How Indy-area businesses use AI to train employees

Indianapolis boasts a handful of interesting startups focused on developing artificial-intelligence-powered business tools. One of them has used this cutting-edge technology to create an AI adviser that could increase the productivity of one of the state’s oldest economic drivers—its vast industrial sector.

The Carmel-based company, Murray Mentor, has created a voice-in-the-ear AI program that allows novice factory employees to tap the expertise of some of the most-seasoned employees—even if those employees retired long ago.

“Let’s say I’m a press operator, fresh out of high school, with a year’s experience,” said Mark Gordon, Murray Mentor’s co-founder and chief product officer. “I don’t know what I’m doing, and the old-timers aren’t around to help me. So you put AirPods in your ears and say, ‘Hey, Murray, this stamping press isn’t working. What do I do?’ And Murray has a conversation with me about what to do.”

The system was designed to address a problem rearing its head at countless manufacturing concerns: the mass retirement of older factory workers, and with it, the loss of an enormous amount of institutional knowledge. It’s of particular importance in Indiana, where manufacturing makes up a quarter of the state’s annual gross domestic product, according to a recent report by Conexus Indiana, a manufacturing and logistics initiative of the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership.

“We’re facing a retiring workforce tsunami,” Gordon said. “There aren’t enough people left on the factory floor who know how to keep the machines running. The junior people need more help.”

Murray tackles the problem by conducting extensive interviews with veteran employees and pairing knowledge gained from those with a proprietary database developed from years of studying general factory operations and machinery. Documentation about a client company’s specific equipment and processes is then added to the mix.

“The combination of those two things is really all we need,” Gordon said.

Though Murray Mentor officially launched only late last month, it’s already raised its first funding round, expected to bring in $850,000 to $1 million from five investors, including Cincinnati-based Fireroad Ventures and Indianapolis-based Start Something Ventures. It also has a handful of early customers, including Indiana Furniture. Management sees manufacturing, in sectors ranging from food and beverages to automotive to chemical manufacturing, as fertile ground for AI applications.

“It seems like everybody’s focused on things like financial service AI startups or health care,” Gordon said. “So the boring industries like manufacturing probably don’t get the first look out of Silicon Valley-funded startups.”

Turning data into decisions

Murray isn’t the only Indy-area company developing specialized, business-oriented AI advisers. Across central Indiana, other firms are building and deploying tools that can sift through vast amounts of company-specific information and either synthesize it into new products or glean one needle of specific information out of a haystack of data.

AI advisers are specialized software agents trained on a specific company’s internal knowledge, plus general industry data. Unlike generalized consumer tools such as ChatGPT, these programs answer questions and handle routine tasks only inside a specific informational domain. Companies use them to, among other tasks, analyze data, forecast outcomes and capture institutional knowledge that might otherwise be lost.

Bitter personal experience led to the creation of Indy-based ConverSight.ai, and its AI agent, Athena. The company’s co-founder and CEO, Ganesh Gandhieswaran, previously led a data analytics team at a New Jersey-based tech services and consulting firm. He and his team used mountains of data to assemble voluminous reports for their clients. The problem was, the client still had to dig through page after page of information to find one specific data point.

Athena tackles this problem by sorting through a firm’s proprietary data and quickly extracting specific answers to specific questions—and doing it verbally. The company has raised about $15 million in venture funding since its founding in 2017.

“Let’s say you’re in a meeting with a customer or preparing for one,” Gandhieswaran said. “You need information, but you don’t have it. That’s where Athena comes into play. Just have a conversation with the AI and get insights instantly.”

Given Gandhieswaran’s (and many of his employees’) background in supply chain logistics, Athena is fine-tuned to solve problems in that particular field. ConverSight.ai spent the last seven or eight years building a formidable base of general knowledge about supply chains, studying and incorporating everything from articles about the field to catalogs of industry-specific jargon that might vary from one sector of the industry—or even one specific company—to another. That base of information amounts to 3 to 5 terabytes of data.

During the first weeks of “onboarding” with a new customer, that client’s company-specific data is layered on, creating a tailored version of Athena.

“We’re not giving clients an empty Athena,” Gandhieswaran said. “We’re giving an Athena with terabytes of supply chain knowledge already.”

Since landing its first paying customer in 2017, ConverSight.ai has built a client list of hundreds that includes global manufacturers, oil and gas companies, and a lot of logistics firms.

