Elevate Your Java Applications with MongoDB and Spring AI

Taylor Pacelli
August 26, 2024 | Updated: September 19, 2024
#genAI

MongoDB is excited to announce an integration with Spring AI, enhancing MongoDB Atlas Vector Search for Java developers. This collaboration brings Vector Search to Java applications, making it easier to build intelligent, high-performance AI applications.

Why Spring AI?

Spring AI is an AI library designed specifically for Java, applying the familiar principles of the Spring ecosystem to AI development. It enables developers to build, train, and deploy AI models efficiently within their Java applications. Spring AI addresses the gap left by other AI frameworks and integrations that focus on other programming languages, such as Python, providing a streamlined solution for Java developers.

Spring has been a cornerstone for Java developers for decades, offering a consistent and reliable framework for building robust applications. The introduction of Spring AI continues this legacy, providing a straightforward path for Java developers to incorporate AI into their projects. With the MongoDB-Spring integration, developers can leverage their existing Spring knowledge to build next-generation AI applications without the friction associated with learning a new framework.

Key features of Spring AI include:

Familiarity: Leverage the design principles of the Spring ecosystem. Spring AI allows Java developers to use the same familiar tools and patterns they already know from other Spring projects, reducing the learning curve and allowing them to focus on building innovative AI applications. This means you can integrate AI capabilities—including Atlas Vector Search—without having to learn a new language or framework, making the transition smoother and more intuitive.
Portability: Applications built with Spring AI can run anywhere the Spring framework runs. This ensures that AI applications are highly portable and can be deployed across various environments without modification, guaranteeing flexibility and consistency in deployment strategies.
Modular design: Use Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs) as building blocks. Spring AI’s modular design promotes clean code architecture and maintainability. By using POJOs, developers can create modular, reusable components that simplify the development and maintenance of AI applications. This modularity also facilitates easier testing and debugging, leading to more robust applications that efficiently integrate with Atlas Vector Search.
Efficiency: Streamline development with tools and features designed for AI applications in Java. Spring AI provides a range of tools that enhance development efficiency, including pre-built templates, configuration management, and integrated testing tools. These features reduce the time and effort required to develop AI applications, allowing developers to bring their ideas to market faster.

These features streamline AI development by enhancing the integration and performance of Atlas Vector Search within Java applications, making it easier to build and scale AI-driven features.

Enhancing AI development with Spring AI and Atlas Vector Search

MongoDB Atlas Vector Search enhances AI application development by providing advanced search capabilities. The new Spring AI integration enables developers to manage and search vector data within AI models, enabling features like recommendation systems, natural language processing, and predictive analytics.

Atlas Vector Search allows you to store, index, and search high-dimensional vectors, which are crucial for AI and machine learning models. This capability supports a range of AI features:

Recommendation systems: Provide personalized recommendations based on user behavior and preferences.
Natural language processing: Enhance text analysis and understanding for chatbots, sentiment analysis, and more.
Predictive analytics: Improve forecasting and decision-making with advanced data models.

What the integration means for Java developers

Prior to MongoDB-Spring integration, Java developers did not have an easy way to integrate Spring into their AI applications using MongoDB Atlas Vector Search, which led to longer development times and suboptimal application performance.

With this integration, the Java development landscape is transformed, allowing developers to build and deploy AI applications with greater efficiency. The integration simplifies the entire process, enabling developers to concentrate on creating innovative solutions rather than dealing with integration hurdles. This approach not only reduces development time but also accelerates time-to-market.

Additionally, MongoDB offers robust support through comprehensive tutorials and a wealth of community-driven content. Whether you’re just beginning or looking to optimize existing applications, you’ll find the resources and guidance you need at every stage of your development journey.

Get started!

The MongoDB and Spring AI integration is designed to simplify the development of intelligent Java applications. By combining MongoDB's robust data platform with Spring AI's capabilities, you can create high-performance applications more efficiently.

To start using MongoDB with Spring AI, explore our documentation, tutorial, and check out our GitHub repository to build the next generation of AI-driven applications today.

Head over to our quick-start guide to get started with Atlas Vector Search today.

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Better Business Loans with MongoDB and Generative AI

