Juji

Juji, Inc. operates as a provider of cognitive artificial intelligence (AI) agents delivered in the form of chatbots. The company was founded in 2014 by Dr. Michelle Zhou, a former IBM Watson researcher and expert in Human-Centered AI, and Dr. Huahai Yang, who serves as the CTO. Zhou's background includes nearly 15 years at IBM Research and IBM Watson, where her work on understanding user personalities and preferences, including inventing the Watson Personality Insights tool, directly inspired the creation of Juji. The San Jose-based company aims to democratize AI, making it accessible to non-technical users in organizations of all sizes.

The core of Juji's business is a no-code platform that allows users to build, deploy, and manage custom AI chatbots without requiring programming skills. This platform is designed to automate high-touch, complex human interactions with empathy and responsibility. Juji's business model targets enterprises across various sectors, including higher education, talent management, and healthcare. For example, universities use Juji's chatbots to handle repetitive questions from prospective students and support remote learners, while market researchers use them to conduct qualitative interviews. The company's revenue is estimated to be around $2.8 million annually.

Juji's product combines generative AI with computational psychology, enabling its chatbots to possess advanced human soft skills like active listening and empathy. This allows the chatbots to go beyond simple question-and-answer interactions to infer user personality traits, needs, and psychographics from conversations in real-time. The platform includes Juji Studio, a graphical interface for no-code chatbot creation; Juji IDE, an environment for scripting more complex interactions; and the Juji API for integration into third-party applications. A key differentiator is the platform's ability to manage conversations flexibly, handling user digressions without losing sight of the main goal, a concept rooted in years of linguistic and AI research. The system also features a real-time dashboard for human staff to monitor and improve the chatbot's performance without interrupting live conversations. Keywords: cognitive AI, empathetic chatbot, no-code AI platform, human-centered AI, conversational AI, AI assistants, psychographic insights, chatbot builder, automated interviews, Michelle Zhou, Huahai Yang, generative AI, computational psychology, talent management, higher education chatbot, healthcare chatbot, AI adoption, responsible AI, AI agent, natural language processing