The AI in Business Podcast

I hope that by the end of this episode of the AI in Industry podcast, you'll not only be able to hire better data scientists who will be a fit for your business problems and build better data science teams, but also pick the AI applications and use cases that you should bring into your business versus those that you shouldn't. This episode, we interview Brooke Wenig, the machine learning practice lead at Databricks. Databricks was founded by the folks who created Apache Spark. Those of you who are technically savvy with AI will be familiar with Apache Spark as an open source language for artificial intelligence and distributed computing. Wenig works with a lot of companies with Databricks. Databricks is now close to 700 folks and helps implement AI applications into, oftentimes, large enterprise environments. Wenig speaks with us this week about what to look for in an actual data scientist and how to find data science folks with the right skills to be able to communicate to business people, not just to work with models. What should people be capable of; how should they be capable of thinking? Hopefully, some of you will have better interview questions by the end of this podcast. In addition, we ask Brooke about what the value of covering the cutting edge applications of AI is, looking at what's working in industry. How does that help us in our own business make better decisions? Read the full article on Emerj.com

If you want to understand the international competitive dynamics of artificial intelligence, particularly the US and China, starting with the United Nations is probably not a bad move. This week, I spoke with Irakli Beridze, the head of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the UN, particularly under the wing called UNICRI, the organization's crime and justice division. Irakli was kind enough to invite me to speak at a recent event in Shanghai held by the UN and by the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies on national security, and when we were there, we talked a good deal about China's unique AI-related strengths. I spoke with Irakli about the strengths of the ecosystem in China for artificial intelligence and how that stacks up against the US. In addition, I asked Irakli about what it's going to look like to encourage more and more multilateral action. In other words, how do we get countries to be on the same page so AI doesn't become an arms race?

Discover how so-called autoML, or automated machine learning, could bring AI to more businesses by allowing users to build AI models faster and cheaper. Read the full article, where we go into further detail, at Emerj.com. Search for "AutoML and How AI Could Become More Accessible to Businesses"

AI has numerous use cases in legal, from document search to compliance and contract abstraction. This week, we speak with Lars Mahler, Chief Science Officer for LegalSifter, about what's possible with AI for legal departments today and how AI applications for legal teams, such as natural language processing-based contract analysis, work. In addition, Mahler discusses how lawyers at companies and data scientists work together to train machine learning algorithms. He provides some insight into how a company has to make its way into the legal space and the challenges of training an NLP system and collecting data for it. Read more about AI in legal at Emerj.com

There's a lot of venture money pouring into artificial intelligence in healthcare. From pharma to hospitals and beyond, the potential applications in healthcare are promising. Late last year, we spoke for The World Bank about our proprietary AI in healthcare research, and speaking with governments, it's clear that there are hurdles that healthcare companies have to overcome to access data for training AI systems. Broadly, most of the folks that we speak with who are innovating in AI and healthcare are frustrated with how hard it is to streamline the data to make use of it for applications such as diagnosing illnesses. But why is that? That's a question that we asked our guest this week. Our guest this week is Zhigang Chen, and he speaks about why this problem exists and how it can be overcome. In addition, Chen talks about the AI ecosystem in China and how it differs from Silicon Valley.

Saying that your company does artificial intelligence might still have a slightly cool ring to it if you're talking to one of your peers at a conference, but it doesn't mean very much to venture capitalists today, who've been battered with machine learning and artificial intelligence in every pitch deck they've seen for the last three or four years. I wondered, from a venture capitalist perspective, what makes an AI company's value proposition actually strong? What is it that makes an AI startup actually seem like a company that maybe could use AI to really win in the market? Not just to be another company that says they're going to do it or says they are doing it, but where can it actually provide enough of that competitive edge to make a VC want to pull the trigger? Getting a grasp of the answer to that question seems pretty critical. This week, we speak with Tim Chang, partner at Mayfield Fund in Menlo Park, California. Chang and I both spoke at the Trans Tech Conference, held every year in Silicon Valley, focused on wellness and health-related technologies. Chang talks about what it is about an AI company's pitch, product, and market that actually makes AI an enhancement to the business in a way that's compelling to someone who wants to invest potentially millions and millions of dollars.

If one wants to start a general search engine, they're going to have to compete with Google. If one wants to start a general eCommerce platform, they'll have to compete with Amazon. But the same dynamics play out on a smaller scale. There are going to be some established players, some big tech giant, be it IBM or someone else, who already has a product. When it comes to getting a new AI product out to market, how does one compete with the big guys? This week's guest is Mike Edelhart, who runs Social Starts and Joyance Partners, seed stage investment firms out in the Bay Area. Edelhart has invested in a number of companies, and in this episode, we get his perspective on not only the patterns among successful AI startups and where AI plays a role in their competitive strategy, but what a "land and expand" strategy looks like for a new product that already has larger and more established competitors.

