Oxylabs, a premium web intelligence collection platform, announced the launch of a new AI-driven solution, OxyCopilot, that is designed to help its users save time and money spent on complex web data acquisition tasks. The industry’s first artificial intelligence (AI) assistant for scraping is a part of Oxylabs’ Web Scraper API, an all-in-one public web data collection platform.
Built on a combination of AI and proprietary Oxylabs’ technology, OxyCopilot will enable both web scraping professionals and those who have little experience in web data collection to generate instant parsing instructions and requests for the Web Scraper API using nothing more than a URL and natural language prompts.
“In Summer, together with Censuswide, we carried out a wide survey of developers and web scraping practitioners in the UK and US. The data showed that 74% of businesses faced an increasing demand for public web data over the last year. Unfortunately, building the necessary infrastructure and maintaining data parsers remains a heavy challenge for many companies — a proper parsing process alone can take up to 40 development hours per week for the tech teams. With OxyCopilot, we aimed to help our clients collect the data they need more easily”, says Julius Cerniauskas, CEO at Oxylabs.
According to Cerniauskas, the newly-released AI assistant helps to level the playing field. Previously, the barrier to entry for smaller companies was tough because they needed to hire a team of web scraping professionals that are hard to find on the market. By saving development hours spent on repetitive web scraping tasks, businesses can devote more attention to data quality, analysis, and innovation.
Moreover, using Oxylabs’ unified web scraping platform, they don’t need to maintain costly infrastructure, such as servers — a challenge that 61% of professionals identify as the most pressing when collecting data on a large scale.
“We always aspired to be industry leaders through innovation, and taking a step further in the field of AI was a natural business decision for us. OxyCopilot is unique in its design, and we are currently patenting technological implementations behind it. Most importantly, it functions as a part of a broader platform that includes other AI-powered solutions, from proxy management to web unblocking. With the help of AI machine learning (ML), we are moving towards automating the entire public web data collection process”, adds Cerniauskas.
Oxylabs holds over 100 patents globally, part of them covering technologies that have AI and ML implementations. In 2023, the company obtained ISO/IEC 27001:2017 standard for excellence in information security management.
You can read more about building the industry’s first web scraping AI copilot here.