The AI in Business Podcast

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 co...

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 simil...

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, wh...

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 compan...

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...

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 industrie...

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...

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...

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...

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 bet...

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 machi...

When Google's DeepMind won against one of the best modern Go champions, is used multiple AI approaches and exposed gaps in some individual strategies. This even has shed more light on AI, but also on the utility in combining approaches to AI for individual problems. Data security is one of these problem areas where multiple AI approaches is being used to make our information safer. Dr. Sal Stolfo...

This episode's guest is Uri Sarid, CTO at Mulesoft. Sarid speaks about where he believes the future of machine learning (ML) applications in industry might go - he thinks applications might stay small and niche-based, and will develop based on how well they each serve their individual purposes. He also speaks on his belief that companies will get used to dealing with disparate ML technologies and...

It isn't by chance that birds fly in flocks and fish swim in schools -  they're actually smarter when they act in a group. Could it be possible to extend that collective intelligence to human beings, and even AI? Louis Rosenberg is a PhD from Stanford, previously founder of Immersion and who now runs Unanimous AI, a company focusing on harnessing swarm intelligence with human beings. In this episo...

Predictive analytics and machine learning are all the rage in Silicon Valley, but how do companies actually derive value by leveraging these technologies? We asked this question to Dr. Ronen Meiri, CTO and Founder of DMWay, a predictive analytics and machine learning platform company based in Israel. In this episode, Ronen speaks about what his company does and how smart executives are starting to...

Our guest in this episode has spent a large part of his life on figuring out how to make machines more intelligent. LoopAI Chief Scientist Patrick Ehlen has worked on a number of important projects, from DARPA projects to big-company AI solutions at places like AT&T. LoopAI works on getting AI to make sense and meaning of unstructured text, and Ehlen talks about the potential business applications...

This week's guest is Senior Vice President of SPARK, an economic development organization dedicated to getting startups and other early-stage companies off the ground in Ann Arbor. Skip Simms speaks on how to convey complex technologies to investors who don't necessarily have your technical expertise, and still close the deal and get the investment. Simms talks about companies he's seen do this we...

For some companies, big data remains an abstraction; for others, it's an integral part of the lifeblood of a business. Mat Harris is vice president at Sojern, a travel marketing platform that has leveraged big data to grow $3 billion in bookings and 1/3 of a billion traveler profiles across its platform. In this episode, Harris speaks about how Sojern and other businesses are using a combination o...

Companies looking to raise money are often asking what investors think of their company, their industry, and how they're making investment decisions in related companies. In this episode, I ask these questions of Robert Seidel, who is managing partner of Motus Ventures, an investment firm focusing on autonomous Vehicles and the IoT. Seidl talks about various data sources and the people and network...

This week's interview was recorded live at Nuance's Silicon Valley office with guest Charlie Ortiz, director of the AI and Natural Language (NL) Processing Lab for Nuance Communications in Silicon Valley. In this episode, Ortiz speaks about what he sees as the most important developments in natural language processing (NLP) over the last few years, what advancements brought us to where we are toda...

Fifteen years ago, investing in AI may have seemed a bit far-fetched, but today it's not at all a rare occurrence; however, it's more rare to find entire firms dedicated to investing entirely in AI. In today's episode, we're joined by Saman Farid, co-founder of Comet Labs, an investment firm focused on investment in AI companies across industries. He speaks about his investment hypothesis in the f...

One of the most memorable moments from this interview is when our guest mentioned that Larry Page hired him to solve intelligence; very few people can say this, and this says something about today's guest, Dr. Nando de Freitas - a senior researcher at Google and professor at Oxford - as well as the gravity of his present work. Today, I speak with Nando about a topic well known through his research...

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Matteo Berlucchi, the founder of Your. MD, which uses artificial intelligence to create one of the first personal health assistant platforms in 70+ countries. Berlucchi talks about the challenges in making an AI do what you want, specifically helping people self diagnose and seek proper treatment. He discusses the multiple approaches to AI that are blended togeth...

CTO and Co-founder of Sumo Logic Christian Beedgen gives his take on how to glean return on investment from applying machine learning to companies. There are no easy answers, but Beedgen boils down simple concepts for thinking about humans thinking through causation, machines working out correlations, and how the combination of the two can glean us better ideas and get to answers faster than human...

Artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) are often seen as different trends, but there is a lot of overlap in these areas, where you might not expect. Lucid VR's CTO Adam Rowell speaks today about how AI plays a role in making VR work, augmenting the accuracy of images and making a more immersive and convincing experience for users. Rowell also touches on non-gaming VR apps that he an...