Jasper targets enterprise to expand generative AI beyond generic AI

Generative AI has been all the rage in the recent months, but it is typically generic and not specifically focused on the specific needs of any one company.

San Francisco based startup Jasper is aiming to help make generative AI less generic. The company made a series of announcements today at its Gen AI conference.

Jasper is a well funded operation, raising $125 million in October 2022 to help advance its generative AI efforts. All the money is being put to good use, the company says, as it is rolling out new products that expand enterprise functionally and usefulness for Jasper’s generative AI technology.

To date, Jasper’s AI platform has been providing services that help organizations rapidly develop both text and image based content.

Now, Jasper is taking the next step for enterprise generative AI with the launch of its Jasper for Business suite. Among the new features is Jasper Brand Voice, which helps organizations to customize content creation to match the tone and style of their existing brand.

The new Jasper Everywhere feature is meant to extend Jasper’s generative AI to run wherever users are working, including in online documents and content management systems (CMS).

And, rounding out Jasper’s updates is an API (Application Programming Interface) designed to help organizations extend generative AI to their own application development.

“We’re very focused on how people use generative AI in business settings,” Jasper president Shane Orlich said in a media briefing. “We want generative AI to be the superpower that sits alongside our business users and helps them create better content at work.”

There may be no “I” in teams, but Jasper want there to be AI

Organizations almost always work in teams with multiple groups of individuals working together to help execute a task.

The Jasper for Teams offering is designed to help support this collaboration workflow. Jeremy Crane, VP of product at Jasper explained that the tool is an ongoing effort that will encompass a number of features including document collaboration, status updates and analytics. The document sharing and collaboration feature is intended to be similar to tools such as Google Docs, said Crane.

Extending the ability of Jasper’s generative AI to work wherever users are working is another part of the company’s initiative to better support business workflows. Crane noted that Jasper is building out tools that will integrate its generative AI with existing business applications. It’s an effort the company has dubbed Jasper Everywhere. 

The first step in that effort is an updated version of the company’s web browser extension that supports Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.

Crane said that the browser extension is designed to be conveniently accessible to users as they perform their tasks. This means that users have access to the tool in the context of other web-based tools without having to switch back to Jasper.

Generative AI doesn’t need to be generic AI

Generative AI is built with Large Language Models (LLMs) that are often trained on large, albeit generic, sets of data.

The new Jasper Brand Voice feature is an effort to fine tune generative AI content creation to meet the specific style and needs for a given organization. With Brand Voice, man organization can provide updated corporate and product information to the AI model to support a higher degree of accuracy for content creation.

Many organizations utilize some form of style guide within their marketing to help provide a consistent message and tone. That style guide approach can now be replicated with Jasper’s Brand Voice.

“Every company has different rules that they use for writing that they want to implement across their team, such as what acronyms they use or don’t use,” said Crane. 

With Brand Voice, he said, Jasper can help anyone with a company to create content, in the right tone and style with the latest information about the company and its services.

All the new capabilities coming to the Jasper for Business offering are developed with a series of different generative AI models at its foundation, including OpenAI.

“Think of Jasper as this application layer that’s sitting on top of many different models, including our own models,” Orlich said. “We’re able to pick and choose which pieces of those models we want to support in order to create the right piece of output for our customers.”