ZÜRICH, SWITZERLAND – At GITEX Global 2025 in Dubai, two AI innovators – Squirro and Shaffra – offered a glimpse of how AI is driving digital interactions to evolve beyond text boxes and chat windows.
Their live demonstration featured Shaffra’s conversational avatar, powered by Squirro’s enterprise-grade AI platform, showing how lifelike digital agents could soon become trusted interfaces to complex business data as organizations integrate AI into their operations.
The collaboration highlighted an increasingly important idea in enterprise AI: that the next wave of digital assistants won’t just look and sound human – they’ll understand context, respect compliance boundaries, and operate securely across an organization’s knowledge landscape.
The Enterprise Gap: From Chatbots to Colleagues
By now, enterprises have spent years experimenting with conversational AI, but most implementations still stop short of real value. Typical chatbots can answer common questions but continue to struggle with navigating intricacies of enterprise data or handling sensitive information responsibly.
Squirro and Shaffra set out to address three of the most persistent barriers:
- Data fragmentation: Critical knowledge often sits in disconnected systems like SAP, Oracle, and internal databases, beyond the reach of conventional AI models.
- Hallucinations: Generative models can fabricate details, a risk that’s unacceptable in regulated sectors such as finance, compliance, or government.
- Security and governance: Enterprise AI must respect permissions, ensure data segregation, and maintain full auditability – non-negotiable for most organizations.
The Secure Brain Behind the Avatar
The GITEX demo showed how pairing Shaffra’s lifelike avatar with Squirro’s AI platform is able to bridge these gaps.
Squirro’s system acted as a secure reasoning layer, providing the avatar with access to verified, permissioned enterprise data. Its retrieval augmented generation (RAG) ensured that every response was based on factual sources, complete with traceable references — turning conversations into reliable, auditable interactions.
In regulated industries, robust data control is non-negotiable. The joint architecture supports this, with Shaffra offering full deployment of its ecosystem on-premise or within a local cloud infrastructure, thus ensuring complete data sovereignty and compliance with regional regulations—a principle that aligns directly with Squirro’s secure-by-design platform.
Unlocking Real-World Applications
The Squirro–Shaffra approach suggests practical uses across industries:
- Operational Intelligence: An AI “colleague” that can query live data from multiple back-end systems like Oracle andSAP, providing context-rich answers on finance, operations, or risk, all in conversational form.
- Customer Engagement: Shaffra’s avatars can move beyond simple scripts, enabling secure, human-like digital agents for government or regulated industries that deliver compliant, data-backed information to end users.
- HR and Workforce Automation: The joint solution is poised to transform AI-driven recruitment, offering a digital assistant that helps employees access HR policies or onboarding information safely, maintaining full data privacy and compliance.
A Glimpse at the Future of Human–AI Interaction
The demo that Squirro and Shaffra presented at GITEX is an early example of how trusted, transparent intelligence could underpin more natural interactions between people and enterprise systems.
In a landscape crowded with generative AI experiments, this partnership underscored a more sustainable path forward: AI that’s explainable, secure, and designed to work within the realities of modern business.