A lot of AI in the press is CMOs or marketing people talking about what a company can do in a way that really is aspirational. They're speaking about what they can do, but in reality, the things that they're talking about, the capabilities won't be unlocked for maybe a year or more. These are just things on the technology road map, but people speak about them like they exist now. This week, we speak with Abinash Tripathy, founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Help Shift. They've raised upwards of $40,000,000 in the last six years to apply artificial intelligence to the future of customer service, and we speak about the hard challenges of chatbots and conversational interfaces, as well as how long it's going to be until those are actually robust. This in opposition to how people at large companies might put out a press release touting their own chatbots that simply aren't capable of doing what they say they can to any meaningful degree. We also talk about where AI can augment and make a difference in existing customer service workflows. Even if we can't have all-capable chatbots to handle banking or insurance or eCommerce questions from people, where can AI easily slide it's way in and actually make a difference today? In this episode, we draw a firm line on where the technology currently stands. Overall, though, this episode is about the challenges of actually innovating in AI. We talk about why it really is the big companies that do a lot of the actual cutting edge breakthroughs of AI and why others are going to have to license those their technologies from large firms like Google and Amazon. We also discuss why companies maybe need to have a realistic expectation about where they can apply AI, as well as why actually innovating and coming up with new AI capabilities on their own might just be wholly unreasonable given their data, their company culture, and their density of AI talent. Read the full interview article on emerj.com

This week we interview a leader at Facebook. Jason Sundram is the lead of World.ai at Facebook, which is one of their efforts to work with public data around roads and population and other projects of that kind. But Sundram is also highly involved in the Boston office here, where Facebook will soon have around 650 employees. Many of them focus on data science and artificial intelligence. Last time we talked about personalization in AI with Hussein Mehanna, who was Director of Engineering at Facebook at the time. This time, we'll talk about two topics that all established sectors need to be focusing on: How does one build ML and data science teams? How does one pick an AI project? For business leaders who are considering hiring data science talent or thinking about how to start with AI in terms of making a difference in their bottom line, this should be a useful episode.

One of the promises of artificial intelligence is aiding humans in making smarter decisions. Whether it's in pharma, retail, or eCommerce companies, the idea of being able to pool together streams of data and coax out the insights that would help make the best call for the organization to reach its goals is the promise of artificial intelligence. As it turns out that same dynamic is sort of happening in the public sector where AI is now being used to inform policy. This week we interview Professor Joan Peckham at the University of Rhode Island. Previously, she was Program Director at the National Science Foundation. PhD in computer science and she runs the Data Science Initiatives at URI. The University of Rhode Island is home to DataSpark, an organization that helps policymakers inform the decisions that they're going to make about the economy, the environment, the opioid crisis, a variety of social issues, based on deeper assessments of the data. The ability to find objective insights might help policymakers make better decisions about where they allocate budget and what decisions are made. Right now, policymakers are beginning to tune into artificial intelligence as a source of informing their decisions. The same dynamic will likely play out in the C-suite, particularly when the data is actually there. For more on AI in government, visit Emerj.com

Sales is a big part of any sort of B2B firm. We speak this week with Micha Breakstone, co-founder of Chorus.ai. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Sciences from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and prior to starting his own company, he studied for a few years at MIT and was working on NLP at Intel. He speaks with us this week about where AI is being applied to sales, answering questions such as: How can managers better train salespeople? How can salespeople better find the patterns that lead to closing a deal? The next appointment? A bigger contract? This is a nascent domain. There are very few companies are actively leveraging artificial intelligence in their sales process, but in the two years ahead we'll likely see more and more firms who are. For more information on Ai for sales enablement, go to emerj.com

Close to a year ago, we had an interview here on the AI in Industry podcast with Jeremy Barnes of Element AI. We visited their headquarters in Montreal, and we'd interviewed Yoshua Bengio a couple years before that. Jeremy had brought up one point in that interview that I really like and that transfers its way into this conversation, which is that businesses should think not just about being more efficient with artificial intelligence, but places where they can actually make a real difference in the bottom line for the company beyond shaving off some savings. In this week's episode, we focus on compliance and analyzing contracts. At first, one might think about such an application in terms of cost savings. We speak with Shiv Vaithyanathan, an IBM fellow and Chief Architect of Watson Compare & Comply, about the following: What's possible with AI when it comes to analyzing contracts, and, most importantly Where is the business upside for AI as it relates to contract analysis. How can we analyze contracts not just in a way that saves money, but that allows us to optimize our deals for revenue, for the likelihood that they'll go through? What's that farther vision?

