The Keenious team in Croatia.


“Not many people in AI are thinking like this because it’s so tempting to just give that answer. And in many sectors, giving a right answer immediately might mean saving a lot of time and money while allowing you to just go onto the next thing.”


He said there were already citation tools that give immediate answers: “You can just select a piece of text and say ‘create a citation’ and it just automatical- ly adds one in at that point. There’s no process of the user making, writing or thinking on their own. We could make that too, but we don’t want to do it, because you’re not left with anything as a person. What is the purpose of a thesis? It’s not actually the thesis that, in most cases, is just going to go on a shelf. The purpose was the process of writing it and what you become, who you are after writing it.”


This approach has many positives from a business point of view. One is that Keenious isn’t competing with ChatGPT. “If we’re trying to be a better ChatGPT we’re going to lose, there are thousands of companies trying to do that.” But there are ethical motives too: “Personally I want to be able to sleep at night. I want people to be better off using Keenious and to know I didn’t help plagiarism or help people cheat. When AI can answer every question you wonder what’s the point of getting an education. But why doesn’t a teacher give you the


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right answer right away? It’s because you want a teacher who helps you discover the answers for yourself. I’d be happy if the AI is enhancing education and not contributing to the breakdown of education.”


Angel librarian?


Frode says Librarians have played a vital role in making his start-up viable and keeping the sector attractive to new technology investment.


“We come under the Ed Tech umbrella and there aren’t so many investors in this space. It’s not like fintech – which is financial tech with banking – which is huge and has a lot of investors. Ed Tech has some very different characteristics: it may be more conservative, moving less fast, and there are a lot of decisions that potential customers (universities) have to make. These can be seen as dangers by investors.


“But if you get a good reputation and have happy customers, they are not afraid of sharing this with other similar universities. This is something that is very specific to this sector. It means our customers recommend us to others. In a competitive space you wouldn’t often get this help from your customers. Purchas- ers are hesitant because it’s such a big user base and they don’t want to buy it until they are sure. I’d say it’s tricky to get into this space, but if you build relationships and keep your customers


happy then it has a lot of benefits. It’s a lot more sticky. It’s not as volatile. You can’t just be ‘fail fast’ which is normal in a lot of companies. But if you’re an investor who is not used to this you may be not aware of these benefits, and from the outside it can seem a bit slow.”


Library role in start-up journey Frode explained how library buyers played a vital part by investing time and effort in his start-up, and then alleviating the risk for other potential investors by being transparent and supportive.


“The first organisation to take the risk with Keenious was The Research Council of Norway,” Frode says. “They had a great programme where you could get a million Norwegian Kroner (about €100,000) as a student just out of university, it was a very specif- ic programme to start up something based on what you had been working on during your master’s thesis.” Keenious got the funding after build- ing a prototype and doing market re- search by “going up to students sitting at cafes at LSE and in California and asking ‘what do you think about this?’” The funding enabled Frode and his Co-founder Anders Rapp to build a better prototype that got the attention of the University of Tromso, where Frode and his co-founder are alumni.


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