Pienso Inc., a New York-based startup that spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last year, is tackling arguably the biggest obstacle to artificial intelligence adoption in the enterprise: the shortage of people versed in applying the technology.

Pienso’s mission is supported by $2.1 million in outside capital that was raised via a seed round announced this morning. Eniac Ventures, a fund that took in $100 million earlier this year to back early-stage startups, provided the biggest chunk of the investment. Fitbit Inc. backer SoftTech VC, Indicator Ventures and E14 Fund contributed the rest.

The cash will help Pienso ramp up operations. The startup’s plans revolve around its Intelligent Development Environment, a platform that seeks to fill the AI skills gap by automating the complex hands-on work involved in building machine learning models.

Instead of writing code, users of Pienso’s software can create an AI system with relatively straightforward graphical controls. Pienso hides the nitty-gritty details behind what it calls Lens, an abstracted interface for customizing the behavior of a model.

The platform also provides features for handling the training phase of AI projects, which involves putting a model to work on analyzing sample data reflective of the information it would be expected to handle in production. These practice sessions help achieve the desired level of accuracy before deployment. According to Pienso, users can check that their models draw the right lessons during training and make tweaks as needed.

The startup’s main target audience is the so-called domain experts who typically set the goals for an AI project. If a firm wishes to, say, use machine learning to automate the task of identifying potential customers, that person could be a representative of the sales department.

Allowing these users to take over the development process, or even just a part of it, can significantly reduce the dependence on a company’s technical personnel. This is particularly valuable for traditional enterprises that may struggle to find enough AI professionals in today’s competitive hiring climate. Alphabet Inc., Microsoft Corp. and other tech giants are aggressively recruiting machine learning talent to support their internal projects.

Reducing the number of personnel required for a project has the added benefit of lowering overhead. Pienso, along with the other startups working to ease AI development, could thus help to make the technology accessible for a broader range of organizations.

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