The AI in Business Podcast

Marshall Brain discusses how wetware (the human brain) is increasingly becoming a part of a bigger system which may in itself be managed by software systems. The roles and relationships of humans and machines are rapidly changing. With the increasing advances in technology, there are fewer and fewer skills or activities that an enterprise needs from human beings, and they only need those until they can be replaced by software or hardware. For example, computer vision systems are often still not as effective as the human eye, so we still need human vision systems to recognize text or to recognize object placement, and take action accordingly (in a store, warehouse, or other setting). A human can fill that role as a piece of wetware until the software or the hardware catches up. How will man and machine collaborate in the future? We explore these dynamics in depth in this week's interview. For more interviews and insights from leading thinkers in AI and automation, visit: www.TechEmergence.com

Machine learning currently faces a number of obstacles which prevent it from advancing as quickly as it might. How might these obstacles be overcome and what impact would this have on the machine learning across different industries in the coming decade? In this episode we talk to Dr. Hanie Sedghi, Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, about the developments in core machine learning technology that need to be made, and that researchers and scientists are working, on to further the application of machine learning in autonomous vehicles. We also touch on some of the impact that might be made if machine learning is able to overcome its own boundaries in terms of computational research, in terms of certain algorithms, and what kind of impact that might have in the arena of autonomous driving and in the realm of natural language processing (NLP). See more episodes online at: www.TechEmergence.com

Fraud attacks have become much more sophisticated. Account takeovers are happening more often. Many security attacks involve multiple methods and unexpected attacks can devastate businesses in just a few days, as we saw with Neiman Marcus and Target. False promotion and abuse is seen not only on social media sites but is also targeted at business. To combat these risks, fraud solutions need to be smarter to keep pace with fraudsters to prevent attacks and react quickly when they do happen. This requires a fast-learning solution with the ability to continually evolve. In this episode we talk to Kevin Lee from Sift Science and examine the shifts in the info security landscape over the past ten or fifteen year. Lee also highlights what new kinds of fraud are now possible and what machine learning solutions are available. See more episodes at: www.TechEmergence.com

Unlike the field of self-driving cars, the fields of construction, mining, agriculture, and other classes of "heavy industry" involve a huge variety of equipment and use-cases that go beyond traveling from A to B. The heavy industry leaders of today are no farther behind automakers in their understanding that AI and automation will be essential for the future of their companies. In this episode, guest Dr. Sam Kherat discusses the areas in heavy industry where AI is currently playing a role in heavy industry, what type of capabilities and functions are automatable, and at what level. He also shines a light on how AI might affect the future of the industry within the next 2-3 years, and in what ways we can expect large equipment to become more autonomous.

Although machine learning in finance is far from new, it is merely at the cusp of a much wider set of applications (in all segments of finance, from insurance to bookkeeping and beyond). Already machine learning has overhauled so many aspects of the financial landscape, from accounting to trading, and it is destined to have more and more impact as it develops further. Guest Alexander Fleiss and his team at Rebellion Research are developing and using AI which uses quantitative analysis to pick investments. Fleiss discusses the current status of machine learning in the world of finance as well as lesser-known niche applications that don't make headlines - but do make a big impact on how businesses are run. He then goes on to explore the effects of future innovative applications of AI in the financial domain.

Guests Will Jack and Nikhil Buduma co-founders of Remedy Health Inc discuss the challenges involved in collecting, setting up and structuring data in order to implement AI in healthcare. By the end of this episode, listeners will have gained insight into the challenges of healthcare data systems, and the potential solutions to cleaning and organizing this data for healthcare AI applications.

If there's any industry ripe for disruption by AI and ML applications, it's healthcare. This week, we speak with ElevenTwo Capital's Founder and Managing Partner Shelley Zhuang, whose investment focus (among other spaces) is on innovative healthcare services. In addition to discussion how AI is helping propel genomics, diagnostics, therapeutic treatment, and other innovations, she touches on what the healthcare space might look like in the next 10 years. For healthcare startups looking to break into the healthcare market, Zhuang doesn't pretend to have simple answers; however, she identifies commonalities among companies that have been successful in smart preparation for meeting regulatory and other industry considerations. This interview was recorded live in San Francisco at Re-Work's Machine Intelligence in Autonomous Vehicles Summit in March 2017.

