The International Society of Automation sees Mimo as a way to expand membership and grow globally.
The International Society of Automation has created an AI-driven large language model (LLM) that’s designed to provide support for current members, attract new ones, and strengthen its international connections.
The LLM, named Mimo, was formally announced on July 11 but has been available since late June, said Jason Wampler, CAE, ISA Managing Director of IT. (The name Mimo is a reference to the engineering term “multiple input, multiple output.”) Mimo is trained on material from Pub Hub, ISA’s repository of proprietary information—white papers, articles, webinars, and more—to answer user questions relevant to the field.
ISA leadership began discussions about creating Mimo late last year. “We already had a knowledge base—our file-protected document-rights platform that shares our white papers, our standards, our articles, and so forth,” Wampler said. “We were asked [by the ISA board] to try to find better ways to surface that.”
Non-members receive only a limited number of answers from Mimo and shorter answers than what members receive.
One way Mimo helps with that effort is its ability to quickly translate materials, which helps with ISA’s goals of expanding its international reach. “Mimo can do basic research and help users compare one standard to another, and being able to do that if you ask it in Spanish as well is a game-changer,” Wampler said. “Now we have a constituency that knows we have the standards and content they’re looking for, even if English is not their first language.”
Mimo operates under a freemium model, in which non-members receive only a limited number of answers, and shorter answers than what members receive. In part that’s to help ensure that proprietary content isn’t used to feed large public-facing AI tools such as ChatGPT. (ISA bars users from repurposing its content in that way, and partnered with the tech company Betty Bot on the overall design and security elements of the LLM.) And it’s also designed to encourage those most engaged in automation-industry technology to become members. “Our CEO, Claire Fallon, has been very strong on making sure our IP doesn’t walk out the door,” Wampler said. “And we want to make sure that members get the best experience possible. When a non-member hits the site, we want to try to entice them to become a member.”
It’s too early for ISA to say if that strategy is successful. But Wampler said that usage of Mimo to access Pub Hub content was competitive with non-LLM searches on its content in June, when the tool hadn’t even been formally announced.
Beyond international outreach and potential membership growth, Wampler said he’s hopeful that Mimo can help ISA conduct gap analysis around its content, using data on the questions people ask it to help develop more content responding to those questions.
“What Mimo does for is us, is it provides us with a faster on-ramp for newer content,” he said. “If we don’t have a lot of material on a particular topic, a committee can start working on a white paper or come up with an education session at our next conference. I see that as a value-add to what LLMs can do.”
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