When Chris Ganje and Ian Jones left senior strategic roles at BP plc to establish AMPLYFI in 2015, they sparked a trailblazing journey that’s seen them develop a pioneering tech platform which empowers everyone in an organisation to create value from vast quantities of structured and unstructured data.
Headquartered in Cardiff, this comprehensive business intelligence and research platform incorporates a series of artificial intelligence algorithms that unlock both the deep web and clients’ internal datasets, delivering unique machine-driven insights. As part of our Digital Series celebrating the very best in CCR innovation, we spoke with Chris, the American Co-founder of this remarkable enterprise, discovering the dynamics of success that has seen AMPLYFI rise to become one of the most talked about tech companies in the UK…
“Delivering clear, market-changing insights that have enabled measurably better decision making for some of the world’s largest organisations”
“Our technology reads content faster and more accurately than any human can” explains Chris “so we’re able to deliver clear, unbiased, market-changing insights that lead to measurably better decision making.”
The AMPLYFI platform is capable of revealing previously hidden links, trends and opportunities – enabling this transformational tech and extraordinary team to change the game for some of the largest organisations around the world, with the company’s current product suite including two platforms, DeepResearch and DeepInsight.
“Our DeepResearch product is an enterprise-grade search engine that helps knowledge workers find relevant information faster using federated search across a multitude of internal and external sources” says Chris. “It then analyses those results in real-time using Machine Learning models, so users become what we call ‘five-minute masters’, able to drill down to find very specific and otherwise impossible-to-find information.
“AMPLYFI’s ‘DeepInsight’ is the world’s first Insights Automation Platform”
“Beyond that, we have also developed DeepInsight, the world’s first Insights Automation Platform (IAP), which helps organisations research, analyse and generate insights from vast quantities of both structured and unstructured textual content. Using several AI techniques, it outperforms the largest of human research teams by analysing hundreds of thousands – or even millions – of documents in near real-time, at unprecedented speed and levels of accuracy.
“That means users can very quickly understand global trends – and identify the leading nations, organisations and individuals behind them – getting profound insight into levels of risk through functionality that flags up early warning signals for both supply chain and customer assessments. It’s a real game-changer in an increasingly uncertain and ever-changing world.”
Pioneering the development of Machine Learning and data science across structured and unstructured data sets allows AMPLYFI to address many different pain points for many different industries. “We work with some of the largest organisations from around the world and their use cases vary significantly” emphasises Chris. “For Financial Services, it’s primarily about gaining a better understanding of customer risk, especially as we plan to eventually emerge from the COVID-19 crisis. For industry incumbents, it’s about horizon scanning and pinpointing sources of future disruption before it’s too late.
While for governments, defence organisations and security agencies, it’s about making sense of the sheer volume of content generated globally on the internet – allowing them to create actionable intelligence that preserves or enhances national security. Our platform is capable of performing its analysis across multi-languages – and we’re conscious that this is a time when budgets are under increasing pressure, so our self-service business model is designed to keep costs down, offering clients the option to choose SaaS or direct API access.”
“Addressing many different pain points for many different industries”
As a fellow alumnus at Cambridge University’s Centre for Science and Policy (and a non-exec member of Innovate UK) Chris naturally takes a diverse and wide-ranging world view of emerging trends – and shared some of those identified by the AMPLYFI Insights Automation Platform: “ESG – or Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance – is increasingly becoming an important performance metric for investors to assess and build their portfolios, but the current scoring methodologies for measuring and benchmarking companies’ performance lack transparency and have significant limitations. We’re developing new AI-driven methodologies to create a range of global ESG indices that will overcome these shortcomings.
“The Environmental element of ESG currently attracts the most attention, particularly around sustainability and climate change – with our analysis revealing some emerging, very early-stage technologies such as nanodiamond batteries and glucose biofuel cells that could disrupt future global energy systems. This could potentially remove the need for large electricity grids and even render smart grids obsolete before they are deployed at scale.”
Given this capacity to deliver astonishingly prescient insights into new and emerging markets, it’s no surprise to hear that AMPLYFI themselves are continually developing their capabilities – with some significant upcoming product upgrades about to be unveiled: “We currently have three enhancements in Beta testing and scheduled for release. We’ve always given users the ability to customise their internet searches and we’ll soon launch an ‘auto-build’ facility that enables them to create their own connectors, whether it’s to their preferred websites or internal data repositories.
“Three significant product upgrades about to be released”
“This is linked to a further option to build dedicated data lakes, which is particularly useful for specialist or niche analysis such as pharmaceutical drug discovery or peer-reviewed literature in medicine where users demand repositories constructed from gold standard, trusted sources. Beyond that, we’re also readying a new search automation feature that empowers users to construct complex search strings to focus on areas such as specific geographies or content types, raising the quality of analysis even further.”
Given the pedigree of clients, breadth of use and increasingly business-critical nature of the services delivered, the future for AMPLYFI holds almost endless possibilities – and for Chris, the ongoing development of the platform is intertwined with a mission to ‘build trust in the machine’.
“Within our sector of business intelligence, AI is more about probability and confidence scores than providing precise answers”, reflects Chris. “So we’re always striving to engineer transparency into our platforms’ analysis, allowing users to dive deeply into the results to build the necessary confidence and trust needed to act upon its insights. That’s why we’re an industry partner in the EINST4INE pan-European initiative which is seeking to address the challenges of future industrial systems – and we’re working closely with the University of Cambridge to progress our understanding of how to better integrate digitally and socially-driven decision-making approaches in contemporary industries. We have come a long way in the last six or seven years, but in many ways, our journey has just begun.”
