Since the start of the 20th century, multiple psychological models have emerged to provide a scientific explanation for human motivation and a better understanding of why people do what they do. From the five-factor model, measuring traits like extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, or the HEXACO personality analysis of honesty, humility, and emotionality, among other traits, these models have stood the test of time in explaining the complexities of the convoluted human behavior and its mysterious makeup. But as the world has increasingly digitized, there’s a new source of behavioural activity we leave behind that provides a better reflection of ourselves than previously thought.
Enter INFI, a game-changer in the space of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and human-machine interaction, and the first to crack the code of converting validated psychological models into algorithms, enabling a new level of individually-based insights. Their technology promises to reinvent a lost art of personal communication and change the way people are engaged in the digital world.
Unlike any other method, its unique value proposition lies in digitizing conventional human psychology models. By implementing clinical and research-supported psychology principles combined with proprietary AI algorithms, it can instantly produce comprehensive insights from mobile usage about personality traits, attitudes, and behavior of any user, employee or customer based on their mental state of mind in real-time.
Founded in 2013 and led by Yoram Kraus, CEO, and Yaron Coriat, CTO, INFI is a leading global AI company headquartered in Tel Aviv, who’s pioneering EmpathAI™, an AI-based core technology designed to methodically evaluate a mobile user’s personality in real-time and deliver insights and recommendations. It can be used as another layer of data, giving companies a more comprehensive understanding of their customers, specifically as it relates to the motives behind a customer’s actions and decision making.
Spearheaded by Prof. Sarit Kraus, a world-renowned AI researcher, INFI was able to establish a link between human psychology and digital analytics to create an individually based personality assessment, utilizing advanced technologies including natural language processing, and deep and convolutional neural networks.
INFI transcends all platforms and digital channels, enabling companies to create a new human-like CRM on top of their existing ones. Its competitive advantage over other AI based approaches, of which all focus on the ‘what’, is in its in-depth focus of dealing with the question of ‘why’, the real motivator behind an individual’s actions and decision making. The startup believes that unveiling this answer is paramount to bridging the gap between the individual-machine relationship, and thereby engendering customer loyalty, reliability and enhancing brand perception.
“Our mobile user behavior analytics can trace displays of our psychological state” said Yoram Kraus. “With EmpathAI™, we are revolutionizing the dynamics of human-machine interaction to create a better understanding of a customer. Rather than answering what the individual is doing, INFI focuses on answering the question of why customers make a decision and act in a certain way, which allows companies to gain more insights and recommend offerings tuned to customers’ specific needs, wishes and motives.”
INFI believes its core technology EmpathAI™ will have a dramatic impact on our daily lives, as individuals and communities, improving our quality of life across multiple sectors and uses.
For instance, offering a loan or issuing a credit card to an individual without credit history available used to be a daunting task for financial lenders. With nearly 2 billion people in the world without access to credit facilities, INFI’s personality-based risk assessment establishes a new baseline and helps lenders approve or decline a credit line request, allowing them to provide loans for credible people lacking any credit history. They can use this invaluable data for capturing the true business potential, while reducing rejection rates that may be as high as 85%.
In e-commerce, INFI can provide insights and actionable recommendations to sellers that empower the creation of custom buying journeys. Customers can receive offers tuned to what they genuinely want and need, increasing conversion rates from current levels of 2 to 5 percent while dramatically reducing spamming.
And in healthcare, their personalized Pocket Doctor, powered by INFI, will help guide patients on how to treat illnesses and suggest specific wellness programs tailored to each patient’s mental makeup when needed, ensuring comprehensive care, and revolutionizing the medical system. Their applications can proactively approach each patient, in a specific personality-based manner and provide them with the motivation to adhere to a doctor’s patient-specific treatment recommendations. They’re improving the patient’s quality of life and their surroundings; providing real-time support, reducing the loss of precious time and costs to the healthcare system, and allowing healthcare providers to better manage their resources.
With respect to data privacy, INFI complies with European GDPR, US privacy requirements, and other key regulations. “We uphold the utmost concern for individual privacy and do not engage in acquiring of third-party sharing of personal data,” added Kraus.
Backed by angel investments, INFI is expanding its footprint globally. “We recently launched our go-to-market strategy by forming strategic partnerships in the UK, USA, India, Hong Kong and APAC, Turkey and LATAM. We’re in the process of securing a round D investment based on a valuation of $3 billion, with the goal of going public in two years,” added Kraus.
As a part of its strong organic growth, INFI has expanded its human capital and is currently home to over 100 employees, ranging across diverse disciplines such as AI, mathematics, clinical psychology, research psychology, and criminology. They expect to double their workforce over the next year. With the global affective computing market poised to grow to $173 billion by 2025, INFI’s efforts at imprinting consciousness into machines and humanizing our digital selves seems inevitable.