Based on AEM's patent-pending research, Haystack enables users to ask analytical questions about large textual datasets and get useful and explainable answers—requiring up to 20x less work than traditional approaches.
How Haystack Works
Haystack is designed to make it easier for organizations to use AI to find what works, reduce costs, and improve services.
Haystack users upload and ask questions about mission-critical data, such as survey responses, public comments, and reporting. Haystack then leads users through each step—powering analysis but also stopping for inputs where needed or directing attention to analysis that needs to be double-checked.
“Our customers are sometimes surprised to learn that popular chatbot and LLM-based products can be risky for analysis,” said Mark Blevins, Senior Executive Vice President at AEM Corporation. “They can provide wildly incorrect answers: they misunderstand the assignment, skip sources, or overstate their confidence, and they make it challenging or impossible to check their work.
Key Differentiators and Capabilities
Unlike other AI-powered programs, where errors are hard to anticipate and even harder to find, Haystack keeps users in control.
Human-AI Partnership: Haystack engages users at key points of the analysis workflow, preventing low-confidence AI outputs from going unnoticed.
Multiple Approaches: Haystack seamlessly integrates multiple AI/ML methods for the tasks where they excel—enhancing reliability, speed, and explainability.
Usability: With an intuitive interface, Haystack only requires that users are knowledgeable in the source data. It doesn’t require users to know coding or data science.
Full Traceability: Users can export completed analyses with clear documentation of sources, AI analysis, and reviews.
Based on typed questions, Haystack supports fully traceable analysis:
- Filtering: Find data that meet specific criteria
- Math: Perform calculations using data embedded in unstructured text
- Clustering: Find key themes at the right level of analysis
- Classification: Match user-supplied labels to a set of inputs
Common Use Cases
Analysis can be applied to a range of datasets, including survey responses, public comments, reporting, notes, transcripts, articles, and web pages. Examples include:
For a survey dataset: What concerns did respondents with an overall rating higher than 3 share about the proposed plans?
For a set of notes from UX research: What ideas did users with some demonstrated degree of policy expertise share about how to improve the workflow at [a specific step]?
For a set of progress reports: What is the total number of employees who have benefited from this initiative?
For a project dataset: Which of [a set of labels with definitions] should be applied to categorize these efforts?
Flexible Pricing Model
While Haystack is available through a licensing model, the product can be bundled with expert AI support for fee-for-performance pricing if the impact of insights will translate into direct and measurable business performance.
Early Praise
"Haystack is able to provide insights for data at the scale of a government agency," according to a federal Chief Data Officer. "We see great potential in using Haystack to reduce staff burden, tackle new and ambitious analysis projects, and help to measure and manage for the highest level of impact."
“Haystack doesn’t require users to know coding or data science,” said Mat Morgan, DataWorks Lead. “Once they go through the process for the first time, it’s fun to see them start to explore the possibilities: What other questions could I ask my data?”
Join the Waitlist
Haystack is now available for organizations to get more value from their customer, project, and program data. This includes federal, state, and local government programs looking for a commercial tool to reduce red tape and improve operational agility.
AEM will expand access to new customers through an application process. Enterprise customers during limited release will have access to personalized support.
Sign up to receive notice when Haystack is available for your organization by visiting haystack.aemcorp.com.
About DataWorks
DataWorks by AEM Corporation is a cloud-based software suite focused on addressing common enterprise pain points. Flagship product Haystack is a workflow tool that helps analysts efficiently derive insights from large datasets. DataWorks solutions deliver clarity and confidence in AI-driven decision-making. For more information on DataWorks or other AEM Corporation services, please visit aemcorp.com/ai.