Episode Summary: Recently, we were called upon by the World Bank to do a good deal of research on the potential of applying artificial intelligence to health data in the developing world. Diagnostics was a very big focus of the information that we presented. It appears as though diagnostics is an area of great promise with regards to AI, and that's what we're focusing on in this episode the podcast. This week, we speak with Yufeng Deng, Chief Scientist of Infervision, a company that focuses on computer vision for medical diagnostics. We speak with Deng about the expanding capability of machine vision, including what kind of data one needs to collect and what is now possible with the technology. In addition, Deng also speaks about how Infovision found a business problem to solve using AI, and in that he provides transferable lessons to business leaders in a variety of industries.

Artificial intelligence plays a role in the future of retail in terms of a deeper understanding of customers going beyond intuition. This week, we speak with Pedro Alves, CEO of a company called Ople, based in San Francisco. Alves was previously the Head of Data Science at a number of companies in addition to being Director of Data Science at Sentient Technologies, one of the best known AI firms in the Bay Area. Sentient has raised upwards of $200 million. We talk with Pedro about the future of retail, the future of understanding customers with artificial intelligence. Essentially asking under what circumstances would a retailer need to go beyond intuition in order to inform their understanding and their ability to influence the actions of their customers or their users. In addition to that, Alves talks with us about what has to happen to AI as a technology to become more accessible and within reach of existing enterprises. Knowing now all the points of friction for bringing AI into an existing business, he talks about the transition points that he thinks are going to have to happen over the course of the years ahead in order to make these technologies more accessible to companies.

A lot of machine learning applications in business can be boiled down to some form of decision support. There are big decisions like deciding whether or not to merge or acquire another company, and there might be smaller decisions like whether or not a tumor has enough traits that make it seem like it's worth a surgical procedure or if it's worth leaving alone. In this particular interview, we talk about the domain of decision support, specifically in tax and accounting. There are few firms that know more about tax and accounting than Ernst & Young, and there are few people at Ernst & Young who know more about artificial intelligence than Sharda Cherwoo. Cherwoo is a partner at EY, and she is also the Intelligent Automation Leader for the Americas division of its tax practice. Cherwoo talks about where decision support is being influenced by machine learning in accounting and tax today, the initial experimentation traction, and results. She also paints a picture of bigger decisions that might be automatable by machine learning software. The focus of this episode may be on tax and accounting, but here are transferable lessons for business leaders in all industries that revolve around how machine learning can help inform decisions made by human experts.

We spoke with Robert Golladay, General Manager, Europe at CognitiveScale, which offers AI software that helps both wealth advisors personalize insights and identify new opportunities for clients. According to Golladay, AI is being applied to wealth management services in two areas today: Personalization: Helping financial advisors identify the investment preferences of a client and provide personalized advice to a degree that was not possible before. This might involve taking into account factors such as declared, observed, and inferred information around client goals or attitude towards risk. Engagement: Helping wealth advisors communicate the most relevant insights for a client at a preferred time and channel.

This week, we're going to be talking about the defense sector. We interview Ryan Welch, CEO of Kyndi, a company working on explainable AI. We focus specifically on the unique data challenges of the defense industry, as well as the general use case of AI in defense writ large. Many of the challenges that the defense sector has to deal with transfer to other spaces and sectors. Business leaders that deal with extremely disjointed text information, what is sometimes called "dark data," and information in various languages or different dialects, will be able to resonate with some of the unique challenges talked about in this episode, and maybe even gain some insights for how to handle them. Read the full interview article on Emerj.com

Whether we're talking about customer service, marketing, or building developer teams, what we try to do on our AI in Industry podcast is bring to bear lessons that are transferable. There are few more transferrable ideas than what makes a company ready to adopt AI. When it comes to the willingness and the ability to integrate AI into a company strategy and to fruitfully adopt the technology to really see an ROI, what do the companies that do so successfully have in common? What do the companies that are not ready or too fearful to do it have in common? There are probably few companies in the AI vendor space that are aiming to sell AI more ardently into the enterprise than Salesforce, and there are few people that know more about how that process is going than Allison Witherspoon, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Salesforce Einstein, which is their artificial intelligence layer on top of the Salesforce product. We speak to Witherspoon about the telltale signs of a company that understands the use cases of AI in their industry and that have a good chance of driving value with AI. We also talk about the common qualities of companies that might not ready for I adoption. Read our full interview article on Sunday at Emerj.com

