A Bermudian software firm’s foray into artificial intelligence for corporate responsibility tasks has produced an AI package that developers believe can be moulded to an array of time-savings jobs.

Muuvment IQ, an AI package that was quietly launched late last year, has saved consultants thousands of hours’ work in the field of corporate sustainability, according to Zabi Yaqeen, the company’s president and cofounder, and Kim Carter, its finance and sales manager.

Corporate sustainability, which can cover topics ranging from social to environmental considerations, has become a standard payroll item for large companies.

Assessing a company’s performance, or hiring a consultant for the lengthy job of comparing its sustainability performance with other firms, quickly became a task where AI could outperform human beings.

Mr Carter said: “We met an analyst in London who had just done a report for her client. It took her three weeks. She charged $80,000.

“When she saw what we were doing, her reaction was, thank goodness. This is such a hard job. I can spend my quality time giving advice to my client rather than doing the donkey work. A machine can do it better and it can do it in five minutes instead of three weeks.”

Muuvment IQ’s version 2 arrives at an interesting juncture in the world of AI, Mr Yaqeen said.

He told The Royal Gazette: “You’ve probably seen how generative AI writes responses. It doesn’t really know the answer; it guesses the answer. It’s guessing the next word in a sequence for a response based on patterns it’s seen in a lot of data. It kind of understands that these words and concepts belong together and it produces answers.”

When ChatGPT emerged, users ran into “hallucinations” when the AI concocted wrong responses, along with what Mr Yaqeen called “bias for a consensus view, where the thing that it’s seen most often is what it’s going to present”.

Muuvment IQ employs a “multi-tiered, knowledge-based system” based on a database of vetted information around the topic of sustainability.

Mr Yaqeen said: “With AI, what people have seen most often is the generative AI capacity, where it can just make up responses.

“But there are many other applications. It’s very good at looking at texts, summarising texts, manipulating data in different ways.

“In this context, what it does is it goes into this database with information from regulators, various government agencies from leading practitioners in sustainability. The AI goes in and pulls relevant information. All those resources have been vetted by an industry expert who looks at those resources. It will go and try to find the information from there.”

Muuvment said its AI product eliminated large tasks that would have taken an employee days or weeks.

Mr Yaqeen said: “It’s taken us over two years to get this tool to where it is now.

“But for a peer analysis report on sustainability comparing, say, 70 factors across environmental, social governance for ten companies ‒ the number that we get from firms who go to external consultants to produce these types of reports is that it can cost anywhere from $15,000 to $100,000.

“It can take a week or two weeks of work. Whereas with our AI product, it takes five to ten minutes to produce.”

Mr Carter added: “For one company, it took them seven weeks. They hired one of the big four accounting firms. They paid $140,000 for it. When they saw what this tool could do, it was quite a surprise.”

Mr Yaqeen called the AI tool “industry agnostic”, capable of adapting to different companies and departments within companies.

He said: “We’ve released an additional service called Muuvment Labs where we can create custom AI workflows for different industries.”

The AI also comes with refined techniques for searching online, with the ability to compile a library of the most accurate search prompts.

Mr Yaqeen said that Muuvment had a patent filed on the AI’s underlying technology that the two believed could be applied to “a bunch of different problems”.

Both software researchers said that artificial intelligence had hit so suddenly that it still faced an “adaptation curve” with the public.

Mr Yaqeen said: “There were a few reasons we found that people are reluctant in using AI. It’s a groundbreaking technology but people have spent 30 years working a certain way and all of a sudden there’s a new technology that comes to change the way they work. That’s going to take time.”

He said the firm had tried to develop the refined version of Muuvment IQ with “a human-first AI mindset ‒ the AI is not intended to replace humans but it can increase their productivity”.

He added: “Let AI do that boring, repetitive work so that humans can do what they’re good at.”