Do you know Ask Mona?
What do Ask Mona and elqano have in common?
Discover Ask Mona’s success story, and how this fine example of the dynamism of the AI sector in France inspires us to boost the development of corporate culture.
Ask Mona is a French startup, created in 2017 by Marion Carré and Valentin Schmite, which has completed this autonomous 2021 a fundraising of 2 million euros with Bpifrance, Saga Invest, an investment fund specializing in art and new technologies.
What it offers: an artificial intelligence service that facilitates access to culture to the general public, and offers new possibilities to its professionals. We can’t help but wonder!
ASK MONA IS A CHATBOT THAT CHATS WITH ITS USERS TO RECOMMEND FREE PERSONALIZED CULTURAL OUTINGS, FROM CLASSICAL THEATRE TO STREET ART TOURS, ASK MONA ALWAYS HAS THE RIGHT IDEA!
– Ask Mona website
How does it work?
Ask Mona is a digital personal assistant available 24/7, which can help us find the cultural events or outings that match our current desires, very easily and according to different criteria (date, price, location, etc…).
This service demonstrates the value of AI in providing access to culture, but also, by extension, to all forms of culture, particularly in companies.
What do Ask Mona and elqano have in common?
#1 – Artificial Intelligence
The main point in common is that both have developed a service based on artificial intelligence.
The AI market is currently expanding rapidly. All sectors of activity are developing their own exploitation of this technology, which has not finished surprising us by the multiplicity of its potential applications.
In the case of Ask Mona, the service offered is twofold: on the one hand, end users looking for information on cultural activities, and on the other hand, the structures and institutions offering culture. The latter, Ask Mona’s clients, are proposing an offer and are transmitters of information. Their objective thanks to Ask Mona: to reach a wider and more qualified public in relation to their cultural offer.
elqano applies this same “recipe” and pursues this same objective: to create a link, to connect needs with solutions. In the case of the company, it is finally a scheme quite similar to that of the culture which applies: collaborators seek information and others hold knowledge.
The connection between individuals and individuals, individuals and contents, that is what is made possible thanks to Ask Mona in the Culture and to elqano in the company world.
#2 – The conversation
Both have relied on a chatbot. Even if search engines are still relevant, the conversational form is more popular than ever.
At elqano, we observe in our studies and among our clients that in the working world, the preferred modes of communication and information retrieval, and considered the most effective, are company chat and informal conversation at the coffee machine!
Usage, whether in the professional sphere or in our everyday lives, has evolved.
Today more than ever, we realise that what works best is to transpose our real/physical relationships into the digital space.
The case of the informal conversation in front of the coffee machine in the office, or the dinner with friends, are perfect examples of what we are looking for today in the development of digital services. These life sequences are simple moments of information exchange. Who is currently working on this topic? What film is on at the moment? So many questions that are answered in these informal discussions.
Ask Mona and elqano have therefore understood this and present themselves as (almost magical!) amplifiers of these behaviours, in the cultural sector for one, and in companies for the other.
In the case of companies, there is a huge stake in capturing this informal knowledge. Indeed, just like formal knowledge, informal knowledge constitutes a large part of the knowledge and know-how of companies, but also a large part of the internal culture of each company.
#3 – Accessibility
Both have set themselves the mission of facilitating access to culture, knowledge and learning for all!
One of the major challenges to which artificial intelligence combined with a chatbot responds is indeed that of accessibility.
Whether it’s finding one’s way through the mass of French cultural offerings or accessing the right information in the workplace, the solutions proposed by elqano and Ask Mona are establishing themselves as seekers who find more relevant answers, more quickly and who create new bridges.
The Ask Mona startup, which is already well established on the French cultural market with some fifty clients – including the Théâtre du Châtelet, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris Musées, the Grand Palais, the Musée des Augustins (Toulouse) and the Centre Pompidou (Metz) – is looking to expand internationally and is aiming for a portfolio of 1,000 cultural institutions by 2025!
Some links to go further:
Ask Mona website
Chronicle on Europe 1
Article Frenchweb
Article AI News