Episode Summary: This week we talk to Alejandro Giacometti, the data science lead at a company called EDITED, based in London. The company claims to help retailers with inventory optimization, and we speak with Alejandro about how artificial intelligence can be used to search the web for the product clusters and individual products of major retailers to help inform other retailers on what products might be popular. There are two primary takeaways from this episode. The first is the broad capability of monitoring the competition with artificial intelligence, something that can be applied across industries, not just in retail. The second is that EDITED is generating information from what is freely available on the web, and so it would seem their software doesn't require businesses to integrate it into inventory management systems in order to train the algorithm behind it. I'm not necessarily lauding the company; I haven't used their product nor read all of their case studies. That said, it's worth noting simply because its approach is fundamentally different than most AI vendors. Read the full interview article on emerj.com

Some businesses are going to require a sea change in the way that their computation works and the kinds of computing power that they're leveraging to do what they need to do with artificial intelligence. Others might not need an upgrade in hardware in the near term to do what they want to do with AI. What's the difference? That's the question that we decided to ask today of Per Nyberg, Vice President of Market Development, Artificial Intelligence at Cray. Cray is known for the Cray-1 supercomputer, built back in 1975. Cray continues to work on hardware and has an entire division now dedicated to artificial intelligence hardware. This week on AI in Industry, we speak to Nyberg about which kinds of business problems require an upgrade in hardware and which don't.

We speak this week with Aneesh Reddy, cofounder and CEO of Capillary Technologies. Capillary is a rather large firm based in Singapore. Aneesh is in Bangalore himself. The firm focuses on machine vision applications in the retail environment. How do we instrument a physical retail space so that, with cameras, we can pick up on the same kind of metrics that eCommerce stores can? Retail stores, as Reddy talks about in this episode, have to focus on the data that they get from the checkout counter, such as what kind of purchases were made, and potentially some kind of data about how many times the front door was opened or closed. That doesn't really lay out that much detail about who came in, what percent of them converted, and what the average cart value was for different people. A lot of that is completely greyed out when looking at the numbers that are accessible to brick and mortar retailers. But some of that is changing. Reddy talks about what's possible now with machine vision in retail, and what it opens up in terms of possibility spaces for understanding customers better in a physical environment. More importantly, Aneesh paints a bit of a future vision of where he believes retail is going to be when not just computer vision is included, but when audio and other kinds of sensor information are included.

In this episode of AI In Industry, we interview Nick Possley, the CTO of a company called AllyO, based in the San Francisco Bay area. We speak with Nick about where artificial intelligence and machine learning are playing a role in recruiting today and how picking the right candidates from a pool is in some way being informed by artificial intelligence. Whether a business leader is hiring dozens and dozens of people or whether they 're just interested in understanding how AI can engage with individuals on more of a one-to-one basis, this should be a fruitful episode. In addition, the fundamentals of what we discuss in this episode, in terms of taking in data from profiles and responding and engaging with applicants, could be applied to all sorts of cases, such as customer service and marketing. Read the full interview article here: https://www.techemergence.com/how-to-use-ai-to-hire-and-recruit-talent

What makes a chatbot or a conversational interface actually work? What kind of work does one need to do to get a chatbot to do what one wants it to do? These are pivotal questions and questions that for most business leaders are still somewhat mysterious, but that's exactly what we're aiming to answer on this episode of the AI in Industry Podcast. This week we speak with Madhu Mathihalli, CTO and co-founder of Passage AI. We speak specifically about what kinds of tasks conversational interfaces are best at, what kinds of word tracks, what kind of questions and answer are they suited for and which are a bit beyond their grasp right now. In addition, we speak about what it takes to train these machines. In other words, how do we define the particular word tracks that we want to be able to automate and determine which of them might be lower hanging fruit for applying a chatbot or which of them might not? Read or listen to the full podcast here: https://www.techemergence.com/how-to-get-a-chatbot-to-do-what-one-wants-in-business/

Episode Summary: In this episode of the AI in Industry podcast, we interview Rajat Mishra, VP of Customer Experience at Cisco, about the best practices for adopting AI in the enterprise and how business leaders should think about the man-machine balance at their companies. Mishra talks with us about how the executive team should be able to imagine the future of specific work roles that might integrate AI technology or envision how those roles will shift in the short-term. In other words, how will AI affect workflows?

