At the ITAPA 2024 conference, Jakub Linhart from the company Mama AI presented how "virtual workers" are transforming research, services, and media. The company, which won the AI Awards 2024 for the recruiter Adéla for Armáda ČR, showcased concrete projects with measurable results. They also addressed why they are called Mama AI.
Who is Mama AI and why "Mama"
Mama AI was founded in 2021 as a team of approximately 25 experts who had previously spent two decades in IBM Research in the areas of artificial intelligence, conversational systems, translation, and speech technologies. The split with IBM was amicable and the company continues to cooperate with it, as well as with Red Hat, Google, Microsoft, AWS, and Nvidia. Thanks to this, it has deep insight into technologies and can build solutions precisely to clients' needs.
The company won the AI Awards for the virtual recruiter Adéla and is often seen in the Czech Republic as a key AI player. The name "Mama" has multiple layers: the acronym Man–Machine as well as Machine–Man, the universal word "mama" as the beginning of communication, and the metaphor of a "mother" sending "daughter" products into the world with the support of an investor. The goal is technology that naturally mediates contact between human and machine.
Virtual workers in practice: from the laboratory to the insurance company
Mama AI’s solutions are built from cooperating agents that can run on‑premises as well as in the cloud, process voice, text, or documents, and communicate with each other. In drug research they created an assistant which, when given a formula, finds similar molecules in a database of about 1.5 billion records and predicts properties such as toxicity and solubility. What used to take weeks of laboratory tests is shortened to minutes. The product naturally attracts interest from investors and research teams.
In non-life insurance, the system processes medical reports via OCR, creates a timeline of events, determines a diagnosis, and maps it to internal payout tables. According to the presentation, in diagnosis classification it achieved an accuracy of 97.7% for 60% of cases, which surpassed even human claims adjusters and enabled a high degree of automation. In a bank’s IT help desk, meanwhile, an assistant, upon receiving a ticket, searches for similar resolved cases and offers a solution that is correct on the first try in 87% of cases. The result is a significantly shorter time to resolution and relief for teams.
Voice, empathy, and boundaries: when AI accompanies
The virtual advisor "Michal" for ADHD is deliberately limited to verified materials to minimize hallucinations and avoid getting "carried away" off topic. If a question is unrelated, he politely declines it and, if necessary, recommends a specialist; it is not a clinical psychologist, but a form of initial first aid. The prototype was created in about a week and was also reviewed by a professor of psychology, who evaluated it as at a level that would pass a third-year exam. The visualization is simpler due to the demands of live real-time rendering.
Mama AI’s synthetic voices are used by almost all nationwide TV stations in the Czech Republic and by several radio stations; in the demo all the voices were artificial. The host Bára "Hači" has a digital twin, Hachiko, which hosted on the radio even while she was participating in the show Big Brother. The company is also testing companion forms of interaction for seniors, for example a phone game with "animals", which has proved very popular. In a project involving medication monitoring, a virtual worker called seniors, reminded them of medicines, and created a surprisingly strong sense of closeness.
