The AI in Business Podcast

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...

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 wi...

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 th...

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...

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 t...

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) compani...

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—Pa...

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 st...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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-ti...

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, focus...

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. Ra...

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 un...

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...

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...

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 l...

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 d...

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...

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 ensurin...

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 ap...

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 relation...

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...