In this episode of the AI in Industry podcast, we interview Nikhil Malhotra, Creator and Head of Maker's Lab at Tech Mahindra, about how artificial intelligence changed the nature of IT services and business services in general. Malhotra talks about what businesses should consider to make themselves relevant for the future. In addition, he discusses the philosophy shift that has to happen for people to be appreciative of the process of problem-solving, and to see profit and growth from AI. We hope business leaders in the IT services industry will take from this interview the low-hanging fruit applications in the IT services industry.

Episode Summary: Prominent technology companies like Google and Amazon lead the way in the B2C world, having access to streams of searches, clicks, and online purchases. They have access to large volumes of consumer data pointss numbering in the billions that can be used to train machine learning algorithms. B2B companies operate under a different model: "propensity to buy," as it's called. A typical B2B company might at most make a couple hundred sales per year, and many B2B companies make only dozens. In other words, every sale matters. In this episode of the AI in Industry podcast, we interview Kiran Rama, Director of Data Sciences Center of Excellence at VMWare, about purchasing external data and to leveraging internal data. Rama also talks about using data to determine how likely certain leads are to turn into high-value customers. In addition, he discusses with us the "propensity to buy." We hope that this interview can help business leaders determine if and how AI can help their organizations identify which leads could yield the highest ROI and which customers are the most primed for reselling.

For business leaders who are thinking about integrating AI into their company or who are just in the very beginning of that journey, this may be a useful episode of the podcast. Many times, people think that finding the right talent is the biggest challenge when it comes to integrating AI into the enterprise. Much of our own research and conversations with machine learning vendors and the consultants trying to sell AI into the enterprise actually think there's another, bigger problem: combing the expertise of subject matter experts and that of data scientists to leverage information for future initiatives in business. This week, we interview Grant Wernick, CEO of Insight Engines in San Francisco. We speak with Grant about the initial challenges of organizing data and setting up a data infrastructure a business can use to leverage AI. We also talk about using data in leveraging normal workflows so that non-technical personnel can use it to drive better product innovation to help the company.

One of most fun parts about doing our geolocation pieces at TechEmergence is that we are able to interview so many people within a given country or city. Recently we did a huge piece on AI in India. We got to interview folks from the government and the bigger existing businesses, as well as a handful of people at the unicorns in Bangalore. One of those companies is Fractal Analytics. Fractal Analytics works in a number of spaces. One of them, consumer packaged goods, is an area on which we haven't done much coverage. Many of our readers are in the retail space, but CPG has some pretty curious AI use cases. This week, we interview Prashant Joshi, Head of AI and Machine Learning at Fractal Analytics, about the different applications of machine learning in the CPG sector: doing chemical tests or finding new buyer segments within existing groups of consumers to determine who is buying from a company and who is buying from competitors. Hopefully, for those in retail, this interview will not only highlight some of the interesting use cases of AI in the CPG world but also provide some ideas about winning market share from what some of the bigger CPG firms are doing with Fractal Analytics.

In this episode of the AI in Industry podcast, we interview Grant Ingersoll at Lucidworks, about enterprise search. Ingersoll talks about how companies have massive amounts of siloed data, making it difficult to find within enterprise systems. We hope businesses might take away from this interview what is required and what is involved in building search applications to make corporate data more accessible and structured. Ingersoll will also discuss how data strategies are going to evolve and how scientists and data experts might come together to build an enterprise search application.

We receive a lot of interest from business leaders in the domain of data enrichment, and we've executed on a few campaigns for these businesses. At the same time, our audience seems particularly interested in the collection of data to train a bespoke machine learning algorithm for business, asking questions related to how to get started on data collection and from where that data could come. This week on AI in Industry, we seek to answer those questions. We are joined by Daniela Braga, CEO and founder of DefinedCrowd, a data enrichment and crowdsourcing firm, who discusses with us how a business might determine what kind of data it might need for its AI initiative. We hope the insights garnered from this interview will help business leaders get a better idea of how they could go about starting an AI initiative and seeing it through from data collection or enhancement to solving its business problem.

There's more to successful AI adoption than picking the right technology. Business leaders should be aware of the technical requirements of the initiative they're undertaking, and few of those requirements are as important as data. For this episode, we spoke with Mark Brayan, CEO of Appen, a firm that offers crowdsourced training data for machine learning applications. We discuss how developing a sound data strategy is essential for using AI to solve business problems. Brayan also helped us detail how and when a business can make use of certain data collection and enrichment methods depending on their business goals.

