If your online business remains to be determining how finest to make use of AI — and aren’t all of ours? — one essential consideration to start out is knowledge.
What of your organization’s knowledge might be helpful for AI, the place is it saved, how safe is it, who has entry and the way can or not it’s correctly organized and formatted for safe use in AI functions? And in addition, importantly, how does it transfer round inside and outdoors of your group? What processes is your online business enterprise that may benefit from AI automation?
Answering these questions isn’t any simple feat, particularly when the common enterprise globally makes use of round 112 (!) totally different enterprise software program instruments and functions (in line with Statista analysis dated 2023).
Enter 8flow, a startup based in 2022 by former ServiceNow veterans. Immediately, it’s asserting $10 million in a strategic funding spherical to speed up its mission of serving to companies automate advanced workflows by way of AI.
“Every enterprise has its personal set of enterprise functions—a whole lot or 1000’s,” stated Boaz Hecht, co-founder and CEO of 8Flow, in a current video name interview with VentureBeat. “One thing must map all of it and provides the AI the context so it will probably run workflows throughout them.”
The spherical is led by Caffeinated Capital, with participation from ServiceNow Ventures, Okta, HNVR and strategic angel traders.
Evolving companies to get their datasets prepared to be used in AI apps
8Flow offers enterprise prospects with infrastructure for mapping and analyzing inside workflows.
The corporate’s know-how creates a structured basis that allows AI brokers to automate duties historically managed by human operators, emphasizing assist and back-office operations.
The funding alerts rising curiosity in agentic AI functions—clever programs able to performing duties autonomously—particularly in large-scale, fragmented enterprise environments.
Hecht stated that agentic AI is a pure evolution of right this moment’s automation instruments—however one that also wants an important lacking piece: enterprise context.
“The best way agentic AI goes to occur is the know-how will evolve and get higher. However as soon as it’s in a position to run workflows by itself—which means, reasoning because it runs—one thing might want to give it the context of a particular enterprise.”
Hecht additionally defined that 8Flow is targeted not on changing AI motion suppliers like OpenAI or AWS, however on powering their effectiveness inside enterprise programs.
“We’re not attempting to construct the AI actions themselves. The large gamers—OpenAI, AWS, and so on.—will do this. We’re constructing the intelligence behind it that tells the AI what to do and why.”
Bridging the hole between AI potential and enterprise readiness
8Flow’s platform captures and processes real-world knowledge to information AI brokers by way of present enterprise processes.
By observing, analyzing, and optimizing human behaviors, the corporate permits enterprises to coach and deploy AI brokers extra successfully and with minimal disruption. This strategy addresses a key problem in enterprise automation: making workflows intelligible and actionable for AI.
Raymond Tonsing, managing companion at lead investor Caffeinated Capital, famous in a press launch that whereas many enterprises are desirous to undertake AI, they face a elementary downside—making ready their operations for automation.
He emphasised that corporations want assist to revamp workflows in a method that units up AI brokers for fulfillment, and describes 8Flow as well-positioned to assist accomplish this.
A map of your workflows and knowledge
The corporate compares 8Flow to Waze, the GPS app that revolutionized driving by capturing driver habits and routing knowledge. Equally, 8Flow’s platform goals to audit, arrange and optimize enterprise workflow knowledge to assist clever automation.
Hecht reinforces the analogy by evaluating 8Flow’s position to the sort of contextual mapping required in autonomous driving.
“Consider it like Tesla constructing self-driving automobiles. If it didn’t have Waze, it wouldn’t know the place to drive. It wants context—the place to start out, the place to complete, find out how to deal with factors of curiosity. Enterprises want the identical.”
8Flow units itself aside by specializing in utilized AI tailor-made to particular enterprise capabilities reasonably than generic automation approaches. Up to now, the platform has tracked over 600 million workflow occasions and is nearing the one billion mark. By this huge dataset, the corporate can ship actionable insights for duties starting from password resets to managing end-to-end buyer assist operations.
In keeping with Hecht, the corporate’s product philosophy is to present AI instruments actionable insights with out aiming to reinvent what others are already constructing.
“The idea is that cloud suppliers will provide the motion capabilities. What we’re offering is the mapping—the reasoning behind actions at scale in an enterprise.”
Actual-world trade utilization
Prospects are already seeing worth. Sam Collier, CIO at OP360, highlights the advantage of gaining real-time visibility into agent workflows—an space that beforehand relied on time-consuming, handbook evaluation. Collier believes the partnership with 8Flow will unlock new methods to enhance effectivity and redefine clever automation.
With integrations into programs like ServiceNow and Salesforce, 8Flow’s platform permits corporations to take care of visibility into each human and AI exercise throughout their assist and operational environments. The backing from enterprise know-how leaders ServiceNow and Okta additional strengthens 8Flow’s place as a foundational participant within the shift towards AI-native enterprise infrastructure.
As enterprises more and more flip to autonomous brokers to handle inside workflows and buyer interactions, the strategic assist for 8Flow suggests rising demand for clever, data-driven automation instruments that match the real-world complexity of enterprise programs.