In the last few months, we've had a string of fantastic interviews with investors and have gained a cross-industry picture of what's important for start-ups and emerging trends in the AI and ML space. This week's interview is no exception. Ann Miura-Ko, co-founder and partner at Floodgate, starts with an explanation of the "self-driving enterprise" concept, her functioning idea about AI investing and the future of software in general. Her high-level insights embody an interesting emphasis on the dynamic of human-machine interactions and relationships cross industries, including the constant workflows and interactions of people using software and bolstering the predictive and prescriptive analytics capabilities of that software. While forward-thinking, Miura-Ko also paints a picture of how these synergistic relationships between humans and machines are happening with companies today.

Getting an investor's perspective in AI is always a good idea for companies looking to raise money, in terms of understanding of excites VC's, but even more broadly an investor's perspective can point to emerging factors in how AI is going to impact a particular industry, shining a light on industry developments, including the commonalities that matter for any company, in any industry, leveraging these tools that are increasingly embedded with AI. In this episode we interview Polaris Partners' Gary Swart, who speaks about elements of companies that are laying the right foundations for using AI optimally and making a more defensible, durable company in an increasingly competitive landscape.

The upsurge of malware and sophisticated attacks continue to keep cybersecurity in the spotlight, but new developments in AI and deep learning offer more advanced solutions to combat security threats. This week, we catch up with Eli David, CTO of Deep Instinct—a company founded in Israel with US headquarters in San Francisco—that applies deep learning to information security. David spoke with us about why and how the deep-learning approach to AI is relevant to the future of cybersecurity. Companies that are actively building their own security infrastructure, or are in growth mode and know they will eventually need to, should find this interview particularly relevant. David shares his perspective on how and where potential cyberthreats focus their attacks and the resulting ramifications for industries as they look for best ways to respond and prevent attacks.

One of the most clear insights from our recent consensus in marketing and advertising was that companies who have more digital touch points along the path to conversion—and more conversion in general—have an advantage when applying AI and ML technologies. In this week's episode, Scopely Co-Founder Ankur Bulsara shines a light on this dynamic and describes how gaming companies are taking advantage of digital trails and applying machine learning technologies. We don't cover much gaming on the TechEmergence podcast, so this interview is a bit off the beaten path. Bulsara speaks about how dialed-in and instrumented the mobile gaming environment is and how data is used to leverage higher conversions over time, as well as how Scopely's systems are set in place to ensure success of their business model. We think his insights on how gaming companies leverage higher conversions with (and without) machine learning can serve as an analogy for companies in other industries that are considering how to set in place similar, optimal digital processes over time.

In this episode, we speak with Co-founder and CEO Alex Holub of Vidora, about how AI can be put to work to improve marketing results. Holub touches on the resources needed—time, money, in-house or outside expertise, calibration, and data— in order to leverage AI in a realistic way. It's safe to say that today, some businesses are not yet set up to be leveraging AI, while others should be seriously considering taking the leap to using machine learning. Holub draws some firm lines as to what kinds of businesses are primed to take advantage of AI, and what it takes to flip the switch and make AI a useful and inspired revenue driver in the marketing domain.

I'm always a little shocked when I see how much venture investing goes into the healthcare space, which brings me to the subject of this week's episode: just how the healthcare industry is (and isn't) being impacted by innovations in AI technology. Guest Steve Gullans of Boston-Based Excel Venture Management talks about some of the various healthcare-related ML and AI applications that he sees being brought to light, and touches on which innovations have a better chance of getting blocked and redirected by parties of interest and those that have more promise in being accepted and rolled out sooner. By the end of this episode, listeners will have a more clear picture of practical considerations in healthcare technology adoption, reasons that are often less about quality or potential of the technology and more about clarity on ROI for investors.

