One of Guyana’s prominent technology firms which specializes in conversational AI and enterprise systems development, V75 Inc organized a two-day boot camp to get their technical team ramped up on a relatively new but powerful technology stack called Jaseci (find out more at https://jaseci.org ). Jaseci is an open source AI ecosystem bringing with it an open computational model, technology stack and methodology designed to enable developers to rapidly build robust products with sophisticated AI capabilities, at scale. V75 Inc has been in the pro-serve technology business since 2014 through its predecessor-in-interest Version75 Solutions which was later incorporated as V75 Inc in 2019. In 2018 the company partnered with conversational AI firm, Clinc Inc based in Ann Arbor, MI and entered the conversational AI engineering space, which at its peak, saw twenty-five certified conversational AI engineers from V75 that helped build over 90% of Clinc’s deliveries to clients such as OCBC, US Bank, Barclays and others.
As a progressive technology start-up in a developing country, V75 Inc particularly appreciates the importance of wisely investing the relatively limited human and financial resources available, especially operating in a environment following the pandemic. V75’s leadership immediately recognized the immense value that the Jaseci open source ecosystem could bring, not just for their planned pro-serve deliveries but for their aspirations to enter the product space. The design of Jaseci’s technology stack would provide enough abstraction and developer ease-of-use to wield AI engines and handle complex infrastructure challenges with deployment without the requirement of deep domain knowledge.
From April 26-27, V75’s leadership organized a two-day Jaseci Hackathon to serve as a bootcamp to ramp up select members of V75’s technical staff on the new technology. A total of eighteen members joined remotely and in-person for this event. The event was led by V75’s founder, Eldon Marks, who underwent a personal ramp-up journey on the technology stack before organizing the knowledge-sharing exercise in the form of the hackathon. During the hackathon proceedings, Jaseci Labs cofounder and the creator of Jaseci, Prof. Jason Mars joined in to introduce Jaseci to the team and answer questions about the stack and its capabilities. The two-day hackathon took the team through the set-up of Jaseci, the basics of its glue language called JAC as well as the development paradigm of the stack. By the second day, the team was building out their planned conversational flows and leveraging the Universal Sentence Encoder in the creation of a pre-trained, chatbot that was surprisingly capable at handling question-answer type exchanges. The team also observed that Jaseci provided a very robust micro-services based infrastructure upon which APIs could be built, with or without AI capabilities.
