Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Wovenware COO Carlos Melendez (Part 1)

Wovenware is a Puerto Rico-based AI solutions company working in Computer Vision and Insight Management.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself as well as Wovenware.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Venkatesh Bala, Chief Risk Officer, Biz2Credit (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Can you give me one metric that gives me an idea of the number of banks that are using your solution?

Venkatesh Bala: If I look at banks and financial services companies, it’s a growing number. I’ll give you one example in the context of what is happening with PPP or the Paycheck Protection Program. The first PPP was launched in April and it went on until August. Now, the second round has begun.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Venkatesh Bala, Chief Risk Officer, Biz2Credit (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Is your primary source of data the bank accounts?

Venkatesh Bala: To say that means that we only rely on one source of information. Having cash flow data at a transaction level is the most important, but we have other sources of information. 

Sramana Mitra: Like? Can you give me an example?

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Venkatesh Bala, Chief Risk Officer, Biz2Credit (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is the structure of your AI model? Talk about what the architecture of the AI is.

Venkatesh Bala: We collect permission-based information when the customer comes to our marketplace. We can build a robust platform that allows us to ingest a substantial amount of data, and we can apply cutting-edge AI tools. 

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Venkatesh Bala, Chief Risk Officer, Biz2Credit (Part 1)

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Small business credit has been upended in COVID. Banks are processing PPP loans at a frantic pace without the scalable infrastructure to do so.

This discussion delves into the realities of that world.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Biz2Credit.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Blackbird.ai CEO Wasim Khaled (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: There must also be a way for those platforms to receive input. If your system has detected some major misinformation that is being amplified in a platform, there must be a way of informing that platform.

Wasim Khaled: Absolutely. The platforms are definitely on our radar as future partners. Just this Monday, Blackbird released a report which is on our website called “Man, Machine Intelligent System for Scalable Identification of Hoaxes and Misinformation.” This is a collaboration with a company called News Guard.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Blackbird.ai CEO Wasim Khaled (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Two questions based on what you said. How prevalent is this kind of cyberattack on the brands today?

Wasim Khaled: It is surprisingly very high. It’s amazing that a lot of the organizations have not fully understood the impact that it has on them because they don’t have the methods to detect these types of attacks. These things are happening all the time.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Blackbird.ai CEO Wasim Khaled (Part 5)

Wasim Khaled: If you look back to the era of the Soviet Union, they weaponized propaganda and disinformation. They recently wielded it using these new tools. Again, it’s self-subscribing to propaganda. It’s the perfect system when you have polarized groups to drill in on that.

I want to think about this and consider where that might be going. Today, it’s pretty bad. We can see this week, in particular, how many opposing narratives are coming out on the same topic.