tl;dr

Spine creates reliable AI analysts that make it easy to get the right data to drive decisions. We capture and embed your business context, to enable real plain language data questions. Instead of spending time struggling with inflexible dashboards, or translating questions to queries, just ask questions and get answers. Empower internal decision makers, or your customers, with interface options that integrate with existing workflows.

The problem

From having built over 200 copilots for companies and having processed more than 100k user queries here are some of our key learnings:

• Analytics and business intelligence are critical to running any organization. They allow leaders to understand what’s working, what’s not, and where they can find new opportunities.
• Most existing BI tools are inflexible and technical. To find answers to novel questions requires knowledge of the data model, or a BI specific query language.
• In practice, it's not always obvious what you'll need to know to respond to an evolving situation, or what new questions your data will raise. Static reports and dashboards create dead ends. You can get stuck waiting for someone from the data team to be available, or having to act on best guesses.
• And it's not just internal decision makers who face these challenges. Your customers can only interact with their application data through:
  • static dashboards that require engineering teams to build,
  • custom reports your support teams and analysts put together, and/or
  • data exports that require expertise to dissect
• While the extraction of information from unstructured sources has evolved, handling structured data remains a challenge:
  • Beyond accurately deciphering user intent, structured data often comes with messy table schemas and unwritten business context, for which there are no established methods of embedding in the models.
  • Simply having models generate complex SQL and/or code to process the data makes the execution less transparent, flexible and reliable.
  • Isolating data across multiple tenants and user access controls remains a barrier in making this a customer facing feature.

The solution

We build custom AI analysts that allow any user to ask plain language questions about their data, and get reliable answers.

Plain language questions and natural exploration

With the chat interface, users can easily explore their data, asking questions in their own words, instead of "translating them" to a formal query. When the results raise new questions, just ask them. No searching for the right report, or getting stuck at a deadend in your dashboard.

Revisit crucial insights

Once you’ve found insights in your data, it’s easy to come back to. Get regular notifications for key questions, collect insights into shareable reports, or add them to flexible dashboards.

Transparent and reliable answers

Even on a single table dataset Spine’s AI analyst performs 15x better than GPT-4o out of the box.

Rather than leveraging models to generate complex SQL or code (or find answers from the data directly), our solution leverages a proprietary Data Processing Unit (DPU) that comprises a collection of refined modules.

The DPU enables us to:

• have individually tested and schema/domain fine-tuned modules that work at scale
• react to the data and modify the operations we take to get the answer
• explain the steps taken by the AI in a simple human readable manner

During the customer onboarding process, we capture and embed the business context and the schema understanding into the DPU modules. Additionally we build and maintain data and schema-specific semantic layers, across tables, which makes it possible for us to accurately interpret and handle natural language questions across multiple tables with over millions of rows each.

Finally, a combination of automated and human evaluations give us an objective way of measuring performance — both before and after we deploy the analyst.

Diverse use cases

We are able to support use cases across diverse industries and user bases by systematically gathering domain specific knowledge from our customers, and automatically inferring relevant data characteristics. Whether you’re in finance, retail, healthcare, telecoms, manufacturing, or any other industry, we can create an AI analyst for your business.

Sales analyst

Understand what outreach activities are getting attention, with who. Dig into team member performance, email deliverability and more, to better understand what’s effective and what’s not performing.

eCommerce platform analyst

Gain insights into which products are selling the most and why. Analyze customer behavior, optimize inventory management, and uncover trends in purchase patterns to maximize your sales potential.

ERP system analyst

Keep projects on track by monitoring task progress, timelines, and budget adherence. Evaluate project performance, identify risks, and ensure timely delivery of project milestones.

The power and flexibility of AI without needing a technical team

You don’t need your own AI team. Have your custom analyst up and running in the next 30 days, and leave the upkeep to us. Monitor and tune the analyst’s behavior over time with our admin panel.

About us

We are Akshay and Ashwin – the co-founders of Spine AI 👋. We've been friends for over a decade, with our shared journey beginning at the University of Waterloo. Our interest in machine learning took root in an unlikely place – a building called Spine at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore during an exchange term.

And in our first year we’ve grown! Across our team, we collectively collaborated with more than 45 enterprises, guiding them toward the next levels of AI maturity. We have more than 100+ citations in GenAI and patents in AI and data processing. Our team also has experience working at companies like Nvidia, Shopify, Instacart, Amazon, Epic Games as well as founding multiple YC companies.

The ask

• If you need better access to insights within your organization, or want to empower your customers with their data, we'd love to hear from you!
• First 10 companies that contact us after launch get to trial a free, fully functioning AI analyst for your data! (Just let us know you heard about us from YC)
• Help us spread the word! Please share this post and join our journey by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter.