The Tesoro AI Podcast

The gig economy has created jobs we never would have imagined.  This offered those in "boring, low skill" jobs an opportunity to earn a living while enjoying a better quality of life.  Fortunately, AI is stepping in to fill the empty seats these workers once occupied.  Manufacturing is a great example of this activity.  Production lines once required humans to review products for defects – a quite...

he real goal of Conversational AI is not to make users believe they are speaking with a human.  The real goal is to enable robots to solve issues faster and more effectively, using conversation.  Chatbot technology was among the first AI use cases that received early hype.  Many early attempts to build failed due to an inability to truly solve issues or due to poor user experience.  As the hype ha...

The rate at which technology is advancing is incredible.  From all of the use cases we've explored in this podcast alone, we've seen some mind-boggling uses of AI.  As innovators, we're always trying to push the boundaries of what's possible – in this case via AI – but we also need resources to support rapid innovation when we get ahead of our skis.  DevOps is a field that is enabling more safe an...

The tech world is fired up due to the emergence of 5G and the potential for game changing technology that it is enabling.  From autonomous driving vehicles to AI applications running on edge devices, 5G is set to open the door to exponentially more powerful tech.  The challenge is that traditional systems are not best fit to move messages/signals from point A to point B with the proper efficiency...

How customers experience a company's product or service is always top of mind for executives.  However, wise executives know that employee experience should be equally valued.  As businesses become increasingly driven by technology, the quantity of help desk tickets are growing exponentially.  Quickly solving these issues results for employees has a direct impact on employee downtime and satisfact...

Sales coaching is big business.  The challenge is that it's generally a 1:1 activity, whether done in-house or leveraging consultants.  With AI's ability to gain a contextual understanding of conversation, combined with powerful recommendation engines, sales professionals can now be coached at scale, real-time, and with a strong dose of personalization via AI.   In this episode, I sit with Marc Be...

Whether we are talking investing or sports, pattern recognition reigns supreme as the key characteristic enabling top performing professionals to rise above the competition.  For the industrial manufacturing industry, pattern recognition in IoT data (as well as video and image data) have opened an opportunity to drive operational efficiencies and greater profit margins.  Artificial intelligence ha...

With 'computer vision' we give machines the ability to see the world around us.  Computer vision is enabling the use of game changing technology such as self-driving vehicles, medical image analysis, and facial recognition.  Historically, computer vision was only accessible to deeply technical AI experts.  Today, innovative companies like Roboflow are reducing its complexity, enabling both technic...

The demand for healthier food and the fear of food shortages have had farmers scrambling for answers for years.  Vertical farming has emerged as a solution, but its not scalable enough to feed a growing global population.  Thus, farmers have had to rely on chemicals – until now.  Innovative minds at Biome Makers have come up with a better solution, utilizing AI to understand the biological makeup...

You get an email regarding a package being delivered.  It says you should log into your account. Seems legit, but you never ordered a package!  Fraudsters are trying every trick in the book to fool you into sharing sensitive information.  This activity is especially difficult to catch when you, specifically, are the target – which is the case with spearfishing email.  For most of us, there isn't e...

The manufacturing industry contributed to one of history's greatest productivity revolutions.  However, today the industry has been left behind by the technological revolution.  Despite attempts at automation in manufacturing, the industry remains known for its tough and mundane manual labor which leads to safety risk and high employee turnover.  Technologists are rethinking manufacturing with art...

In crime shows, you often see a sleep deprived security guard snoozing in front of his monitor at the very moment suspicious activity occurs.  This may or may not be a Hollywood creation, but what is real is the challenge of vigilantly monitoring a camera feed 24/7.  Interestingly, most criminal and suspicious activity occur in front of a camera, but timely recognition and reporting create the gre...

Have you created a burner account to research your competitors?  No judgement here! Sales is a competitive space and knowing how you stack up against the competition is an asset that can set your sales team apart.  With so much data, AI should be able to serve up relevant details to help win deals, right?  This is the challenge that Klue has taken head on.   In this episode, I sit with Jason Smith...