Over the last year, we've covered a lot of marketing applications. Many people know of our deep marketing research we've done on the landscape of machine learning in marketing applications and which industries will be affected first. But marketing doesn't tell the whole story when it comes to B2B sales. At some point, we need to take these clicks and turn them into appointments, for example. In this episode of AI in Industry, we are joined by Vitaly Gordon, VP of Data Science and Engineering at Einstein, Salesforce's customer relationship management application driven by artificial intelligence. We speak with Vitaly about where AI is serving a role in sales enablement today and how the CRM and sales tool ecosystem might be different in the near-term future; how will salespeople be able to leverage AI to make themselves more productive? Vitaly paints an interesting picture of where he sees the low hanging fruit and the unique challenges with sales data and B2B data that are quite different from the challenges those in the B2C world might deal with.

In this episode of the AI in Industry podcast, we interview Sumit Borar, Senior Director of Data Sciences and Engineering at Myntra, an eCommerce site for fashion, about the current and future state of eCommerce personalization and how the way customers in India purchase products online affect that personalization. Myntra talks about the challenges of bringing dialed-in personalized recommendations to the physical world and the challenges of bringing eCommerce into the developing world. In addition, he discusses with us the different ways that eCommerce is being experienced in rural parts of India and some of the unique hurdles that they've had to overcome. Business leaders looking to apply machine learning and data science to the eCommerce world in developing markets and business leaders aiming to bring data science to the physical retail world should tune into this episode. Read the full interview article here: www.techemergence.com/ai-retail-ecommerce-india-challenges-opportunities

This week on AI in Industry, we speak with Amir Saffari, Senior Vice President of AI at BenevolentAI, a London-based pharmaceutical company that uses machine learning to find new uses for existing drugs and new treatments for diseases. In speaking with him, we aim to learn two things: How will machine learning play a role in the phases of drug discovery, from generating hypotheses to clinical trials? In the future, what are the roles of man and machine in drug discovery? What processes will machines automate and potentially do better than humans in this field? We hope the insights in this episode provide business leaders in the pharma industry with an understanding of the current state of AI in their space and where it might play a role in their industry in the next two to three years. See the full interview article here: www.techemergence.com/future-drug-discovery-ai-role-man-machine

We usually discuss the impact of artificial intelligence on a business's bottom line, but governments and NGOs are also considering AI as a mechanism for improving society. This week on the AI in Industry podcast, Anandan Padmanabhan, CEO of the Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence in India, speaks to us about where and how the public sector should consider leveraging AI. Padmanabhan discusses the challenges that the Indian government faces in providing education and healthcare to its citizens. Although AI might help overcome these challenges, those who need these services most may not have access to the technologies necessary to work with it. See the full interview article here: www.techemergence.com/ai-government-ngo-social-good-initiatives-interview-wadhwani-institute

AI has made it easier to understand text as a medium in a deeper, more efficient way and at scale. With video, the situation is quite different. Searching for content within videos is more challenging because video is not just voice and sound, it is also a collection of moving and still images on screen. How could AI work to overcome that challenge? In this episode of the AI in Industry podcast, we interview Manish Gupta, CEO and co-founder of VideoKen, about the future of video search as machine learning is increasingly integrated into the process. Dr. Gupta talks about how video is becoming more searchable and discusses his own forecasts about what that will look like in the future. He also predicts what machine learning will allow Youtube to do as people continue to search for more specific video content. Our Content Lead, Raghav Bharadwaj, joins us for this interview. See the full video article here: www.techemergence.com/machine-learning-video-search-video-education-how-it-works/

This week on AI in Industry, we are talking about the ethical consequences of AI in business. If a system were to train itself to act in unethical or legally reprehensible ways, it could take actions such as filtering or making decisions about people in regards to race or gender. When machine learning is integrated into technology products, could a misbehaving system put the company at financial and legal risk? Our guest this week, Otto Berkes, Chief Technology Officer of New York-based CA Technologies, speaks to us about realistic changes in the technology planning and testing process that leaders need to consider. We discussed how businesses could integrate machine learning into the products and services, while still protecting themselves from potential legal downsides. See the full interview article featuring Otto Berkes live at: https://www.techemergence.com/?p=13752&preview=true

When we think of recommendation engines, we might think of Amazon or Netflix, but while consumer goods and entertainment might be the most prominent domains for recommendation engines, there are others. This week, we speak with Madhu Gopinathan of MakeMyTrip.com, one of the few Indian unicorn companies, about recommendation engines for travel companies. According to Madhu, MakeMyTrip's recommendation engine has to figure out the best hotels for customer given their destination, but recommending hotels to first-time users and those who don't frequent the site can prove challenging. How does a travel company's AI-based recommendation engine start the process of making well-informed recommendations? Madhu talks to us about how a recommendation engine might match people immediately with their preferred product or service when the on-site data does not exist to inform the AI-driven recommendations. See the full interview article here: www.techemergence.com/recommendation-engines-actually-work-strategies-principles

