The privacy-focused artificial intelligence development startup webAI Inc. said today it’s rolling out a new AI-powered assistant called Companion to help large organizations “supercharge” their productivity.

Companion, webAI claims, is a “breakthrough” AI assistant that can be customized to support almost any kind of enterprise workload. Theh company is known for its focus on private AI systems, and provides tools that enable enterprises to deploy AI models locally on Apple Inc. devices such as Mac computers, iPads and iPhones.

The idea is to minimize the reliance on cloud infrastructures, which are not controlled by the organizations that use them. In this way, webAI puts extra emphasis on data privacy, as well as lower latency.

Companion is being launched as part of the winter release of webAI’s platform, in what the company says is a response to overwhelming demand from its customers for an AI assistant tool that goes beyond existing, generic cloud-hosted models.

It provides enterprises with a private and highly customizable AI assistant that can be embedded directly into employees’ workflows. Customers will be able to train Companion on their own corporate data to enhance its capabilities and knowledge, while ensuring that data never falls into the wrong hands.

The ability to combine large language models, which are trained on public data, with proprietary data is key to the development of more capable AI systems such as AI agents, which have specialized, domain expertise and can perform tasks on behalf of their users. Enterprises are eager to adopt this capability, but many also have significant privacy concerns and need to retain full control over their intellectual property. It’s these companies that Companion is aimed at.

According to webAI, Companion takes AI beyond the simple chat experience most people are familiar with. It can run on any OSX desktop or laptop, and its context-aware nature means it can slot itself within employee’s workflows with ease. In this way, it gives enterprises the ability to combine the world’s most powerful LLMs with their own trade secrets, increasing their potential.

Because Companion runs on customers’ devices, or within enterprises’ private networks, it means there’s no possibility of their data being leaked outside.

“Privacy is the founding principle of webAI, it’s in our DNA,” said founder and Chief Executive David Stout. “We are pioneering private AI that knows your business and runs on your devices, inside your walls, completely under your control.”

The company said Companion can be used together with its Navigator product, which is an AI development platform that enables teams to design, build, train and deploy their own LLMs and other kinds of AI models, without any cloud dependencies.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Meta AI