Automating the marketing grind

While Murray Mentor preserves the expertise of retiring machinists and ConverSight.ai helps executives move mountains of supply chain data, another Indy-area startup is carving out a niche in the marketing department. Backstroke Inc., co-founded by longtime marketer R.J. Talyor, uses AI to generate customized email campaigns for e-commerce retailers. The idea is to streamline a process that, while a major sales driver, nevertheless consumes a monumental amount of staff time.

“Every e-commerce retailer sends email campaigns to drive revenue for their business,” Talyor said. “It accounts for between 25% and 40% of their revenue. Those campaigns are created by a human. Backstroke generates [easy to use] and 1-to-1 campaigns with the guide of a human, rather than the human having to take the time to do it.”

To make the system effective, Talyor and his wife, Allyson Talyor, a data scientist and another of the company’s four co-founders, spent years helping to educate it by compiling a sprawling proprietary dataset—they signed up for every e-commerce email marketing campaign they could find.

“Our initial dataset had 12,000 brands that we signed up for individually,” he said. “And with those 12,000 brands, now we have around 4-1/2 years of data.”

By pairing that dataset with a specific retailer’s brand guidelines, Backstroke can generate email campaigns in minutes. The company now has more than two dozen clients, ranging from national brands to local startups. The lineup includes Los Angeles-based PSD Underwear and Indianapolis-based sports-themed clothing retailer Homefield Apparel. Since launching last year, Backstroke has completed two funding rounds for nearly $5 million.

‘The deployment side’

Local entrepreneurs aren’t trying to create the next ChatGPT. For them, building a niche AI for a particular task or specific industry seems like smart play.

“For large language models, the winners have already been determined,” said Ting Gootee, president and CEO of TechPoint, which promotes the tech industry in Indiana. “It’s Microsoft, it’s OpenAI, it’s Google. We are not going to be building a company like that here in Indiana. But where we can win is really on the deployment side. Because deployment can be sector-specific, geography-specific, application-specific.”

A recent TechPoint report on Indiana’s AI adoption rate and workforce needs frames artificial intelligence not as an emerging technology but as a transformative force that’s already reshaping entire industries. The survey found that Indiana ranks just 35th among states in raw AI adoption. But when adjusted for the state’s manufacturing-heavy economy, Indiana leaps to sixth.

“I think we should have an aspirational goal in terms of where AI meets the physical world, by providing AI-enabled assistant technologies to traditional industries,” Gootee said. “We have a lot of strength in areas such as agriculture, manufacturing, logistics and life sciences.”

She noted that while Indiana isn’t a nationally recognized AI hub, its manufacturing base and globally significant pharmaceutical and life sciences companies could make it stand out. TechPoint’s report points out that Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Co. was recently named the world’s most AI-ready pharma company, thanks to its heavy investment in the technology for drug discovery and innovation.

The broader labor market is already shifting. National job postings requiring AI skills have surged 440% since 2023, according to the report, with demand spanning not only IT roles but also non-tech fields such as marketing and operations. Employers in Indiana ranked AI and machine learning as their top critical skills gap over the next three to five years, followed by data analytics and big data.

“AI-enabled tech tools could help transform traditional industries here,” Gootee said. “Not only just transforming but actually making our industry more competitive from a global perspective.”

Looking ahead

For startups like Murray Mentor, ConverSight.ai and Backstroke, the business cases for niche AI advisers seem clear. But building trust in such products remains a hurdle. Training even a specialized model requires vast amounts of data, and winning over companies that depend on reliable systems is no small task. Still, Backstroke has expanded rapidly from pilot projects to signed contracts; ConverSight.ai is broadening Athena beyond supply chains, into sales and finance; and Murray Mentor is deploying its AI to its first customers.

TechPoint warns that Indiana cannot afford to lag. The state’s prime-age workforce is expected to plateau in the coming years, meaning productivity gains might be the only way to sustain growth. Employers surveyed by TechPoint said upskilling and reskilling existing employees will be more critical than hiring college and high school graduates, with priority training areas including AI productivity tools, prompt engineering and business intelligence.

“We know that cutting-edge global industries based here are already investing heavily in adopting such solutions,” Gootee said. “The opportunity is in how we drive more AI-assisted tools into those industry opportunities.

“Indiana is a manufacturing state. So when you see companies like Murray Mentor working to capture and pass on critical expertise, that’s an example of how AI can serve the industries that matter most to us.”•