Instabase (Product Review)

My summary of Instabase before using it — Using AI to automate business processes.

How does Instabase explain itself in the first minute? The strap line of Instabase reads “The Power of AI, Applied to Your Business. Instabase combines the latest AI breakthroughs with industry expertise to create real value for your business.” This strap line is followed by a “Try AI Hub” call to action.

How does Instabase work? The premise of Instabase’s AI Hub is that customers can converse with any document, automate their workflows and use pre-built apps for specific use cases. Through Instabase, users can ask questions of their documents, spreadsheets, images, files, etc. AI Hub uses Open AI’s ChatGPT4 to help business users understand content, analyse files and generate insights. This is the “converse” part of Instabase’s offering.

Image Credit: Deep Analysis

One of the concrete applications of AI Hub Converse is invoice processing which enables customers to convert documents and images into a machine readable format. The intelligence part happens where the system evaluates and reconciles incoming invoices so that users understand when balances are due, to whom, and by when.

The AI Solution Builder covers Instabase’s “build” offering; allowing businesses to automate end-to-end repeatable workflows. Instabase lists three main steps to building such workflows:

1. Auto-label data — Customers can prepare and label data using to train a range of models to support specific use cases. Instabase offers functionality to automatically label data and detect data that needs to be annotated.
2. Apply AI models — Instabase offers large language models and open source technologies to apply to their data sets.
3. Build a workflow — Providing a low code approach to create end-to-end workflows.

Image Credit: Instabase

Instabase’s main value proposition is to automate common business processes, based on digitising, analysing and enriching large or complex data sets which then feed into a customer’s different systems of record.

Standard Chartered, for example, has been working with Instabase to automate its client onboarding process and reducing the time involved in reviewing and approving lending applications through a workflow that processes client documents and automates financial calculations.

For customers looking for more out of the box solutions, Instabase has an app store where you can find applications for things like processing meal receipts (which reminded me of Receiptbank) and identity verification.

Main learning point: The aspect of Instabase that I’m most interested is in the ways in which business can use LLMs to understand and question large sets of data to automate business critical processes and decision-making.

Related links for further learning:

1. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jerry-chen-and-instabase-ceo-anant-bhardwaj-building/
2. https://greylock.com/greymatter/the-new-moats/
3. https://instabase.com/resources/big-book-of-applied-ai-use-cases-for-financial-services/
4. https://ffnews.com/fintech-tv/event/event-videos-2023/money20-20-europe-2023/aditi-subbarao-instabase-money20-20-europe-2023/
5. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230607005256/en/Instabase-Doubles-Valuation-to-2B-and-Launches-AI-Hub-A-Generative-AI-Based-Platform-for-Content-Understanding