At TechEmergence, we like to look around the corner at where AI is impacting industries and how people can make better business decisions based on that information. AI and software is an emerging topic of interest to many companies, and in this episode we get a venture capitalist's perspective on where AI will play a vital and necessary role with real results in software and industry. Jake Flomenberg, a partner with venture capital firm Accel in Palo Alto, shared his insights on how software can integrate AI in intuitive and valuable ways for users. He cites some of the companies that Accel has invested in to illustrate some of the potential software features that may be introduced to the enterprise in the next five years or so. Flomenberg's insights may be useful for anyone building a business or planning to buy a product or service from a software vendor in the near future. If you're interested in getting other founders' perspectives on the feedback and interest shown by investors in their startups, our AI startup consensus on investor sentiment is a good place to start.

In some ways, investors in AI have to do a lot of what we do at TechEmergence, which is sort through marketing fluff and determine what's actually working and what's more of a pipe dream, as well as what's coming up in the next five years that seems inevitable and what's more likely to flop. In this episode we're joined by Li Jiang, a venture capitalist with GSV Capital whom I was connected with through Bootstrap Labs as a pre-event interview — we'll both be at Bootstrap Labs' Applied AI event in San Francisco on May 11. This week, Jiang speaks about the current areas of AI applications that he sees driving value in business, as well as what technologies he believes will make a long-term impact in terms of automation. His insights on where AI automations are generating cost savings and increased efficiency, as well as what roles might be completely replaced or significantly augmented by AI, are useful nuggets for companies who are thinking through some of their own business processes and are eager to identify low-hanging fruit.

As it turns out, survival of the fittest applies as much to algorithms as it does to amoebas, at least when we're talking about genetic algorithms. We recently interviewed Dr. Jay Perrret, CTO of Aria Networks, a company that uses genetic algorithm-based technology for solving some of industry's toughest problems, from optimization of business networks to pinpointing genetic patterns correlated with specific diseases. Dr. Perrett has been working for years in this domain, testing algorithms that use variations of parameters in order to gradually arrive at a best result, when there's no simple way to program a solution. In this episode, Dr. Perrett discusses how genetic algorithms (GA) work and ways that they can be tested and applied in a business context. He provides two very useful case studies, including a recent example with Facebook that involved planning out an optimal (and massive) data network.

Getting beyond the marketing and jargon on the homepage of AI companies and figuring out what's actually happening, what results are being driven in business, is part of our job at TechEmergence. Shaking those answers out of founders is not always easy, but we didn't have to do much shaking with Yohai Sabag, chief data scientist for Optimove, a marketing AI and automation company in Israel. In this episode, he speaks about what humans are needed for in the optimization process, and what facets can be automated or distributed to a machine. Sabag gives an excellent walk-through of how marketers can use the "human-machine feedback loop" to optimize individual campaigns at scale.

You might be aware that some of the articles online about sports or financial performance of companies are article written by machines; this machine learning-based technology is the burgeoning field of natural language generation (NLG), which aims to create written content as humans would—in context— but at greater speed and scale. Yseop is one such enterprise software company, whose product suite turns data into written insight, explanations, and narrative. In this episode we interview Yseop's Vice President Matthieu Rauscher, who talks about the fundamentals of natural language generation in business, and what conditions need to be in place in order to drive key objectives. Rauscher also addresses the difference between discover-oriented machine learning (ML) and production-level ML, and why different industries might be drawn to one over the other.

There is in fact a dark side to AI, although we're certainly not at the point where we need to fear terminators, but it's certainly been leveraged toward malicious aims in a business context. In data security, tremendous venture dollars are going into preventing fraud and theft, but this same brand of technology is also being use by the "bad guys" to try and steal that information and break into those systems. In this episode, I speak with Justin Fier, director of cyber intelligence at Dark Trace, who speaks about the malicious uses of AI and how companies like Dark Trace have been forced to fight these "AI assailants".

Most of our recent investor interviews have been Bay area investors, like Accenture and Canvas, and we don't usually get to speak with investors overseas, particularly in Asia. This week, however, we interviewed Tak Lo, a partner with Zeroth.ai, an accelerator program and cohort investing firm based in Hong Kong and focused on startup artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) companies. Lo speaks about when he saw AI take off in China and the differences in that rise compared to the U.S. He also gives valuable insight on consumer differences in how the two populations interact with technology, and how these differences in the Asian market drive different business opportunities in China than in the U.S.

