Prasad Kawthekar is the Co-Founder & CEO of Dashworks, an all-in-one AI search assistant. It enables users to search out any document, message, or email and to speed up a team’s productivity. With over 40+ integrations, Dashworks enables teams to search out and organize their internal knowledge across apps from one place and leverage their collective expertise.

What initially attracted you to computer science and machine learning?

After I began college, I expected to major in Math and Physics and enter academia. I took an intro Java programming course in my second semester and hung out constructing just a few games. I used to be addicted. I loved getting real-time feedback on what I used to be constructing. In my second 12 months, I took a Machine Learning course and have become hooked on the query of how machines think. I then did a few research projects on lively learning, which is the concept of machines asking questions in order that they will learn faster.  I also experimented with just a few different areas of machine learning akin to robotics, computer vision, and drug discovery before finally selecting Natural Language Processing for my graduate degree at Stanford. I like NLP because language is the basis of intelligence and it’s been the toughest to crack.

You were one in all the Founding Engineers at Cresta, what were a few of your key takeaways from this experience?

I joined Cresta when there have been only two people on the team. Now, in fact, it’s a Series C company with a $1.7B valuation. Perhaps an important thing I learned from my time there was the importance of customer obsession. They once flew out the whole team to a customer’s call center and made us work from there for per week. That have shaped how we thought in regards to the solutions we were designing. Customer centricity is now one in all our guiding principles at Dashworks.

Could you share the genesis story behind Dashworks?

After Cresta, I started working at an organization called Blue River. They’d been recently acquired by a Fortune 500 company, and I used to be asked to start out working on a brand new project related to credit scores for lending. It took me seven email threads and eight weeks to search out the appropriate documents!

That’s when I spotted the true cost of scattered information at an organization. Soon after, I convinced my co-founder, Praty Sharma, to leap on board. We met at Stanford during grad school. On the time, he was working at Facebook on their Marketplace search engine.

The pain of trying to search out information at work just seemed in stark contrast to how easy it’s to search out information on the net, where you’ll be able to practically find answers to anything in the general public domain in lower than a second.

Dashworks enables teams to search out and organize their internal knowledge across apps from one place and leverage their collective expertise. What are a number of the technical challenges behind this?

Enterprise search has all the time been a tough problem to unravel at scale. In comparison with web search, you don’t have as much training data. This creates a little bit of a chilly start problem. You wish data points to refine the model but corporations don’t need to use you unless you’re guaranteeing accuracy. You’re also integrating lots of different apps, each of which store their data in several formats. This makes indexing much harder and more time consuming. Finally, there’s lots of sensitivity around data security and permissions.

Traditional approaches to solving this problem have relied on indexing all of an organization’s data, but we’ve been experimenting with different approaches which have only turn into recently possible due to the provision of fast and huge context AI models that allow us to completely bypass indexing.

The Dashwork vision is making humanity omniscient, could you describe what this implies for you?

We envision a world through which a human being is in a position to find any piece of data they need, regardless of how specific or obscure. At the tip of the day, information is power and we’re hoping to make humanity more powerful.

Web serps are focused on democratizing publicly available information. But 96% of the world’s information is definitely on intranets. And a few unknown percentage of that information is behind the intranets of smaller corporations. Until now, entrepreneurs have been specializing in solving the enterprise search problem for giant corporations with big budgets. But we’re focused on starting with smaller corporations and dealing upwards.

On Twitter, you latterly stated, “The easy text box is the interface of the longer term. Dashworks is designed entirely around it.” Could you elaborate on this statement on the way you view this future, and the way Dashworks is designing around it?

Graphical User Interfaces or GUIs got here into existence because non-developers needed a solution to interact with computers. So that you saw the rise of massive buttons, toggles, checkboxes, icons etc. The important thing constraint was needing to know a programming language to interact directly with a machine. But with the rise of AI, machines can understand natural language. And natural language continues to be probably the most intuitive way for humans to speak. Which implies that we envision a future through which you’ll be able to execute just about any motion – regardless of how complex – with a straightforward natural language prompt.

That’s what we’re constructing toward at Dashworks. Within the immediate future, it means reimagining things like user onboarding. What would it not appear to be if onboarding happened entirely via a conversation with a machine as an alternative of buttons and checklists?

What are the different sorts of integrations that Dashworks offers?

We support over 50 integrations across categories like Wikis, CRM, customer support, calendars, HRIS, developer tools, and project management. We integrate with applications including Notion, Google Suite, Confluence, Airtable, Asana, Intercom, Github, Microsoft Teams and more.

What are the varieties of productivity gains are seen from enterprises that integrate the Dashworks platform?

Our customers are likely to see big gains in productivity and efficiency in just a few ways:

• Recent hires get up to the mark faster because they’ve all the data they need in a single place
• Employees spend less time answering repetitive questions, especially on Slack
• Projects move faster and collaboration is simpler because all employees have access to the data they need and there are fewer silos
• Employees get more done because they don’t should context switch as much they usually spend less time trying to find information
• The standard of decision-making improves because employees are in a position to gain context and a full picture on matters