Business loans are a cornerstone of banking operations, providing significant benefits to both financial institutions and broader economies. For example, in 2023 the value of commercial and industrial loans in the United States reached nearly $2.8 trillion . However, these loans can present unique challenges and risks that banks must navigate. Besides credit risk, where the borrower may default, banks also face business risk, in which economic downturns or sector-specific declines can impact borrowers' ability to repay loans. In this post, we dive into the potential of generative AI to generate detailed risk assessments for business loans, and how MongoDB’s multimodal features can be leveraged for comprehensive and multidimensional risk analyses. The critical business plan A business plan is essential for a business loan as it serves as a comprehensive roadmap detailing the borrower's plans, strategies, and financial projections. It helps lenders understand the business's goals, viability, and profitability, demonstrating how the loan will be used for growth and repayment. A detailed business plan includes market analysis, competitive positioning, operational plans, and financial forecasts which build a compelling case for the lender's investment and the business’s ability to manage risks effectively, increasing the likelihood of securing the loan. Reading through borrower credit information and detailed business plans (roughly 15-20 pages long ) poses significant challenges for loan officers due to time constraints, the material’s complexity, and the difficulty of extracting key metrics from detailed financial projections, market analyses, and risk factors. Navigating technical details and industry-specific jargon can also be challenging and require specialized knowledge. Identifying critical risk factors and mitigation strategies only adds further complexity along with ensuring accuracy and consistency among loan officers and approval committees. To overcome these challenges, gen AI can assist loan officers by efficiently analyzing business plans, extracting essential information, identifying key risks, and providing consistent interpretations, thereby facilitating informed decision-making. Assessing loans with gen AI Interactive risk analysis with gen AI-powered chatbots Gen AI can help analyze business plans when built on a flexible developer data platform like MongoDB Atlas . One approach is implementing a gen AI-powered chatbot that allows loan officers to "discuss" the business plan. The chatbot can analyze the input and provide insights on the various risks associated with lending to the borrower for the proposed business. MongoDB sits at the heart of many customer support applications due to its flexible data model that makes it easy to build a single, 360-degree view of data from a myriad of siloed backend source systems. Figure 1 below shows an example of how ChatGPT-4o responds when asked to assess the risk of a business loan. Although the input of the loan purpose and business description is simplistic, gen AI can offer a detailed analysis. Figure 1: Example of how ChatGPT-4o could respond when asked to assess the risk of a business loan Hallucinations or ignorance? By applying gen AI to risk assessments, lenders can explore additional risk factors that gen AI can evaluate. One factor could be the risk of natural disasters or broader climate risks. In Figure 2 below, we added flood risk specifically as a factor to the previous question to see what the ChatGPT4-o comes back with. Figure 2: Example of how ChatGPT-4o responded to flood risk as a factor Based on the above, there is a low risk of flooding. To validate this, we asked ChatGPT-4o the question differently, focusing on its knowledge of flood data. It suggested reviewing FEMA flood maps and local flood history, indicating it might not have the latest information. Figure 3: Asking location-specific flood questions In the query shown in Figure 3 above, ChatGPT gave an opposite answer and indicated there is “significant flooding” providing references to flood evidence after having performed an internet search across 4 sites which it did not perform previously. From this example, we can see that when ChatGPT does not have the relevant data, it starts to make false claims, which can be considered hallucinations. Initially, it indicated a low flood risk due to a lack of information. However, when specifically asked about flood risk in the second query, it suggested reviewing external sources like FEMA flood maps, recognizing its limitations and need for external validation. Gen AI-powered chatbots can recognize and intelligently seek additional data sources to fill their knowledge gaps. However, a causal web search won’t provide the level of detail required. Retrieval-augmented generation-assisted risk analysis The promising example above demonstrates the experience of how gen AI can augment loan officers to analyze business loans. However, interacting with a gen AI chatbot relies on loan officers repeatedly prompting and augmenting the context with relevant information. This can be time-consuming and impractical due to the lack of prompt engineering skills or the lack of data needed. Below is a simplified solution of how gen AI can be used to augment the risk analysis process to fill the knowledge gap of the LLM. This demo uses MongoDB as an operational data store leveraging geospatial queries to find out the floods within 5km of the proposed business location. The prompting for this risk analysis highlights the analysis of the flood risk assessment rather than the financial projections. A similar test was performed on Llama 3 , hosted by our MAAP partner Fireworks.AI . It tested the model’s knowledge of flood data showing a similar knowledge gap as ChatGPT-4o. Interestingly, rather than providing misleading answers, LLama 3 provided a “hallucinated list of flood data,” but highlighted that “this data is fictional and for demonstration purposes only. In reality, you would need to access reliable sources such as FEMA's flood data or other government agencies' reports to obtain accurate information.” Figure 4: LLM’s response with Fictional flood locations With this consistent demonstration of the knowledge gap in the LLMs in specialized areas, it reinforces the need to explore how RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) with a multimodal data platform can help. In this simplified demo, you select a business location, a business purpose, and a description of a business plan. To make inputs easier, an “Example” button has been added to leverage gen AI to generate a sample brief business description to avoid the need to key in the description template from scratch. Figure 5: Choosing a location on the map and writing a brief plan description Upon submission, it will provide an analysis using RAG with the appropriate prompt engineering to provide a simplified analysis of the business with the consideration of the location and also the flood risk earlier downloaded from external flood data sources. Figure 6: Loan risk response using RAG In the Flood Risk Assessment section, gen AI-powered geospatial analytics enable loan officers to quickly understand historical flood occurrences and identify the data sources. You can also reveal all the sample flood locations within the vicinity of the business location selected by clicking on the “Pin” icon. The geolocation pins include the flood location and the blue circle indicates the 5km radius in which flood data is queried, using a simple geospatial command $geoNear . Figure 7: Flood locations displayed with pins The following diagram provides a logical architecture overview of the RAG data process implemented in this solution highlighting the different technologies used including MongoDB, Meta Llama 3, and Fireworks.AI. Figure 8: RAG data flow architecture diagram With MongoDB's multimodal capabilities, developers can enhance the RAG process by utilizing features such as network graphs, time series, and vector search. This enriches the context for the gen AI agent, enabling it to provide more comprehensive and multidimensional risk analysis through multimodal analytics. Building risk assessments with MongoDB When combined with RAG and a multimodal developer data platform like MongoDB Atlas , gen AI applications can provide more accurate and context-aware insights to reduce hallucination and offer profound insights to augment a complex business loan risk assessment process. Due to the iterative nature of the RAG process, the gen AI model will continually learn and improve from new data and feedback, leading to increasingly accurate risk assessments and minimizing hallucinations. A multimodal data platform would allow you to fully maximize the capabilities of the multimodal AI models. Head over to our quick-start guide to get started with Atlas Vector Search today. If you would like to discover how MongoDB can help you on this multimodal gen AI application journey, we encourage you to apply for an exclusive innovation workshop with MongoDB's industry experts to explore bespoke modern app development and tailored solutions to your organization. Additionally, you can enjoy these resources: Solution GitHub: Loan Risk Assessor How Leading Industries are Transforming with AI and MongoDB Atlas Accelerate Your AI Journey with MongoDB’s AI Applications Program The MongoDB Solutions Library is curated with tailored solutions to help developers kick-start their projects

