Bitskout has built a simple-to-use software platform that any user regardless of their expertise can use. Although it’s simple to the end-user, the heavy work is done by AI which takes over tasks that people themselves normally dislike. For example, Bitskout can be configured in less than 5 minutes to extract information from documents, answer questions to text, process images, write reports, compare documents, etc. Such smart automations help to save a lot of working hours that are wasted daily on low-level tasks.
This is not the first time that Bitskout’s co-founder and CEO Ilia Zelenkin has been internationally recognised for his work. However, this is the most important one for him because all the previous recognitions have been given in the name of his previous employers, not personally in his name.
“We’ve built Bitskout ourselves – working on weekends, holidays, and despite all the “no’s”, and all the comments of “it won’t work” or “nobody needs it”, we persevered. And then suddenly you are told by the brightest minds: “Yes, it looks like you are changing the world for the better. Keep it up!”. It almost felt like a fairy tale! I was about to jump out of my shoes,” Zelenkin marked.
IRCAI made their final decisions based on the potential implementation and impact of the AI solution in the sustainable development community, as well as the quality of the scientific content and solution. Zelenkin has been working on machine learning for years and has seen that most of the AI tools are developed for people who can code. This is where he saw a need for something that everyone could use.
Logistics, costs and hiring made Bitskout choose Estonia
Zelenkin is a Belarusian who has lived in Estonia, Belarus and most recently in Spain. When starting a business, he contemplated which country he should start his company in. “I had three equal options on the table – USA, UK and Estonia. Considering logistics, costs and hiring, I chose Estonia. Another reason to choose Estonia was also the ease of managing a company from abroad,” he said.
As there is good expertise in AI development in Estonia, Zelenkin is planning to open an office in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, that would be responsible for all of Bitskout’s core technical developments. The company’s user interface and sales will be managed by teams located in Poland and the US.
“We didn’t need lots of manpower at first when we developed the tool, but now we do, we need sales and marketing. We are in the middle of pre-seed fundraising,” Zelekin notes.
In addition to IRCAI’s recognition, Bitskout has been noticed by Cloudvisor, an official Amazon AWS partner and the World Summit Awards.
“With Bitskout, anybody without any previous experience can use state-of-the-art technology to make their work more productive and engaging. Nothing really trumps our engagement at work like mundane and stupid tasks,” Zelenkin states.
Biggest successes yet to come
Zelenkin sees that their biggest successes are yet to come. He admits that mistakes have been made too, but these have led to his experience today and he wouldn’t change anything. Talking about the productivity software market in general, he thinks that as growth is the essence of any person, the market will grow as long as there are people.
“What I see now, is that the abundance of separate tools with duplicate functions is becoming a burden for many companies. That gave rise to ‘customer-built’ systems. You can now build mobile apps, web apps, even hardware apps without coding, and this trend will only grow. We at Bitskout are betting on it as well,” he concluded.
Bitskout works with two of the most popular project management systems – Asana and monday.com.
UNESCO’s latest global top 100 list includes three Estonian projects, making Estonia the country with most listed AI projects per capita. Find out more about other Estonian AI projects Automation at Invest Estonia and Bürokratt.
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