For the last four years, Fast Company has been hunting for the world’s best products, concepts, companies, policies, and designs that are pursuing innovation for good.

Each year they take on the enormous challenge of selecting the examples throughout the world that stand out the most, and we’ve got exciting news!

For their marquis award, The Best World Changing Idea, OneReach.ai was announced as an honorable mention, in addition to being a finalist in the Data and AI category and honorable mention in the General Excellence category!

Fast Company recognizing our conversational AI platform as a World Changing Idea is a real honor!

“There seems no better time to recognize organizations that are using their ingenuity, resources, and in some cases, their scale to tackle society’s biggest problems.” says Stephanie Mehta, editor-in-chief of Fast Company.

Why OneReach.ai was chosen as a world changing idea

OneReach.ai is changing the world by providing a no-code/low-code platform for building AI and conversational applications that allows anyone to create software applications utilizing today’s most impactful and disruptive technologies. Named twice by Gartner Research as a top platform alongside Google, Microsoft, IBM and Amazon, CS2.0 is the fastest way for organizations to co-create great conversational experiences in any channel, using any of the top AI engines. 

System change versus individual change is an important concept, and one that we have taken seriously at OneReach.ai. Thousands of companies are doing incredible things with AI and data, but many focus on individual solutions rather than changing the system. Individual solutions are incredibly important and often do change the world, but we believe that the work we are doing to change the system is even more impactful.

There are two systems that we are changing: traditional application development, and communication and automation practices. While both systems should be improved, traditional application development needs major changes to ensure that disruptive technologies are accessible and people of diverse backgrounds can participate in creating innovative solutions. 

Traditional Application Development:

According to a study done by IDC, from 2018 to 2023, 500 million new logical apps will be created, equal to the number built over the past 40 years. By 2024, AI-enabled user interfaces and process automation will replace one-third of today’s screen based apps. If we’re to ensure that AI closes the gaps in our society rather than widens them, we need to keep opening the boundaries on who’s equipped and able to build software and conversational AI. 

According to a study by VisionMobile, if there were just 100 developers/coders in the world, 94 of them would identify as male, 25 of them would be in North America while 30 would be in Europe and 40 would have over 6 years of experience. If the majority of technology innovators are characterized by the above, most of the world’s technology applications are created by a small subset of the global population.

Creating software applications shouldn’t be limited to narrow slivers of perspective from our society. Incredible things come from diverse perspectives, and with how disruptive AI, digital communications and machine learning have become, it’s important to ensure the democratization of the ability to create and access these innovations. 

Fundamentally changing the system is a difficult feat. Diverse solutions come from diverse perspectives. This is why we believe it is so important to change the traditional application development system. 

Communication and Automation Practices

Simply put, communication and automation should be done better, and our customers are perfecting these processes by building applications that automate routine conversations and business tasks on our platform.

Automating communications clearly has benefits – mundane tasks can be automated, freeing up time for more important, creative and strategic tasks. But on a broader level, automating tasks and conversations allows the entire organization to do more. We constantly see cases where improving communication and automation has made a huge difference in the way our customers do business.

This change especially helps non-profits who don’t have abundant resources. The United Nations World Food Programme (UNWFP) is using OneReach.ai to automate data collection and help starving people around the world. In order to provide timely services to people in need, however, they rely on collecting accurate on-the-ground data. In the past, this has meant deploying many people, volunteers and staff, to locales to interview and assess. As you can imagine, this tactic is not only expensive and timely, but it can also be dangerous. Today, the UNWFP has solved this issue by automating the collection of critical data with the help of voice and phone bots that facilitate dynamic calls and in multiple languages. 

While there are many tools to build conversational applications and automate tasks, our customers have helped us learn how different we are from other tools available in important categories like channels available, speed, flexibility and inclusivity of the platform. Creating conversational AI applications is very complicated, and unlike most of our competitors, we have solely focused our efforts as a business on perfecting this process for the past 10 years, and we rebuilt our platform from the ground up to release the second generation of our platform this year. 

Few software companies allow users to build without coding, even fewer allow users to create omni-channel experiences with options for any NLU engine, and none offer the flexibility and accessibility that OneReach.ai offers.