Powerpoint is a thing of the past.  Organizations and individuals with valuable data want a way to build dynamic dashboards and data driven apps, without having to acquire front-end experience.  Enter Amanda Kelly (Co-Founder and COO of Streamlit).  Amanda leads a quickly growing startup focused on turning data scripts into shareable web apps in minutes. In this episode we discuss: how Amanda leve...

Some things are difficult to truly appreciate until they aren't available – clean water is one of those things.  Our guest, Elango Thevar (Founder and CEO of Neer.ai), grew up in India in an area where clean, drinkable water was a privilege.  Elango explains that anywhere between 30% of clean water coming from water management facilities is wasted in its commute to US citizens.  Artificial intelli...

A 2-minute scroll through any social media platform and you can see that advertising has exploded.  Performance marketers, who make creative decision on ad display, struggle to understand what works, what doesn't work – and why.  Leveraging artificial intelligence, Viralspace has come to the rescue, allowing performance marketers to stop guessing and start making data-driven decisions on ad optimi...

Home maintenance probably isn't an industry most would associate with artificial intelligence, but Dobby is bringing the industry into the 21st Century.  With a focus on increasing home value and providing the homeowner with a luxury experience, our guest Satadru Sengupta is hyper focused on bring operational efficiency to the maintenance process via digital transformation.   In this episode, we d...

If only real life were like your favorite crime series – zoom in on low quality images from surveillance cameras and up comes an HD image with immaculate detail.  Surprise! Neural networks are turning what was once fiction into reality.  Photoshoots are expensive, but the rise of social media is demanding high quality visuals, especially for consumer focused businesses. In this episode, we chat wi...

Field service workers generally aren't tech savvy, but whether we are talking about industries such as oil & gas, facilities maintenance, construction, or manufacturing - artificial intelligence is a tool being used to create massive productivity gains.  The challenge for AI vendors is to develop solutions that encourage adoption by non-technical users.  This is the task our guest, Vikram Takru (C...

Field service workers generally aren't tech savvy, but whether we are talking about industries such as oil & gas, facilities maintenance, construction, or manufacturing - artificial intelligence is a tool being used to create massive productivity gains.  The challenge for AI vendors is to develop solutions that encourage adoption by non-technical users.  This is the task our guest, Vikram Takru (C...

In this new remote work we live in, we have all been forced to experience the pain of meeting scheduling.  From back and forth emails, to time zone mistakes, to calendar confusion – all of these represent wasted time and resources.  Undock, which identifies itself with a spaceship, is to prepared to bring us into the new world, leveraging artificial intelligence to solve our scheduling woes.   In...

Social Networks, CRMs, and even Excel spreadsheets have been great for storing professional relationships.  For dealmakers, getting a foot in the door with a new client requires access beyond 1st degree connections.  Who do your colleagues know?  What is the nature of the relationship and how strong is it?  These questions are golden, yet current systems underperform in providing answers.  4Degree...

Few industries took a bigger hit than retailers relying on in-store purchases.  Ironically, it appears this adjustment period forced them to heighten their focus on better understanding their customers.  Artificial intelligence has emerged as one way to gather deeper customer insighst.  Rillavoice, led by Co-Founder and CEO, Sebastian Jimenez, is enabling retailers to analyze unique customer feedb...

What's the best way to get inside of the mind of a customer or audience you're serving?  Traditionally, we'd hire market research experts or run a survey.  These methods are limited by scale, but with AI we may be able to dive deeper into real-time customer conversations to derive insights that speed the feedback look and accelerate the innovation cycle.  Remesh, led by our guest Andrew Konya, is...

We often think of insider threats, related to cybersecurity, as the rogue employee hacking internal systems.  However, well-funded nation state attacks have increased complexity as individuals inside the network collaborate with outside organizations with malicious intent.  DTEX Systems has set out to leverage AI to combat this issue.  In this episode, Mohan Koo (Co-Founder & CTO), walks us throug...