Prosus, the Amsterdam-listed consumer internet company and subsidiary of Cape Town-based Naspers, has launched an aggregated generative AI tool called PlusOne.
The tool, which will be used internally by Prosus group companies, is designed to allow employees to collaborate with one another and innovate more easily.
“PlusOne leverages the capabilities of more than 10 diverse generative AI model types that have for the first time been integrated into an all-in-one offering,” the group explained. “With the best generative AI capabilities now available with one click, companies no longer have to think about which AI model to use for each task.”
According to Prosus, PlusOne is the “equivalent of an all-in-one AI team member” that it hopes will “accelerate the performance of the group’s global network of portfolio businesses across fintech, food delivery, classifieds and edtech”.
Integrated with Slack, a collaboration tool owned by CRM specialists Salesforce, PlusOne promises to automate a “wide range of tasks, from compiling reports and translating documents to explaining and modifying code”.
During the initial roll-out phase, PlusOne has been adopted by 25 companies in the Prosus stable and has thousands of monthly active users. “PlusOne will now be offered to all of Prosus’s and Naspers’s portfolio companies, including Superbalist, Takealot.com and Media24 in South Africa.”
Teamwork
In a statement, Euro Beinat, global head of AI and data science at Prosus and Naspers, said: “This tool has become instrumental for teamwork, but also to discover and rapidly test AI use cases. We have seen several companies, such as iFood or Brainly, graduate these use cases into their products and release them to their customers.”
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Prosus said PlusOne is designed with data privacy and security in mind, maintaining control and ownership of a company’s data submitted to and generated by PlusOne. It also integrates with internal company knowledge bases such as Confluence or Google Drive and code repositories such as BitBucket or GitHub.
Prosus did not say whether it intends selling access to PlusOne to companies outside its stable. A spokeswoman said in response to a query that the group developed the tool for its own portfolio companies but “will look beyond its own investments in time”. – © 2023 NewsCentral Media
