Aider Brings Human-Centric Artificial Intelligence and Digital Assistants to Small Businesses Across North America

NEWARK, N.J. and AUCKLAND, New Zealand, July 25, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- From VOICE Summit 2019 (VOICE 19), Aider announced its entrance into the United States (U.S.) with authority by simultaneously unveiling integrations with Square, Shopify, QuickBooks Online and Amazon Alexa. The New Zealand-born artificial intelligence (AI) software company empowers small business (SMB) owners with a central source from which to access the breadth of data from the many different applications used to run their companies.

Aider Founder and CEO, Brendan Roberts, took to the stage at VOICE 19, the World's largest voice technology gathering, to address how voice technology and digital assistants can now cater to SMBs with technology typically reserved for high-end consumer and enterprise environments.

"We believe in human-centric AI and created Aider to give hardworking business owners easy access to the information they need to make daily, data-led decisions," said Roberts.

"North America is the next destination on Aider's strategic growth roadmap and with the help of our new partners, we will deliver AI-powered assistance to help thousands of underserved American small businesses address specific pain points and improve customer experience."

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, only half of all establishments make it to the five-year mark, and only one third make it to 10 years¹. With a vision to help change the dire reality of small business survival in the U.S., Aider solutions will provide better access to critical, up-to-date data by utilizing advanced AI and voice technology.

For small business owners, Aider, accompanied by a voice assistant, allows them to have conversations with their businesses and harness the critical information needed to make smart decisions. With Aider, all they have to do is ask.

Constantly learning and growing its knowledge base, Aider can also schedule notifications and will deliver proactive trends analysis and benchmarking custom to the user's business.

"Cash flow, time management and tedious administrative tasks are big problems for SMBs," said Roberts. "Aider allows users to take immediate, direct action to improve their business. Our NLU (Natural Language Understanding) technology gives opportunities for SMBs to get easy, affordable access to answers from their data."

Well-poised to serve U.S.-based financial, retail, ecommerce and hospitality industries, the founding team includes Aider's chairman, Avi Golan, a former Intuit and Google executive and currently an Operating Partner at SoftBank Group based in Silicon Valley.

Aider has received significant exposure lately on the tail of high profile announcements including being selected for Mastercard's Elite Start Path programme, a collaboration with one of New Zealand's biggest banks, Westpac, and a partnership with New Zealand's biggest payments company, Paymark.

About Aider
Co-founded in Auckland, New Zealand in 2017 by Brendan Roberts and Pete Weaver, Aider is a mobile, digital assistant for smarter business.

Aider, by connecting to the applications small businesses use every day to run their companies, delivers easy access to answers about all aspects of business operations from a single source. Among the many different types of business applications with which Aider connects are: point of sale, accounting, payroll, rostering, online calendar, social media and analytics. Using Aider's mobile app, questions are asked by typing, voice-to-text or speaking through a voice assistant, like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant.

Aider can answer hundreds of questions a business owner might have, including:

• "Hey Aider, how much revenue did I make this week?"
• "Who showed up for work today?"
• "Aider, get someone at Westpac to contact me" (coming soon)
• "How many Uber Eats sales have I made this month?"
• "What were my top selling products today?"

Constantly learning and growing its knowledge base, Aider can also schedule notifications, put reminders in the user's calendar, and will deliver trends analysis and benchmarking.

Aider also provides "built in" connections to weather, events and news apps.

Key Benefits:

• Immediate, easy access to business information in one place accessible simply by asking a question in natural language.
• Enables fast, data-led decisions
• Aider proactively provides actionable insights based on custom business data
• Users can take action directly from Aider to improve their business
• Growing list of business and built-in app connection

¹ https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/advocacy/Frequently-Asked-Questions-Small-Business-2018.pdf?source=post_page

CONTACT:
Kari Viccars
Head of Marketing
Aider
+64 21 086 12262
[email protected]

SOURCE Aider