Portland software company Hanzo is jumping into the artificial intelligence game, but instead of using generative AI to summarize vast amounts of data, the company’s new product will help customers zero in on what is relevant to their needs.
Founded in 2009, Hanzo makes software tools for large enterprises that fulfill regulatory and legal compliance needs around data retention for information generated in communication and collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack, Asana and Atlassian. The new product is called Spotlight AI and it went live for general availability this week. The company has been piloting the product with five customers.
“We don’t generate text, we use (generative AI) to help our clients automate and pass through millions of pieces of conversation and understand if it is relevant for a case or an investigation,” said co-founder and CEO Julien Masanes.
Hanzo's application of generative AI is designed to make the technology more accessible to more customers by using smaller language models that are hosted on secure private cloud instances. This means use of these models is significantly cheaper than running large language models like ChatGPT that take huge amounts of computing power.
When a litigation hold comes in or another type of investigation proceeds, companies must start going through all communication and gathering what is relevant, said Masanes. This can quickly get complicated by chat programs like Teams or Slack, where conversations seemingly never end, plus there are endless combinations of direct messages and groups, he added.
Vice President of Product Dave Ruel noted that a typical litigation case on average has 5 million messages that must be reviewed and the most relevant stuff is less than 1% of those messages.
Many companies end up hiring people to manually go through thousands of messages. Keyword searching and typical machine learning applications haven’t been able to significantly reduce the cost compared to manual labor, Masanes said.
Large language models can help, but the current pricing models are based on how many letters, characters, phrases or sentences queried, and that makes it cost prohibitive with such large amounts of data. Spotlight AI is designed to narrow data and tell human reviewers to start looking at the data it has tagged first, Ruel said.
Hanzo is pricing based on gigabytes used and it estimates that change can reduce the cost by a factor of 10 to 20. These smaller models also use regular computing power and don’t need to be stockpiling expensive, hard-to-find Nvidia chips.
“What’s the point of using AI if it comes close to the cost of a human anyway?” said Masanes.
Hanzo has 60 employees globally. The company is remote-first and has two hubs of employees: Portland, with product and marketing and then Leeds, England, with engineering. The C-suite is distributed. The company has more than 100 customers and is focused on large enterprises.
The company is tapping into the network of talent locally in compliance and legal software. It has several employees from Portland startup Zapproved including Ruel. Other companies in town, like Exterro and RadarFirst, have also contributed to the network of talent.
Masanes said he sees this new product as an opportunity for the company to usher in what could be a “sea change” for the industry.
“We have lots of hopes and ambitions for the product,” he said. “It’s really addressing something crucial for clients and the industry. I think it’s going to be a huge opportunity for our customers to solve many of their problems and for our company to grow.”
