Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Wovenware COO Carlos Melendez (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about how you managed to build this company from Puerto Rico. Is there a university where AI talents are easily available in Puerto Rico?

Carlos Melendez: Puerto Rico has the biggest engineering school in the Caribbean. I went to that school myself. The majority and, at some point, 100% of the talents that were graduating from that school were getting recruited to the US to work. So, a local talent pool is available.

We have built a very good relationship with the professors at that school and other engineering schools. We support some of their research. We are also in constant communication with them.

We also offer summer internships to some of the students. That is one way that we have been able to find talents and train them in what we need them to do when they start with us. 

Sramana Mitra: I’m interested in new pockets of companies and talents developing in different parts of the world. Is there an entrepreneurship community in Puerto Rico or are you an exception? 

Carlos Melendez: There is an entrepreneurship community in Puerto Rico. It is starting to grow. We are an outlier right now. In a couple of years, hopefully, that wouldn’t be the case. My business partner and I are committed to helping that ecosystem.

We collaborate with a local accelerator called Parallel 18. We collaborate to do everything we can to help the entrepreneur. There is another organization called Guayacan. They initially started helping companies get access to mentors from outside the island.

We went to one of their programs in 2012. It allowed us to talk and meet people from outside the island of Puerto Rico. That helped us in our journey to sell outside of Puerto Rico. 

Sramana Mitra: You should look at 1Mby1M to see if there is some way that you can use what we do to scale your ecosystem. What pointers do you have to entrepreneurs who want to build products within the AI domain? 

Carlos Melendez: There is a white space in insight services. The COVID situation has opened up those spaces even more. It’s not building AI just for the sake of building AI. AI is meant to provide insights on data and augmenting human intelligence in helping the decision makers. It’s helping the humans in the middle.

I think there are a lot of examples out there where people can build platforms to provide those insights and those services to customers, but that is not being done right now. For example, I think of restaurants and their need to change and become digital-first businesses because of the COVID situation.

I think of the platform that they could use – a single platform where they can offer their products. Restaurants should not just be able to offer reservations but also plan based on the data and use that to get better insights from the owners.

It’s the same thing with doctor’s offices. This is an area that needs improvement in terms of the digital-first experience. There is a vast number of opportunities to provide insight services that nobody is offering in the market right now. 

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Wovenware COO Carlos Melendez
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