Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Cognitive Scale CEO Akshay Sabhikhi (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Lift yourself to the 30,000 foot level and look at the AI universe. What do you see on the horizon as in trends and open problems that you could point other entrepreneurs to?

Akshay Sabhikhi: If I may draw an analogy, think of this as the 1997 to 1998 timeframe of the Internet age. I remember where I was then. Everyone was in a transformation to become a digital business. How do I establish my e-commerce website so I can have having an online presence? I’m sure you remember that time. We are roughly at that stage.

If you think about what happened then, people were trying to hand stitch websites and put in shopping carts. This whole notion of web server was there but was very rudimentary. The whole notion of app server was still coming about because people were still trying to understand exactly what an app server needs. That is where AI is today. People have been able to pull together lots of different techniques.

Frankly, that’s how we began four years back. We have realized what it means to put up a platform. When I look at the future of where AI is going to go, I look at big and small enterprises needing to be able to build their own AI applications. Having AI today seems like a novelty because people talk about being able to do stuff with AI. A few years from now, this is going to be a reality. Every organization will tell you that AI is not if and when. It’s more like what do we do with it now. There’s almost a Board-level mandate of figuring out the AI strategy.

It’s not about going out and hiring data science people and throwing huge gobs of data at the data science people. It’s about saying, “What is that underlying operating system that gives you the ability to put up AI applications quickly?” That is where the market is headed. The future is towards the adoption of these types of platforms that can give businesses the ability to not go and hire expensive data science resources. There’s a massive scarcity when it comes to data science people. How do you democratize that knowledge in a platform to let other people who are less technical to be able to develop AI-based solutions.

Sramana Mitra: That is the future but that puts you in competition with Microsoft, Google, and IBM Watson. How do you compete?

Akshay Sabhikhi: We effectively partnered with Microsoft. Microsoft had come to us and said, “We love to partner with you because you have an industry-verticalized platform that can sit on top of Azure.” I have a four-year partnership with IBM Watson. In fact, some of us came from IBM Watson. We were part of the early wave of creating commercial IBM Watson. Understanding that Watson is a set of APIs doesn’t mean that you can go solve diabetes or you can go solve personalization for consumers.

Our approach has been that there will be a lot of platforms out there that will provide lower-level APIs. It’s like saying, “I have the eye, ear, and the nose. I can do vision, text, and speech.” But the digital brain that orchestrates that to actually solve real problems is something that I believe we have cracked with the work that we have done over the last three years. We think of ourselves as a verticalized platform that sits on top of the Azure stack and IBM Watson. We’ve effectively shown how we work with it.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Cognitive Scale CEO Akshay Sabhikhi
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