When contemplating a new venture into AI or machine learning, companies need to take on a number of important considerations that relate to talent, existing data and limitations. One way executives can judge how successful or appropriate and AI project would be for their company is to examine use cases of businesses that have previously done something similar. With AI and machine learning news increasing in tech media, a business leader may find it challenging to cut through the hype and identify valid, useful case studies. We talked to Ben Lorica, the Chief Data Scientist at O'Reilly Media, to get his insights on what key details executives should be looking for within a case study. To see the our interview article, visit https://www.techemergence.com/what-executives-should-be-asking-about-ai-use-cases-in-business

Episode Summary: In this episode of the podcast, we interview AIG's Chief Data Science Officer, Dr. Nishant Chandra, about natural language processing (NLP) for internal and team communication. Dr. Chandra talks about how NLP can help with sharing documents with specific team members whose roles warrant viewing those documents. Instead of a broad memo that would go out across the company, a document could be transformed to a tailored message depending on the individual receiving it. For instance, a document could be presented in a digestible way to the executive team, but be distilled to contain fewer details for the technology team to make it relevant to them. How might NLP serve this summarization role for internal communications in the next 5 years? See the full interview article here: www.techemergence.com/nlp-text-summarization-team-communication

This week's episode of the AI in Industry podcast focuses on two main questions. First, how should business leaders determine the most fruitful, potential applications of AI in their business? Second, how do they choose the right one into which to invest resources? This week, we interview someone who has spoken with a number of CTOs and CIOs about early adoption strategies for machine learning for customer service, marketing, manufacturing and other applications. He is Madhusudan Shekar, Principal Evangelist at Amazon Internet Services. See the full interview article here: www.techemergence.com/how-to-determine-the-best-artificial-intelligence-application-areas-in-your-business

At TechEmergence, we often talk about the software capabilities of AI and the tangible return on investment (ROI) of recommendation engines, fraud detection, and different kinds of AI applications. We rarely talk about the hardware side of the equation, and that will be our focus today. For hardware companies like Nvidia, stock prices have soared thanks to the popularity of new kinds of AI hardware being needed not only in academia but also among the technology giants. Increasingly, AI hardware is about more than just graphics processing units (GPUs). Today we interview Mike Henry, CEO of Mythic AI. Mike speaks about the different kinds of AI-specific hardware, where they are used, and how they differ depending on their function. More specifically, Mike talks about the business value of AI hardware. Can specific hardware save money on energy, time, and resources? Where can it drive value? Where is AI hardware necessary to open new capabilities for AI systems that may not have been possible with older hardware? What is the right business approach to AI hardware? This interview was brought to us by Kisaco Research, which partnered with TechEmergence to help promote their AI hardware summit on September 18 and 19 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California. See the full interview article here: www.techemergence.com/financial-roi-ai-hardware-top-line-bottom-line-impact

Episode Summary: Facebook and Google's advertising complex is founded on machine learning, allowing people to self-serve their data needs across a broad audience. India-based InMobi is a company in the advertising technology space that delivers 10 billion ad requests daily. Today, we speak with Avi Patchava, Vice-President of Data Sciences and Machine Learning at InMobi, which operates in China, Europe, India, and the US. Patchava explains how machine learning plays a role in appropriately matching advertising requests to the right audience at scale, whether on mobile, desktop or different devices and media. Patchava paints a robust picture of what this technology will look like moving forward and how it will change the game for marketers and advertisers, especially with the emphasis on data and machine learning. See the full interview article here: www.techemergence.com/future-advertising-machine-learning-audience-targeting-reach

Companies with wells of data at their disposal may find themselves asking how they can use them in meaningful ways. Generally speaking, a clean set of data is the foundation for AI applications, but business owners may not know how exactly to organize their data in a way that allows them to best leverage AI. How exactly does a business transition from having data with the potential for usefulness to having data that's going to allow for an accurate, helpful machine learning tool—one that can actually help solve business problems? In this episode of the podcast, we speak with Bryon Jacob, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at data.world, a company that offers products and services that help enterprises manage their data. In our conversation, Bryon walks us through the common errors companies make when creating and organizing data sets, and how these companies can transition to a more organized and meaningful data management system. The details in this interview should provide business leaders with a better understanding of some of the processes involved in getting started with AI initiatives, and how to hire data science-related roles into a company. See the full interview article with Bryon Jacob live at: https://www.techemergence.com/how-existing-bus…ta-assets-for-ai/