If you're going to apply machine learning (ML) in a business context, you need a lot of data, and algorithms across the board perform better with more recent, rich, and relevant data. Today, there are companies whose entire business models are predicated on helping others make sense of and use of this type of information. In this episode, we speak with the CTO and Co-Founder of one such company—Palo Alto-based Cloudera. CTO Amr Awadallah, PhD, speaks with us this week about where he sees "data lakes" (or "data hubs", Cloudera's preferred term) and warehouses play an important role in ML applications in business. Based on his experiences helping a variety of companies in many countries set up data lakes, Amwadallah is able to distill and communicate these uses in three broad categories that apply across industries as companies look to solve tougher problems and ask more complex questions using unstructured data.

One facet of business that nearly any industry has in common is the need to stay on top of news in their respective market, including competitor strategies or understanding changes in news related to the field. Media monitoring is a domain that machine learning (ML) is well suited for, with it's ability to coax out headlines, contextual information, and financial data from the seemingly endless stream of social, blog, and other information on the web today. Signal is a company that uses ML specifically for these purposes. In this episode, we speak with Signal Media's Chief Data Scientist and Co-founder Dr. Miguel Martinez, who dives into real business use cases illustrating the use of machine learning for media monitoring across industries.

What does it mean to tune an algorithm, how does it matter in a business context, and what are the approaches being developed today when it comes to tuning algorithms? This week's guest helps us answer these questions and more. CEO and Co-Founder Scott Clark of SigOpt takes time to explain the dynamics of tuning, goes into some of the cutting-edge methods for getting tuning done, and shares advice on how businesses using machine learning algorithms can continue to refine and adjust their parameters in order to glean greater results.

In this episode, recorded live at Canvas Ventures in Portola Valley, I speak with Ben Narasin, a partner with Canvas and an avid venture investor in AI and ML companies, some of which we've interviewed (Crowdflower and Mulesoft), along with many others that we haven't (like Siri). Ben doesn't look for AI to invest in; instead, he looks for companies to invest in, a subtle but important difference in a business world increasingly caught up in the explosion of AI and ML technologies. From investments in Nuance to more recent one such as Houzz, Narasin has solid ideas as to what makes an investment interesting when AI is involved, what might actually add value to a model with AI, and what's wholly irrelevant when it comes to overall business model. Besides making important distinctions on where investments can make a return and how to raise money for your AI startup, this interview is also chock full of great analogies (give me golden dragons all day long—anyone?)

There's been lot of hype around AI and ML in business over the past five years. Even among investors exist a lot of misconceptions about using ML in a business context, and how to get up to speed on and grasp and understand leveraging related technologies in industry. Recently, I talked with Benjamin Levy of BootstrapLabs in San Francisco, who I met through an investment banking friend in Boston. BootstrapLabs invests in Bay area companies, and Levy also travels around the world speaking about investing in AI companies and raising funds for new ventures. In this episode, Levy gives his perspective on what investors and executives get wrong about ML and and AI, and discusses how they can get up to speed on the applications for these technologies and leverage them and related expertise to really make a difference (i.e. increased ROI) in their businesses.

Uday Veeramachaneni is taking a new approach to machine learning in infosecurity, AKA infosec. Traditionally, infosec has approached predicting attacks in two ways: through a system of hand-designed rules, and through anomaly detection, a technique that detects statistical outliers in the data. The problem with these approaches, Veermachaneni says, is that the signal-to-noise ratio is too low. In this episode, Veermachaneni discusses how his company, PatternEx, is using machine learning to provide more accurate attack prediction. He also discusses the cooperative role of man and machine in building robust AI applications in data security and walks us through a common security attack scenario.

When it comes to finding an expert on interviewing and finding machine learning (ML) talent, Parshu Kulkarni may just be the guy to ask. Not only is Kulkarni one of a small subsegment of the global population with an advanced degree in data science who has also been hired to work in tech companies like eBay, but he's been on the unique side hiring of ML and AI talent. Today, Kulkarni works full-time as Head of Data Science at Hired, Inc., a giant platform for hiring top talent in tech and other areas. In this episode, he provide an interesting distinction between what individuals with experience in data science look for in potential hires versus those who do not have the tech background tend to look for, and also dives into the supply-and-demand landscape for data scientists now and in the future—an interesting interview for anyone looking to hire or be hired in the ML and AI space.

