The community of Vieux Fort will soon benefit from an artificial intelligence (AI) call center.

The call center aims to improve the real estate industry in the United States. The Saint Lucia operation will provide support in ensuring that the AI system is effective. The initiative is expected to generate almost 100 jobs at its initial launch, set for August.

Co-founder of OJO Labs, David Rubin, made a presentation to the Cabinet of Ministers and Invest Saint Lucia (ISL) on March 14.

“We have some experience in my previous company employing Saint Lucians on the north side of the island,” said Mr. Rubin. “We employed 150 Saint Lucians in mostly call center operations and one of things that really struck us with Saint Lucians was how good they were with computers and how good they were at multi-tasking.

“The latest company we have started, OJO Labs, is really at the forefront of what we call artificial intelligence. We are building the first automated intelligence assistant for the real estate industry. The initial industry is real estate but it actually has applications across different industries. So it’s basically technology and neural networks that can respond to consumers’ questions and inquiries and do that mostly automatically.

“[Consequently] we need to employ artificial intelligence trainers and so these AI trainers will be tagging communications from consumers and teaching the machine what the intent of those consumers are.

"Based on our experience employing Saint Lucians, we think they would be excellent at this job. We are going to combine that job with some opportunities on the call center side, and think that we will be able to employ quite a few people in the south.”

Minister in the Office of the Prime Minister with responsibility for Commerce, Industry, Investment, Enterprise Development and Consumer Affairs, Hon. Bradly Felix, spoke about the quality of the investment.

“What really struck me was the talent that David identified in the people of Saint Lucia as it related to their ability to adapt, and work very skillfully on computer applications,” Minister Felix said.

OJO Labs has expressed its commitment to provide world class training to Saint Lucian employees in leading edge technology domains. This, the company hopes, will showcase Saint Lucia and help to grow the local call center industry.

The government, ISL, and OJO Labs have been working on this initiative over the last few months.