The memorandum follows FIT CTU's long-term efforts to support the emergence of technology startups. It helps students and graduates turn their ideas into real businesses. The faculty concludes such cooperation with the aim of connecting the academic environment with practice and creating space for the development of innovative technology projects.
"At FIT CTU, we have long supported students and graduates in being able to implement their ideas in practice. Whisper is a great example of a project that was created on the basis of high-quality technical education and students' determination and was able to find practical use of modern artificial intelligence in real business," says Ing. Jakub Novák, Vice-Dean for Cooperation with Industry.
The startup Whisper was created with the vision of building an AI operating system for e-commerce. Its goal is to automate the daily operations of online stores - from communication with customers to working with orders to internal processes between the e-shop, suppliers and carriers.
The first step in this vision is the so-called "AI customer journey", i.e. intelligent support for the customer during the purchase. Whisper is developing an AI expert assistant that understands the products of a specific e-shop in detail, including technical documentation, manuals, or warranty conditions. Thanks to this, it provides customers with accurate answers, recommends suitable products, and helps merchants with customer support automation.
“We want to add artificial intelligence to real processes and solve everyday problems of e-shoppers. Our goal is to gradually automate an increasing part of the operations so that Whisper one day becomes the autonomous control brain of e-commerce,” says the startup’s co-founder Vojtěch Paukner.
In addition to chatbots, Whisper’s technology now also helps with email communication and the automation of tasks related to orders, such as changing delivery addresses or managing customer requests. The startup is also preparing AI search for e-shops that will be able to actively help customers with product selection based on context and additional questions.
FIT CTU has been developing cooperation with industrial partners on research, innovation, and educational projects for a long time. The partnership program is focused not only on supporting joint activities and technological development, but also on building the partners' brand in the academic environment and beyond through media outputs and popularization activities. The cooperation also includes connecting companies with students and graduates of the faculty, for example within the framework of the COFIT career fair, which annually creates a space for talents to meet with technology companies. In addition, student startups can exhibit here with their own stand, reach out to new colleagues for their teams and inspire students to establish their own startups.