Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Samir Addamine, Founder and Chairman of FollowAnalytics (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Help me understand one thing here. Marketing automation is a very crowded field. Try to help me pinpoint where in that very crowded space you fit in. There are all kinds of things going in. There’s campaign management, email marketing. There’s Marketo. There’s Eloqua. There are all kinds of stuff. From your point of view, how does the world look?

Samir Addamine: All the ones you mentioned are decades old. They’re not designed for the real-time marketing and the always-connected customers of today. If these guys started with email, email is not real-time.

Sramana Mitra: Right now, getting people to open emails is very difficult because there’s too much email. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Samir Addamine, Founder and Chairman of FollowAnalytics (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: GDPR was a priority for you long before all this because a priority for the rest of the world. Being in Europe, you had to pay attention to privacy much sooner.

Samir Addamine: Exactly. Also I would say that one of the company’s main value is ethics. Ethics is beyond regulations. It’s much more important. We are collecting data on mobile. We are collecting sensitive data here. We are collecting behavior when people are using the app. We are collecting locations. We are following the Apple and Google guidelines. The Apple guidelines are very restrictive, which is good.

Sramana Mitra: They’re much better than Facebook. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Samir Addamine, Founder and Chairman of FollowAnalytics (Part 2)

Samir Addamine: We are the biggest player in Europe in this area. We don’t have the same kind of visibility yet in the US, but we’ve been accelerating. Last year was an amazing year for us in terms of revenue and deals closed. We hope to close at seven figures, which is quite unique in our category. A few months ago, we decided that it’s time to accelerate in the US. We are the hidden diamond according to some of the analysts that we meet here.

We were at Las Vegas last week for a conference where all the competitors were there. You probably know Leanplum, Localytics, and Braze who are our US competitors. There are three things that are different with these guys. We have had an enterprise approach since the very beginning and AI as well. The connectivity to systems is giving us a huge advantage when we are talking to >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Samir Addamine, Founder and Chairman of FollowAnalytics (Part 1)

Have you started thinking about explainable AI yet? Well, you should. Read on for more.

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

Samir Addamine: I have an engineering degree. I studied in France where I was born and raised. I started my first company in 2005, which was a mobile boutique in Paris. I was trying to develop new services on mobile and games on mobile. In 2008, this company started to really take off, thanks to the app stores and the fact that brands were starting to get interested in having a presence in the app stores. >>>

Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Paul Daugherty, CTO and Chief Innovation Officer, Accenture (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: There is an IT gap that is complicated to bridge. I’m originally from India. I track the evolution of the Indian IT industry. A large part of that is in low-end business process outsourcing. I have seen so many applications where you put a piece of software in and 4,000 people are out of their jobs. This is already starting to flow through.

The projections for the number of jobs losses for this year is half a million. If you have a very low IQ person, you can’t expect that person now to be doing things of much higher order. That’s where the re-skilling or retooling is challenging. >>>

Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Paul Daugherty, CTO and Chief Innovation Officer, Accenture (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In some of your ideas that you’ve presented in the book, you are talking about AI being an augmentation factor as opposed to displacement factor in various workflows. I think the classic one that fits that bill would be in healthcare with doctors working with patients and electronic medical records. It’s actually a big frustration area for me as a consumer to watch how badly medical systems use technology and data.

Would you comment on that? I’m sure you are working with health systems as clients. Where is the problem? Why is this not moving faster? I’m very pleased that cyber security and online advertising are moving, but why is healthcare not moving as fast? >>>

Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Paul Daugherty, CTO and Chief Innovation Officer, Accenture (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: From an innovation process point of view, how do you look at this? Is the actual technology mostly coming from the startups and you’re folding them into the particular vertical practice area or horizontal practice area?

Paul Daugherty: There are different tiers of innovation that we see. We work with the big platform companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. They’re creating platforms at scale and innovating very rapidly. We’re seeing some startups use some of that technology to build businesses around it. We see tremendous innovation from entrepreneurs. They’re bringing in new approaches like pattern recognition for radiology diagnostics. >>>

Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Paul Daugherty, CTO and Chief Innovation Officer, Accenture (Part 3)

Paul Daugherty: We also have another component of Accenture Ventures, which we call Open Innovation. It’s our program for working with all the entrepreneurs, accelerators, and incubators that we can find. We have a team that focuses specifically on open innovation.

We currently have over 3,000 startups that we’ve met with. We’ve curated and understand what we do. That number is ever growing and is growing very rapidly. We curate them into a framework so that we understand, for a given startup, what stage they are at, how ready they are to go to large corporate clients, and what industry and geography they specialize in. We have a system that we track all that in. >>>