” or “HVAC” or documents with labels like “RFI” or “submittal” and so trigger workflows and policies based on those labels.
Amrit Jassal, Egnyte co-founder and CTO, said in a statement: “Out-of-the-box AI models can support an astounding array of applications, but are not well suited for the more specialized, and often regulated, business settings that many of our customers operate in. Just as they must be careful when selecting and training new hires for their organizations, today’s knowledge-based businesses need to select and tune their AI to ensure the highest degrees of accuracy and reliability. And now they can, without the typical complexity.”
Egnyte plans to introduce other specific vertical market AI models, for life services perhaps, and will roll out a next generation of its Trainable Classifier, enabling non-technical business users to train their own classification models, without exposing those models or the underlying data to any third parties.
The company will be showcasing its new capabilities at the the Vertical AI for AEC at the Procore Groundbreak event being held this week in Chicago, and at the Egnyte Virtual Summit in December.
You can read an Egnyte blog about its existing AI/ML work with documents to get more of a sense to the background to Egnyte’s AI/ML work.
