Infosys's NIA: An Enterprise-Grade AI Platform

Aeron Thomas

Editorial Intern (The Indian Learning) Indian Society of Artificial Intelligence & Law

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Infosys is a multinational IT company, it is the second-largest IT company in India after TATA consultancy services. It was founded in Pune and registered in the year 1981, headquartered in Bangalore. It mainly emphasis providing business consulting, information technology and outsourcing services. Its revenue reached well over 10 billion dollars in 2017. A company as big and successful as Infosys is considered to be at the top of their game in keeping themselves abreast in various technological advancements and inventions. In this era of Artificial Intelligence, Infosys managed to pioneer an AI platform, Infosys Nia. Infosys Nia is an enterprise-grade AI platform that quite simplifies the AI adoption journey designed for Business & IT. Infosys Nia supports end-to-end enterprise AI journey from the arenas of data management, digitization of documents and images, model development to operationalizing models. This initiative taken by the firm is to simply dismantle the problems faced by industries that are not able to move from AI experimentation to production, also the enterprises that are struggling to derive insights from their documents and also to boost enterprises that are finding it difficult to manage their siloed data assets.

The audiences targeted in the markets are those customers who are facing struggles in their firm, due to the continuous shift in advancing techs, and firms that are devoid of evolving the efficiency of their production due to lack of technology enforcements.

What is Nia?

Infosys’s Nia is a next-generation platform, which is very much inclined to tackle and help breakthrough business problems such as forecasting revenues, forecasting the kinds and types of products needed to be built, understanding customer behaviour, deeply understanding the content of contracts and legal documents, understanding compliance, and fraud. Such applications are much in demand due to various businesses booming and lots of them looking forward to enhancing the technological, efficient and productive aspects of the business. Infosys Nia is also furnished with tools that let it amass, ingest, and process as much information it can, empowering companies to constantly use past knowledge even as they grow and as their centre frameworks experience adjustments. Nia also aids in enabling them to spare assets particularly with regards to the workforce and the financial aspects.

Infosys Nia aid firms by making affordable offers to businesses which are struggling in Technological fronts as it gives away the chances to use AI by automating repetitive tasks and responsibilities, allowing them to become increasingly profitable. More than that, this empowers staff to be productive in their respective jobs.

One of the many fronts, in which Nia could be useful are:

Data management

Infosys Nia is controlled by different technologies that allow it to generate insights quickly from various sources. It also provides end-to-end support for complex data workflows including data extraction, transformation and loading and also complying with data from other sources to power further ML experimentation. Constraints to accommodate data with a variety of schema or storage types can be solved by implementing Lite versions enabling lite infra footprint.

Machine Learning

Machine learning workbench and further included toolkit aids experts and citizen data scientists in unravelling the creation of various AI Models. Nia Machine Learning workbench further increases data scientists’ productivity within the respects of magnitude by different sorts applying automation to the data science workflow. It offers a broad range of machine learning algorithms with industry-leading speed and scale. Moreover, data analysts, developers, and even business users with even their finite knowledge of data science can also build high-performing Machine Learning models as a result of its easy-to-use Machine Learning workbench.

Conversational AI

Infosys Nia Chatbot brings various conversational artificial intelligence features to already existing and further new enterprise applications. It leverages existing enterprise channels and newer channels such as social, mobile, devices to provide on-demand access to enterprise knowledge with ease.

The new Nia Chatbot is delivered as an end-to-end offering with rather quite flexible deployment options. Nia Chatbot expands the very scope of automation even beyond IT simplification and optimization by helping out interested clients to build smart and efficient conversational user interfaces on their various core business systems, this aspect is quite very helpful in time management and closing any communication gaps that might exist.

Deep learning

Nia Deep Learning capability is a very significant feature in the new AI which drastically reduces the amount of manual effort or lead time required to fine tune models for specific problems, thereby solving a prominent problem in the AI lifecycle. The key aspects of Nia Deep Learning are the newly implemented feature that’s “unsupervised feature learning” and “deep learning” algorithms that can automatically learn feature representations from unlabelled data. Nia Deep Learning is very much in possession of state-of-the-art Neural Architectures that can learn a good feature representation from large volumes of unlabelled data and can also be fine-tuned for supervised machine learning. It also tries to solve the inconsistency caused by the limitation of manual human skill resources involving various natural signals such as human speech, natural sound and language, natural image and visual scenes. Deep Learning also has enormous potential which can be quite useful in many domains such as that of healthcare, science, business and government.

NIA Vision

Nia Vision is a GUI based workflow that can be easily used to annotate data, train the machine for object localization, detection and recognition from static and animated images and varied documents. Especially when the status of different sectors of business in keeping structured information which can be easily accessed especially the Legal sectors which deal with very large volumes of information which is stored in documents and images. Businesses find it difficult to manually analyze such information when in need, here the NIA vision can be of use as the Nia AI platform leverages a deep learning framework that enables the visual identification of document imagery based on state-of-the-art object detectors. This is less costly, more accurate, and more reliable than traditional technical approaches such as OCR and template-based information extraction. This designed feature of the Nia keeps in check the errors and minimalizes any damages that have already been caused.

