Veteran artificial intelligence company Next IT Corp. announced today that it’s launching a suite of development tools and data libraries for businesses that want to build their own conversational AI.

Next IT has been in the conversational AI business since before it was cool, and now the company will be offering 10 of its own proprietary AI tools to developers, including a full library of intent data.

According to Next IT President Tracy Malingo, most businesses recognize the value they can gain from AI, but many of them run into unexpected challenges when they try to build something themselves. While hundreds of virtual assistant and chatbot companies have popped up over the last year or two, Malingo said most of these AI tools are trained with very basic information, such as a top 10 FAQ or a list of common help search terms — in other words, answers customers could easily find themselves. These bots might technically qualify as conversational AI, but the questions they can answer are extremely limited.

“Those questions don’t necessarily drive value because those are known entities,” Malingo told SiliconANGLE. Malingo explained that the real value for conversational AI comes from contextual understanding, and that takes data — lots of data. “Not understanding what customers are asking about or where you have risk, where you can scale or enhance value, are really the significant gaps companies can run into.”

Next IT’s newly available Alme Library allows companies to train their AI to not only understand what customers are saying but also to understand what those questions mean for the business as a whole. According to Next IT, the Alme Library includes 90,000 business intents and 165,000 unique actions across 11 industries. Alme’s data is made up of more than 20 million real-world labeled user questions, which can be used to train AI to answer detailed questions that might stump less complicated bots.

In addition to the intents library, Next IT is also offering nine other AI development tools, with more tools releasing in the future. Next IT will offer these tools individually, so developers can pick and choose what they need without having to pay for tools they will not use. The new tools include:

• Cue AI: Analyzes unstructured data to determine the most valuable areas to deploy AI
• Prompt AI: Creates business intent categories using natural language understanding
• Trace AI: Identifies trends, risk, and improvement opportunities
• Alme Conversation Platform: An extensible runtime AI platform
• Context IQ Engine: Next IT’s flagship engine that uses natural language processing to support full conversational attributes
• Prompt Predict Engine: A self-learning AI engine for implementations that do not require full personalization and contextual integration
• Author AI: A natural language generation content management system
• Conversation Designer: A tool controls the visual design for conversations between users and AI
• Alme Lab: A visual IDE for modeling the precise language a bot needs to understand

Malingo said that Next IT has “skinned a lot of knees and elbows” trying to not only figure out how to make AI work, but also how to make it work at scale. With Next IT’s new tools and libraries, Malingo said, businesses will be able to skip that difficult learning process and jump straight to building an AI that meets their needs.

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