Moveworks uses AI to grow its employee automation platform

The AI application startup, which was founded in 2016 and was valued at more than $2.1 billion in 2021, uses a reasoning engine to help employees search for information across the enterprise.

Since its inception, a key ingredient in the company's success has been AI and generative AI technology.

"We were the first company after Google to deploy BERT in production," said co-founder and president Varun Singh on the latest episode of Informa TechTarget's Targeting AI podcast.

BERT was Google's first model with bidirectional encoding that enabled computers to understand large text spans. It was pretrained, so Moveworks did not have to train it from the ground up. It also did not require a lot of data.

After using BERT to train its automation platform, Moveworks started using GPT-2  from OpenAI in 2020. This is two years before the mass popularization of the generative AI vendor's ChatGPT chatbot, mostly to generate synthetic data.

Singh added that he and his team had failed to realize right away that the model could also be used for reasoning tasks.

"It's not so much a mistake that was made or not, but it was just sort of as technology evolved, the moment a paradigm shift actually comes into full focus, you look back and you're like, 'We could have done that sooner because we had access to the models, but we didn't see how powerful they could be,'" he said.

Since the shift, Moveworks has evolved from a platform with a reasoning engine to a platform for building AI agents.

On Oct. 1, Moveworks launched Agentic Automation as part of its Creator Studio offering. The system enables developers to build AI agents.

Throughout the evolution of its business, Moveworks has differentiated itself with its use of AI technology, Singh said.

"Without AI, there's nothing Moveworks has to offer to the world," he said. "There's only value from Moveworks because of AI."

Esther Ajao is a TechTarget Editorial news writer and podcast host covering artificial intelligence software and systems. Shaun Sutner is senior news director for TechTarget Editorial's information management team, driving coverage of artificial intelligence, unified communications, analytics and data management technologies. Together, they host the Targeting AI podcast series.