Cognitive Search

As firms and different sectors evolve throughout time, there is always a need to connect different information systems, (information itself are in the form of a plethora of data)into a central gateway that makes it easier to find precise answers to user queries. Nia Cognitive Search grants various firms and enterprises the capability to retrieve precise answers from various diverse enterprise data sources and formats through the effective use of Machine Learning and Neural Models. Nia Cognitive Search provides scalable data ingestion pipeline to handle volume, velocity and variety of data sources and a complete framework for search including user feedback, automatic tuning, and visualization. Nia Cognitive Search module is equipped with continuous learning and self-optimization features that are completely governed by search metrics. The results provided are of different granularity and clarity according to your use-case – from precise answers to paragraphs and documents.

Nia NLP

Nia Platform NLP enables and allows firms for extraction of useful insights and ideas from raw text and also lends itself to a given variety of applications to enable further processing in of business applications and business logic that needs text classification, named entity recognition and sentiment analysis. This Nia platform also provides the firms with comprehensive NLP capabilities for paragraph and entity tagging, Keyphrase extraction in order to classify the specific references in respect to the respective organizations, people and places and further even incorporates even advanced features like active learning and incorporating reviewer feedback. It has rich intuitive UI features that enable tagging and training custom models and transfer learning features for task-specific fine-tuning.

Nia Model Ops

Full-scale production of a newly made AI or ML model can be quite a difficult task for data scientists. Multiple challenges such as to get models into deployment like multiple infrastructure compatibility challenges and the inability of the model to meet the peak demand from a business perspective. Nia Model Ops will be an aid as it will be available as an integral component of the Nia platform to address these pain points for the data scientists. Nia Model Ops integrates seamlessly with key Nia components to deploy, orchestrate and monitor models in either in-house or cloud base deployments. It provides various useful tools to track various AI assets and resources used to build the models and for versioning them for audit and compliance purposes. It has a rich in-built dashboard to view end-to-end model workflow and monitor models in either training or production stages. The visual dashboard helps in monitoring model performance, degradation and data drift.

Nia Knowledge

As often said Knowledge is power, it’s often the case in the respect of the enterprises as well, as one of the common business challenges of enterprises today is related to retention and reuse of enterprise knowledge. There is a definitive need for processes, methodologies and tools specifically built for representing and building enterprise knowledge to enable re-use by often and various business applications. Nia knowledge provides capabilities to build, consume and reuse enterprise knowledge across various business domains and functions within an organization. The Nia Knowledge module of the Nia AI platform helps enterprises to organize information into an ontology-based knowledge base so that additional knowledge can be inferred and queried. The taxonomy is rather standardized, and also the content is often organized for re-usability across various and multiple business domains within the enterprise.

Fraud detection

Firms and enterprises being fallen prey to fraud is not a new concept, in order to detect this sort of misadventures, the AI gives valid insights into reasons for fraud and prescribes steps to avoid such revenue leakage in posterity. Such a feature is quite useful for any firm.

Conclusion

This rather bold and innovative initiative from Infosys opens up many opportunities for a plethora of firms that are rather looking forward to expanding their respective spectrum in the realm of technology and artificial intelligence. The very inception of Nia began when Infosys and Blue Prism had joined hands in 2017 to help enterprises drive intelligent automation capabilities across multiple industries. It does combine the intelligence of AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP), with Blue Prism's intelligent automation platform and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities. Such a partnership was rather a bold and lucrative move for both sectors in bringing out something as productive and efficient as the Nia. Various other tech giants across the globe, such as WIPRO, as well are competing in the race to provide the best AI-based technology to the customers. What Nia actually does is collect and aggregate multiple organizational data from people, processes and legacy systems into a self-learning knowledge base. As from this general base, every bit of information that is being processed into data, can be easily used to access and implement for varying purposes of the concerned firm and then automates repetitive business and IT processes, so that the concerned employees of the firm are free to solve higher-value customer problems that require creativity, passion, and imagination. . Nia also comprises a data platform, automation platform, and knowledge platform as its key components, along with AI capabilities, such as ML, data analytics, and robotic process automation. Moreover, Nia also offers organizations the basis to deploy AI technological capabilities for simplifying complex operations. Another platform that Infosys offers is the Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE) platform. KBE comprises AI to improve human decision-making capabilities. The KBE platform collects information about engineering products and processes them for developing new products. Infosys has also reported that they have created more than 50 clients and 150+ deployments across different sectors. After, all the very basic purpose of such an AI is to mainly palliate the pain processes or anomalies that exist using AI. Even though the status of Nia is slowly evolving, and it never ceases to stop until the expected perfection is totally achieved.