It’s been the subject of conversation, speculation, and media attention for decades, but the 2020s look set to go down in history as the decade when artificial intelligence (AI) finally brings about a fundamental shift in the integration of technology in our day-to-day lives.

A key question, however, is how can businesses – especially smaller ones with limited resources – make best use of this revolution? For business accelerator One AI, the solution was to combine it with another era-defining solution and offer it as a service.

“One AI was founded with the goal of democratizing and delivering AI as a service for companies,” explains Amit Ben, CEO and founder at One AI. “We anticipated that AI would become something you can take off the shelf, and we built our company with the strategy of being an AI provider from the ground up.”

One AI’s mission is to bring AI to everyday life, by converting language into structured, actionable data. It provides seamless integration into products and services, and uses generative AI to redefine human-machine interactions. One AI curates and hones leading AI capabilities from across the world, and packages them as easy-to-use APIs. It’s a simple but highly effective concept that empowers businesses to deploy tailored AI solutions in days rather than weeks or months.

“Our customers are product and services companies that plug One AI into the heart and core value of their products,” says Ben. “They are spread across use cases in multiple domains, from analyzing financial documents to AI-automated video editing.”

One AI’s main objective as a platform is to use AI to derive meaning from large volumes of unstructured text. “What's the sentiment in a tweet? What sales insights does an email contain?” Ben asks. “Well, One AI provides APIs that extract meaning from these types of data and convert it into structured and usable documents.”

From the outset, Ben’s strategy to achieve this was to allow himself and his team to focus on their core mission, and delegate all other key requirements. This meant finding a software solution to manage the database sitting at the heart of One AI’s platform.

“Dealing with all the database requirements and services – from managing the pipeline, storage, and backups, to maintaining the ongoing lifecycle of the development where documents and requirements change – involves a lot of time, effort, and hassle,” he explains. “We realized long ago that when you're building a company, you have to focus on what you do best and offload everything else to whoever is doing that best.”

One AI stores dozens of different language AI models, each of which uses different data structures. This necessitated a database solution with the flexibility to adopt new requirements and services on a near-constant basis. Having previously used MongoDB Atlas in other businesses, Ben knew he needn’t look any further.

Amit Ben, CEO and Founder, One AI

With MongoDB Atlas, One AI was able to optimize time and resources by focusing on developing its core product, safe in the knowledge that the platform comes with all the data services it needs while giving developers a modern, unified experience. Getting started with MongoDB took a mere two days, allowing the team to accelerate time to value.

“We built One AI from the ground up on MongoDB Atlas because we didn't want to waste a minute having to deal with anything else,” Ben recalls. “Building on MongoDB and Atlas from the start allowed us to circumvent a lot of the usual pitfalls that come with building critical pipeline and processing capabilities.”

MongoDB Atlas has a highly flexible document data model that can handle virtually any type of data. This was critical for One AI, allowing it to comfortably process more than 150 million documents coming from over 20 different internal services in a variety of AI languages, and to store over one billion tokens. With the agility, scalability, and build speeds MongoDB Atlas delivers, One AI now has a compelling and formidable proposition that it can host across more than 100 regions and the three major cloud providers that Atlas supports. That means the company can store data wherever is more effective for each service without having to deal with the heavy lifting of managing multi-cloud infrastructure in-house.

“The MongoDB document model really allows us to spread our wings and freely explore new capabilities for the AI, such as new predictions, new insights, and new output data points,” Ben adds. “With any other platform, we would have to constantly go back to the underlying infrastructure and maintain it. Now, we can add, expand, and explore new capabilities on a continuous basis.”

Amit Ben, CEO and Founder, One AI

Getting One AI to market in two years is, according to Ben, the result of his team’s ability to prioritize their respective efforts without having to commit precious resources dealing with the nuts and bolts of database management.

“The flexibility to do all that within a single platform like MongoDB Atlas is incredible,” says Ben. “Focusing our resources while having everything under a single database that caters to all our services means we only have to manage one thing.”

With MongoDB underpinning its platform, One AI can now deliver its core AI proposition to customers backed up by robust performance, platform stability, and key capabilities. The flexible document model removed several operational bottlenecks and enabled the development of hundreds of incremental changes, ensuring rapid platform development and adaptation.

The company also benefits from the regular new releases from MongoDB, such as Vector Search, which Ben sees as a highly valuable addition to the platform’s toolkit. One AI hopes to utilize Vector Search to make it easier to build next-generation applications that use generative AI without needing a specialist database that can store vectors.

“A very common use case in language AI is creating vectors that represent language,” he explains. “The ability to have that vectorized language representation in the same database as other representations, which you can then access via a single query interface, solves a core problem for us as an API company.”

Generative AI has the power to transform the user experience and supercharge productivity, and Ben is excited to see how customers will make use of it in the future. “I love seeing how customers use our offerings. It's a feeling of creation and fulfillment,” he says. “As a developer myself, it always makes me smile to see people interact with something you've built. And when you do that with AI, you create the sense of intelligence, and it's one of the rarest types of experience you can achieve for people.”

Amit Ben, CEO and Founder, One AI