Episode summary: In this episode of Ai in industry, we speak with Manoj Saxena, the Executive Chairman of CognitiveScale, about how AI and automation are being applied to white-collar processes in the healthcare sector. In simple business language, Manoj summarizes key healthcare applications such as invoicing handling, bad debt reduction, claims combat, and the patient experience, and explains how AI and automation can make these processes more efficient to improve the patient experience in healthcare organizations. Interested readers can listen to the full interview with Manoj here: https://www.techemergence.com/white-collar-automation-in-healthcare/

Episode Summary: Natural language processing (NLP) has become popular in the past two years as more businesses processes implement this technology in different niches. In inviting our guest today, we want to know specifically which industries, businesses or processes NLP could be leveraged to learn from activity logs. For instance, we aim to understand how car companies can extract insights from the incident reports they receive from individual users or dealerships, whether it is a report related to manufacturing, service or weather. In the same manner, how can insights be gleaned from the banking or insurance industries based on activity logs? We speak with the University of Texas's Dr. Bruce Porter to discover the current and future use-cases of NLP in customer feedback. Interested readers can listen to the full interview with Bruce here: https://www.techemergence.com/using-nlp-customer-feedback-automotive-banking

Episode summary: This week on AI in Industry, we speak to Rana el Kaliouby, Co-founder and CEO of Affectiva about how machine vision can be applied to detecting human emotion - and the business value of emotionally aware machines. Enterprises leveraging cameras today to gain an understanding of customer engagement and emotions will find Rana's thoughts quite engaging, particularly her predictions about the future of marketing and automotive. We've had guests on our podcast say that the cameras of the future will most likely be set up for their outputs to be interpreted by AI, rather than by humans. Increasingly machine vision technology is being used in sectors like automotive, security, marketing, and heavy industry - machines making sense of data and relaying information to people. Emotional intelligence is an inevitable next step in our symbiotic relationship with machines, an in this interview we explore the trend in depth. Interested readers can listen to the full interview with Rana here: https://www.techemergence.com/can-businesses-use-emotional-intelligence

A myriad of customer service channels exist today, such as social media, email, chat services, call centers, and voice mail. There are so many ways that a customer can interact with a business and it is important to take them all into account. Customers or prospects who interact via chat may represent just one segment of the audience, while the people that engage via the call center represent another segment of the audience. The same might be said of social media channels like Twitter and Facebook. Each channel may offer a unique perspective from customers – and may provide unique value for business leaders eager to improve their customer experience. Understanding and addressing all channels of unstructured text feedback is a major focus for natural language processing applications in business – and it's a major focus for Luminoso. Luminoso founder Catherine Havasi received her Master's degree in natural language processing from MIT in 2004, and went on to graduate with a PhD in computer science from Brandeis before returning to MIT as a Research Scientist and Research Affiliate. She founded Luminoso in 2011. In this article, we ask Catherine about the use cases of NLP for understanding customer voice – and the circumstances where this technology can be most valuable for companies. Read the full article: techemergence.com/improving-customer-experience-with-ai-gaining-quantifiable-insight-at-scale

Episode summary: In this episode of AI in Industry, we speak with Khalifeh Al Jadda, Lead Data Scientist at CareerBuilder, about the applications of machine learning in improving a user's search experience. Khalifeh also talks about what the future of search might look like and how AI will continue to make the search experience more intuitive (for search engines, platforms, eCommerce stores, and more). Business leaders listening in will get a sneak peak into the future of online search - and an understanding of how and where improvements in search features could impact their business. Interested readers can listen to the full interview with Khalifeh here: https://www.techemergence.com/better-than-elasticsearch-machine-learning-search/

Episode summary: In this episode of AI in Industry, we speak with Andy Terrel, the Chief Data Scientist at REX - Real Estate Exchange Inc., about how AI is being used in the real estate sector today. Looking ahead ten years into the future, Andy paints a picture of the areas where he believes AI will change the real estate business. Andy explores how marketing in real estate might change in the future with chatbots and conversational interfaces in real estate which are high value per ticket interactions - a process that will likely vary greatly from the chatbot applications we see for smaller B2C purchases (in the fashion sector, eCommerce, etc). Interested readers can listen to the full interview with Andy here: https://www.techemergence.com/ai-use-cases-future-real-estate/