In marketing, there are lots of applications in AI and machine learning (ML), from recommendation engines to predictive analytics and beyond. At the company Adgorithms, there are even more ambitious projects underway - like automating the process of marketing altogether by having a machine run and generate ads, or test and spend the marketing budget of a company. Or Shani, CEO of Adgorithms, focuses on the quantitative aspects and optimization of online advertising, using algorithms to improve advertising processes. In this interview, Shani talks about how Adgorithms' smart marketing platform "Albert" meshes with humans' role in marketing, and also discusses how these roles might change over the next 5 to 10 years as we move towards ever more automated marketing processes.

Not all knowledge work can be crunched by a program, but there are some hard-to-automate business processes that a select few entities are making an attempt to automate now. Boston-based Rage Frameworks, Inc. is one such company, and in this episode we speak with Senior Vice President (SVP) Joy Dasgupta about specific applications of automation technologies applied to white collar environments. Rage Frameworks has developed intelligent machines that have been able to take over process that, prior to the emergence of AI and automation technologies, would have required thousands of people to accomplish. These developments are a microcosm of what is to come, and the process is not without its ethical considerations (as discussed in a previous interview with Yoshua Bengio). But Dasgupta's insights provide a concrete glimpse into how these processes are being automated in the knowledge workplace today and what that might mean or look like decades from now.

This week we speak with CEO and Founder of Nexar Inc., Eran Shir, whose company has created a dashboard app that allows drivers to mount a smartphone, which then collects visual information and other data, such as speed from your accelerometer, in order to help detect and prevent accidents. The app also serves as a way to reconstruct what happens in a collision - a unique solution in a big and untapped market. In this episode, Shir gives his vision of a world where the roads are filled with cyborgs, rather than autonomous robots, i.e. people augmented with new sensory information that trigger notifications, warnings or prompts for safer driving behavior, amongst a network of cloud-connected cars. He also touches on what the transition might look like in response to the question - when will autonomous cars be mainstream?

In this episode, we speak with Senior Editor for the Economist in digital and data products and Co-author of "Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform How We Work, Live and Think", Kenneth Cukier, who speaks on the technologies that underlie big data and make it what it is today. Cukier addresses common misconceptions about machine learning and dives into how companies can catch up with this technology by thinking through, assessing ROI, and making sense of the dynamics of big data. Listen for Cukier's apt analogy in comparing machine learning technology to the dynamics of computing from decades ago.

What are executives missing the boat on and what do they need to think about when it comes to AI and ML? This week, we speak with John Straw, who has had a number of businesses in the UK and US, currently a senior advisor to McKinsey & Co., and who works with a lot of executive teams in terms of finding new applications for AI and finding ROI for those technologies in industry. We speak this week about how executives can get up to speed, what degree of knowledge and in what way they should learn it so they can find opportunities in their own companies. Straw also touches on what he sees as the biggest areas of oversight, in terms of preventing companies from finding those applications that can keep them up to speed with competitors and the big technology players.

In many ways, AI and finance are made for each other. Machine learning and other techniques make it easier to identify patterns that might otherwise not be detected by the human eye, and finance is quantitative to begin with so that it's hard not to find traction. Financial firms have also invested heavily in AI in the past, and more are starting to tap into the financial applications of machine learning (ML) and deep learning. This week, we're joined by CEO and Co-founder of Kavout Alex Lu, whose company offers AI trading applications for enterprises and individuals. Lu speaks today about the kinds of patterns that traders now have access to in finance, and he gives examples of ways Kavout and other institutions are using artificial intelligence in stock trading to build better and more personalized products and services.