August 22, 2024

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Hanabi Technologies Uses MongoDB to Power AI Assistant, Hana

For all the hype surrounding generative AI, cynics tend to view the few real-world implementations as little more than “fancy chatbots.” But for Abhinav Aggarwal, CEO of Hanabi Technologies, the idea of a generative AI-powered bot that is more than just an assistant was intriguing. “I’d been using ChatGPT since it launched,” said Aggarwal. “That got me thinking: How could we make a chatbot that was like a team member?” And with that concept, Hana was born. The problem with bots “Most generative AI chatbots do not act like people; they wait for a command and give a response,” said Aggarwal. “We wanted to create a human-like chatbot that would proactively help people based on what they wanted—automating reminders, for example, or fetching time zones from your calendar to correctly schedule meetings.” Hanabi’s flagship product, Hana, is an AI assistant designed to enhance team collaboration within Google Chat, working in concert with Google Workspace and its suite of products. “Our target customers are smaller companies of between 10 and 50 people. At this size you’re not going to build your own agent from scratch,” he said. Hana integrates with Google APIs to deliver a human-like assistant that chimes in with helpful interventions, such as automatically setting reminders and making sure meetings are booked in the right time zone for each participant. “Hana is designed to bring AI to smaller companies and help them collaborate in a space where they are already working—Google Workspace,” Aggarwal explained. The MongoDB Atlas solution For Hana to act like a member of the team, Hanabi needed to process massive amounts of data to support advanced features like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for better information retrieval across Google Docs and many other sources. And with a rapidly growing user base of over 600 organizations and 17,000+ installs, Hanabi also required a secure, scalable, and high-performing data storage solution. MongoDB Atlas provided a flexible document model, built-in vector database, and scalable cloud-based infrastructure, freeing Hanabi engineers to build new features for Hana rather than focusing on rote tasks like data extract, transform, and load processes or manual scaling and provisioning. Now, MongoDB Atlas handles a variety of responsibilities: Scalability and security: MongoDB Atlas’s auto-scaling and automatic backup features have enabled Hanabi to seamlessly grow its user base without the need for manual database management. RAG: MongoDB Atlas plays a critical role in Hana’s RAG functionality. The platform enables Hanabi to split Google Docs into small sections, create embeddings, and store these sections in Atlas’s vector database. Development Processes: According to Aggarwal, MongoDB’s flexibility in managing changing schemas has been essential to the company’s fast-paced development cycle. Data Visualization: Using MongoDB Atlas Charts has enabled Hanabi to create comprehensive dashboards for real-time data visualization. This has helped the team track usage, set reminders, and optimize performance without needing to build a manual dashboard. Impact and results With MongoDB Atlas, Hanabi can successfully scale Hana to meet the demands of its rapidly expanding user base. The integration is also enabling Hana to offer powerful features like automatic interactions with customers, advanced information retrieval from Google Docs, and manually added memory snippets, making it an essential tool for teams around the world. Next steps Hanabi plans to continue integrating more tools into Hana while expanding its reach to personal Gmail users. The company is also rolling out a new automatic-interaction feature, further enhancing Hana’s ability to proactively assist users without direct commands. MongoDB Atlas remains a key component of Hanabi’s stack, alongside Google Kubernetes Engine, NestJS, and LangChain, enabling Hanabi to focus on innovating to improve the customer experience. Tech Stack MongoDB Atlas Google Kubernetes Engine NestJS LangChain Are you building AI apps? Join the MongoDB AI Innovators Program today! Successful participants gain access to free MongoDB Atlas credits, technical enablement, and invaluable connections within the broader AI ecosystem. If your company is interested in being featured, we’d love to hear from you. Connect with us at ai_adopters@mongodb.com.

November 21, 2024