Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Cognitive Scale CEO Akshay Sabhikhi (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Your strategy is to look at the universe as three layers where you have IBM, Azure, or Google underneath. You insert yourself as a middleware. Then you want the domain knowledge of clients where you either code into or the client themselves code that, or there may be verticalized solution providers on top of your layer.

Is that an accurate representation?

Akshay Sabhikhi: Very accurate. We are agnostic to some of the lower-level ML libraries. We work across the spectrum here. We have the verticalized augmented intelligence platform that brings what we have built as well as the tooling that our clients >>>

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 >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Cognitive Scale CEO Akshay Sabhikhi (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is a good example of the other value proposition?

Akshay Sabhikhi: All of us have been to Amazon. We all shop and we have preferences around things we buy on different websites. Think about the last time you went to a website. Pick your favorite sports brand. I never authenticated myself or given my credentials to a retailer on their website because it’s too painful. I don’t know what value I’m going to get when I authenticate.

When I just go up to the website and start shopping, I don’t find any information that’s really personalized to me. What I do find is some very annoying, crazy ads chasing me all over the place. What we did was we said, “It’s unlikely that people are going to authenticate themselves but how do you start understanding the consumer when they come to >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Cognitive Scale CEO Akshay Sabhikhi (Part 2)

Akshay Sabhikhi: I’ll give you a very high-level example. How do I understand you if you’re a patient or a shopper? How do I understand you at a really deep level? How can I use that to personalize the actions or recommendations to almost where it seems like you know me personally?

The second class of problems is what we call amplify. We believe that a lot of organizations have complex business processes. A complex business process is generally a combination of fully-automated or semi-automated and you have people who manage that process. The efficiency of those processes today is limited because it’s unable to look at all the extraneous data that surrounds the process. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Cognitive Scale CEO Akshay Sabhikhi (Part 1)

Microsoft, IBM, Google – they’re all building AI engines. Cognitive Scale has carved out a layer above them – a Middleware of sorts – that enables them to flexibly power applications in different categories. This is a very interesting positioning, and a story well worth reading for AI aficionados.

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

Akshay Sabhikhi: I’m the CEO of Cognitive Scale. We are a four-year-old company that was born in AI. We’re based out of Austin, Texas and have about 150 people. We are focused on making AI practical, real, and scalable for enterprises. This company started >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Christopher Connolly, VP of Solutions Strategy, Genesys (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What you’re saying is the backend of the web self-service systems of phone self-service systems have gone from rule-based systems to learning-based systems.

Christopher Connolly: Right. We are at the precipice of that right now. It’s getting to the point of early adoption. It’s a very different way of thinking of how you interact with brands and how brands interact with you.

Sramana Mitra: Do the same thing for me in your employee engagement use case. What is the nugget there? >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Christopher Connolly, VP of Solutions Strategy, Genesys (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’m a little bit confused. You started off saying that the focus of the company was on customer experience. Now you’re talking about employee experience.

Christopher Connolly: We have multiple different stacks within Genesys. We’ve got 110 different products. They’re summarized into 11 different solution areas. We’ve categorized them into three top-line items. One is customer engagement. The other is employee engagement and the third is business optimization. All of our products are inside each of those categorizations.

On one hand when we talk about customer engagement, it’s about that customer edge. We have a collection of different products >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Christopher Connolly, VP of Solutions Strategy, Genesys (Part 1)

Chris discusses how rule-based systems are moving to learning-based systems in various enterprise use cases.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself and Genesys and what work you’re doing around artificial intelligence.

Christopher Connolly: I am the Vice President of our Solutions Strategy Group. Genesys is the number one customer experience platform. It enables companies to create exceptional omni-channel experiences and relationships. We’re pretty large. >>>