Market research and trends is important when discussing AI and business, but it's also worthwhile to contemplate the ethical and social implications further down the line. How will countries deal with potential unemployment problems? How might countries collaborate to hedge against the risks that AI poses to the future of work and other economic facets? A relatively small group is helping people do just that i.e. getting organizations and countries to think through how they could hedge against the grander risks inherent in a world powered by AI. In this episode, we speak with Jerome Glenn, head of the Millennium Project, an initiative that focuses on research implementing the organizational means, operational priorities, and financing structures necessary to achieve the Millennium Development Goals or (MDGs). Glenn talks about how he gets principalities of the world to bring their big industrial players and the public to talk through possible scenarios that are 30, 40, even 50 years in the future, and about ways we might potentially hedge against risks and make the most of the upsides of AI in a global economy.

A medium-size business with a $20M marketing budget can run into issues when aiming to track an attribute, what marketing dollars brought in customers, etc. But when you're managing $90B for customers all over the world and working in every conceivable channel, things get all the more complicated. Josh Sutton, global head of Data and AI at Publicis.Sapient, speaks in this episode about the future of advertising attribution with machine learning. Specifically, Sutton discusses how his team of publicists is working on managing, tracking, and determining cohorts and attribution across more channels and numerous clients, and touches on ways that the company is applying ML to make sense of marketing data and spend marketing dollars more effectively.

I remember reading an article in Scientific American years ago about a poster of a person looking in the direction people sitting in a school dining room, and that this poster would make people sitting in the dining room less likely to litter. This seems like an absurd example of holding people accountable for their actions, but as it turns out, there are a lot more serious consequences to ensuring behavior change through observation, and one area where this matters is medicine. Today, there's a major issue with people who don't adhere to their medical regimens, only to relapse or experience more serious symptoms later on. This week's guest, Cory Kidd, CEO of Catalia Health and known for his work at MIT on human-robotic interaction, is working to help solve this problem by developing a robot that adds some of that physical presence and accountability. This is likely one of many novel medical AI applications that we're likely to see roll out in healthcare over the next decade.

Today's episode is about continual learning, a focus of Cogitai, a company dedicated to building AI's that interact and learn from the real world. Cogitai's Cofound and CEO Mark Ring talks about the differences between supervised and reinforcement, and how Cogitai intends to take reinforcement learning in the direction of continual learning. Ring also touches on where he sees an opportunity for applying continual learning in domains like vehicles, consumer apps, etc., and improving abstract levels of understanding by machines.

There's not that many serial tech entrepreneurs in the legal space, but Gary Sangha is one of them. Sangha is CEO and founder of Lit IQ, which is applying machine learning and computational linguistics to legal documents to help lawyers avoid making drafting mistakes. In this episode, Sangha talks about where this type of software is most useful and legitimate, what the legal landscape in relationship to machine learning may look like in the next few years, and how this technology may apply across industries.

Some organizations are leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to help the world with research, some to help companies with marketing, and some are intent on ensuring that the future of AI doesn't result in the end of humanity. Theres'a good likelihood that if you're reading this interview, that you're already familiar with OpenAI, an organization with the sole purpose of ensuring that the future of man and machines is a friendly one, and that the concentration of power and intelligence isn't centralized in a way that would make AI a dangerous tool. In this episode, we speak with Ilya Sutskever, research director for Open AI. This was a fun but frustrating interview; Sutskever held his cards close to his chest, but we gain some perspective on what he considers to be areas of importance regarding the future of AI and considerations for safely furthering advances in the field.

Right now, you can take a picture of a flower in your garden and post it on social media to see if anyone knows its proper name. Wouldn't it be nice, though, if a machine could identify the correct name and species in the picture you just took? Solving this problem in applications of machine vision is something that CEO Igal Raichelgauz and his team are working on at Cortica, a machine learning company that is not focused on deep learning, but is instead taking a more "shallow" approach. In this episode, Raichelgauz articulates Cortica's approach, which is based on neurology and goes against some of the current approaches in getting machines to learn. We discuss some of these primary differences and dive into Cortica's goals for applying machine vision in consumer products.

This week's guest is Kimberly Powell, senior director of business development at NVIDIA. In an interview conducted at the 2016 AI Summit in San Francisco, Powell spoke with TechEmergence about GPUs and the factors that are making them easier to use, how Nvidia and others are working to make this technology more accessible to small businesses and startups, and about some of Nvidia's and other similar players' innovations in the deep learning field.

