Company: Version 1
Founder: Tom O’Connor
Website: https://www.version1.com/
About Version 1
From its beginnings in Dublin in 1996, Version 1 has scaled up to become a €350m+ revenue organisation delivering digital transformation programmes, innovation and services to customers across the public and private sectors. AI has not only played a significant role in the business’ success story to date but is increasingly important in helping the company achieve its ambitious growth target of €1bn revenue by 2027.
In fact, data and AI is a key strategic pillar for Version 1, with a particular focus on delivering responsible AI transformation programmes. The company has developed accelerators and solutions for responsible generative AI, which are now in use with multiple customers and partners.
As a first step, Version 1 accelerated the internal adoption of AI tools throughout its own business to be completely empathetic to and work in synergy with customer challenges and requirements. Training and education play a key role in this, with over 90% of the workforce trained in AI. Most employees also have deep technical expertise to help deploy updated developer processes with AI and green coding. Version 1 also ensures an ongoing review of regulations and policy settings to enable AI safety.
Version 1 has invested significantly in other business areas, such as the AI Lab Centre of Excellence, multiple R&D squads, cross-organisational education, and AI scaling plans. The AI Lab Centre of Excellence focuses on computer vision, responsible generative and conversational AI, which is deployed for extensive social value and AI for good use cases.
The dedicated team within the Version 1 AI lab work at the forefront when customers approach the organisation with specific challenges. An example of this is when the Department of Agriculture, Food and Marine Ireland (DAFM) had a particular challenge where it needed to identify, track, and classify crops. Version 1 developed an image classification solution using a custom recurrent neural network machine learning model that enabled the classification and location detection of crops. This allowed correct identification for farmers relying on subsidies, and greater control and accuracy for DAFM.
In addition, Version 1 recently worked with The Dyslexia Association Ireland, leveraging GPT-4 for simplification of text. Version 1 offered an easy and simple solution for reading accuracy, writing fluency and phonological awareness which helped thousands of people at critical life junctures, for example transitioning from school to university or a professional career.
Yet another project promoting inclusivity was delivered for The National Museum of Computing, where Version 1 developed a generative AI app to simplify the intricate museum exhibits, making it entirely accessible for all visitors of diverse age groups, linguistic, and neurological needs.
Education is another important factor in the AI value proposition from Version 1. The company has rolled out an AI Fundamentals training free of charge to all customers or stakeholders who need to know more about AI, and this is supported by a series of free webinars – the AI Series which covers topics such as ethical considerations, regulation, data integrity, future trends, and industry applications.
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