In February 2023 Ismail Shah, CEO of Eziline Software House (Pvt) Ltd, received the Best Services Award in the IT sector from the President of Pakistan, Dr. Arif Alvi, recognising the company's contribution to the country's technology industry. The same month Eziline exhibited at LEAP 2023 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It was a strong start to a year in which the technology itself changed under everyone's feet.
The award
The presidential award is the recognition we are proudest of, and it is written up in its own post. It came sixteen years after the company opened in Rawalpindi with a handful of people, and it recognised exactly the things the company had chosen to be: independent, profitable from day one, and focused on services clients could actually use.
LEAP and the Gulf
LEAP in Riyadh is the largest technology event in the region, and the Eziline stand there continued the Gulf relationships built at Gitex in 2018 and 2021. The ERP, mobile and AI module work for clients in Saudi Arabia and the UAE grew out of these meetings.
GPT-4 and LLM applications
GPT-4 arrived in March and made language models reliable enough for production features. Through 2023 the team built the first LLM-backed functions into client systems: drafting replies in the help desk, summarising reports, answering questions over a company's own documents, and chat interfaces on top of existing databases. The lessons about grounding answers in real data rather than letting the model guess became the design principle behind EZI AI Bot.
Guides
2023 is also when the Guides category on this site filled up: step-by-step pieces on earning on Upwork and Fiverr, Shopify and Amazon dropshipping, LinkedIn, digital marketing skills and tools, written by the team for the freelancers and students that Ezitech trains.
- Presidential Best Services Award in February; LEAP 2023 in Riyadh the same month.
- Murree trip in February.
- First LLM features in client systems; the Guides series begins.
Looking ahead
The LLM features of 2023 had proved the idea; 2024 was about architecture. The plan was to give the models tools, read-only at first, over the ERP, POS, LMS and help desk, so that an assistant could answer and then act rather than describe what to click. That work needed permissions, logging and a way to show the user where an answer came from, and it would take most of the year. The AI modules were to be reorganised by sector, each with its own page, and the Guides series, now the most-read part of the site, was to continue at a post a week. The anniversary in February and the usual campus programmes through Ezitech and Ezi Soft Code were on the calendar. If the architecture worked, the assistant would ship as a product in 2025.