Accenture is a pretty large company in the tech space, providing services to many of the Fortune 500 and global equivalents. They recently conducted a study of their own, combined with expertise from economists and AI researchers, about the longer-term economic impact of artificial intelligence on economies around the world. In this episode, I speak with Chief Technology Officer Paul Daughtery, who has been with Accenture since 1986, who was joined by Global Technology R&D Lead Marc Carrel-Billiard. We met up at a coffee shop after an AI Summit in San Francisco, and I asked Paul and Marc about what they had learned from this newly-published study and what they consider to be the significant impacts of AI and automation on the future job market.

Crowdsourcing is a relatively common term in technical vernacular today. Even if you're not a self-identified "techie", you may very may well have leveraged crowdsourcing in journalism, the sciences, public policy, or elsewhere. One area in which this concept hasn't really taken off is in finance and hedge funds. In this episode, we speak with Richard Craib, founder of Numerai, about the company's model for pooling data science talent, using "anonymous" models to train financial data, and competing against one another, in which winners are rewarded in bitcoin to exchange through virtual markets. Craib speaks about his overarching vision for the company, and also delves into the past, present, and future of AI applications in finance.

What does the world look like when we can replicate human expertise in an assistant? Are we close to developing human-level chatbots that we can ask about law or medical conditions? We dive into this topic with Founder and CEO of exClone Dr. Riza Berkan, whose personal assistant and chat-bot company is leveraging day-to-day human conversational templates in machine learning technology in order to better approach the tough task of replicating human expertise through a machine. Berkan talks about the edge layer of his company's "secret sauce", and touches on the future applications of what might manifest in this field in 5 to 10 years in medical and other consumer applications.

In one of our most recent consensus, we took a close look at future trends in artificial intelligence consumer applications, but it's also interesting to see what's happening now in businesses. Chris Nicholson is the CEO of Skymind.io, which offers deep learning applications that integrate with Hadoop and Spark. In this episode, Nicholson sheds light on current trends that he sees across industries and best practices for implementing AI solutions to gain consistent return on investment.

We've interviewed a number of guests on TechEmergence, but very few who have had a serious part of their career in selling automobiles. But Michael Perry did just that for 5 years before founding Kit, his third startup - an AI application that works in marketing for small businesses and was acquired by Shopify in April 2016. In this episode, Perry speaks about how Kit and Shopify leverage AI on a daily basis, and how a "non-tech" person with no formal background in AI or data science can build a team for an AI project.

Martin Ford started off as a software entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, but became better known for his speaking and writing on robotics' and automation's influence on the job market after writing his best-selling book, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future. In this episode, Martin talks about why he believes 'white collar' jobs (as opposed to blue) are at a higher risk for automation, and gives his predictions on how automation and robotics will impact the job market over the next 5 to 10 years.

As Senior Director and World Wide Head of the Cognitive Innovation Group at Nuance Communications, Mark Hanson works on bringing Nuance lab innovations to business applications, with the guiding goals of improving customer experience and business efficiency. In this episode, Hanson speaks about natural language processing (NLP), where he believes this technology is headed in the future and where it's driving value now, and how companies are applying NLP in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

How do you know if you've made the right decision for a hire? Often, employers go off gut instinct and make a decision retrospectively, but it turns out AI might be able to help out in human resource management through shedding light on best hiring decisions. In this episode, Pasha Roberts, chief scientist at Talent Analytics, tells us about how his company is working on helping companies make better decisions before they hire by applying machine learning and artificial intelligence to various data points on a given applicant, including information from aptitude tests that may help predict not only performance but retention.

Big data is often a buzzword, but if you're trying to quantify data around homes in the U.S. and pair that with hard to quantify information - like images - you're likely running into the frontiers of machine learning technology. This is something Zillow deals with daily. In this episode, Stan Humphries, Chief Analytics Officer and Economist for Zillow, speaks about where they're leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence (hint: almost everywhere), and what he believes are the keys for deriving real ROI opportunities using this technology. Humphries also offers insights for how other companies can model the successful decision-making processes and implementation strategies used by Zillow.