By Bianca Moore
While many people worry about a fictionalized vision of the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI), others look to harness its powers to become more efficient. One such company is Seek AI, a startup aimed at fundamentally revolutionizing how professionals interact with data through advanced AI agents. Essential to their efforts has been product designer Eric Wu, who has helped them in reimagining their website, app input, and chat interface.
Wu came on board during the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) stage of the Seeks AI application production, and has been pivotal in its many new iterations. Having attended Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Wu has an extensive background in industrial and product design, which he has put to use during his time at Seek AI. From first joining the team to its eventual release the product designer oversaw multiple versions of the app ensuring it met the company’s vision while benefiting the users.
Seek AI has carved out a niche for itself in the tech industry by utilizing AI agents to streamline data queries. The RISD graduate helps to break it down. “AI agents are large language models that are tailored to handle specific tasks,” Wu explains. “An agentic workflow involves grouping multiple agents together to achieve a final outcome as opposed to having one large model do all the work.”
What Wu and Seek have done is make it more efficient for data analysts and knowledge workers to go from questions to answers. Wu sought to “offer both the ease of use of a chat interface and the precision of a data application” to those who interacted with their revolutionary application. He approaches product design in an atomic and fundamental manner, focusing on “scalability and iterability.”
Besides the web application, Wu also worked on the marketing and branding front of Seek. The product designer acknowledges, “I have designed three major refreshes for the website.” At the beginning he collaborated with a design agency on the initial branding and visuals. From there Wu took the reins and evolved the website to “tell the story of the product,” as the Seek web application got built out
When it comes to website design, audience and marketing feedback motivate Wu’s design decisions. The last redesign of the website came off user feedback for the first layout, prompting Wu to go back to the drawing board. “We have developed a darker theme with stronger typefaces which help focus on the first impression.”
Through Wu’s direction, Seek AI’s interface focuses on an input-driven chat experience that puts the user at the center of every interaction. “When I first joined, we didn’t yet know how to design an end-user application for data-heavy AI,” he admits, “however, we have made considerable progress since then.” Wu’s hard work has seen Seek appear on NFX’s Hot 75 list which singles out top companies in the field of generative AI.
So what exactly does Seek AI do and why is it causing such a commotion?
In simple terms, Seek helps professionals ask questions on a chat based interface and get data driven answers. Unlike the popular AI engines the general public uses, Seek specializes in data questions such as “what were last quarter’s sales trends in region X?” Taking information stored in a multitude of datasets, the application produces easy to understand responses that summarize the data requested. This all works in a friendly chat program that takes little to no technical prowess to understand and interact with.
The importance of this application can’t be overlooked. It helps to drive efficiency through the data analysis that used to take up valuable time of specialized data teams. Thanks to Wu’s dedication to functional design, the application resolves the underlying complexities of data workflows with its engineering. Wu’s “background at RISD with front-end coding” empowered him with the necessary engineering intuition to “optimize each component for implementation.”
What sets Seek apart is its dedication to the end user. Central to this focus has been Eric Wu, a product designer who always has the user in mind. With companies expanding in ways they never thought possible, there has been a gap in the market for a simple to use AI-driven data analysis application. Efficiency, always a paramount in business, has been pushed to a whole new level thanks to AI.
With Wu in charge of product design, Seek AI stands out for valuing ease of use. Seek AI will continue to innovate solutions that empower both users and businesses to harness the full power of their data with confidence.
