Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: James Markarian, CTO of SnapLogic (Part 1)

A view into AI in the context of integration.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself and SnapLogic.

James Markarian: I’m the CTO at SnapLogic. I’ve had a very unusual career in the Valley. In about 30 years, I’ve only had three jobs. I was at Oracle for a number of years in the earliest days. I was CTO at Informatica for about 15 years. I’ve been at SnapLogic for a little bit over a year now. I don’t talk about it too much, but I was at a venture capital company for about a year in between Informatica and SnapLogic. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Prashant Fuloria, Chief Product Officer at Fundbox (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You explained what data you’re drawing from. Based on that data, what kind of conclusions are you drawing? Of course, you are drawing conclusions about the health of the business. Is there any kind of correlation? Are you trying to score them?

Prashant Fuloria: Absolutely. When we run our AI on the data that we have, we essentially build our own credit rating. Based on that, we place customers in different risk buckets. Based on that rating, we decide whether to approve a customer right away. If so, how much credit would they have access to? Very often when we are not able to approve the customer, we give them the option to remain connected with us. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Prashant Fuloria, Chief Product Officer at Fundbox (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on the AI. What signals are you looking for? What is the algorithm learning on the basis of?

Prashant Fuloria: We capture a number of data elements about a business. First and foremost is the data that we find in the small business graph. It’s important because the health of the business does depend on the health of the businesses around it and their interactions.

If I run a construction business, I may have a number of clients. The Fundbox small business graph captures the clients that I >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Prashant Fuloria, Chief Product Officer at Fundbox (Part 2)

Prashant Fuloria: Let me explain the SMB to B concept a little bit more because it’s a fascinating and sometimes overlooked area. You and I interact a lot on an ongoing basis with small businesses that are fundamentally B2C. You talked about e-commerce. You might go down to a coffee shop and get your morning cappuccino. You might go to a small store.

These are all B2C merchants where the nature of their transactions typically follow a predictable path. It’s an end consumer transaction and consummated with a credit card. The data is fairly well-organized. You’re absolutely correct that there are a >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Prashant Fuloria, Chief Product Officer at Fundbox (Part 1)

FinTech is making great strides today with the help of AI and bringing to small businesses certain kinds of financial services that were only available to much larger ventures once upon a time.

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

Prashant Fuloria: Fundbox is a midstage Fintech startup founded in 2013 with offices in Tel Aviv and San Francisco. The mission of the company is to help small businesses become successful by giving them financial power. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: John Price, CEO of Vast (Part 7)

John Price: In order to solve a problem that is worth solving with machine learning, the biggest problem is the amount of data you have to aggregate, normalize, and get in shape. Once again, it’s not the intelligence. AI is not the center of the universe. The problem is shifted from software engineering. You pick your vertical you want to solve and get that data in shape for your machine learning algorithms. Be careful because you’re underestimating the amount of effort to get the data.

Sramana Mitra: What you said is exactly right. We keep harping on this point. To set up something that would work in an AI model with machine learning, you really need to understand the domain in which you’re building the problem. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: John Price, CEO of Vast (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Based on all the things that you’re doing, what are the trends and where do you see open problems that would be good pointers for new entrepreneurs to start companies in? If you were starting a company today, where would you start the company?

John Price: I can tell you what not to do probably much better than I can tell you what to do. After Shell Research, I ended up at Neuron Data. We were a C-based expert systems shell.

Sramana Mitra: I remember Neuron Data. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: John Price, CEO of Vast (Part 5)

John Price: With that, we combine lending process, which is the other part of home shopping. Our technology is being embraced very rapidly by the lenders. You look at the mortgage business. They are stuck at the bottom of the real estate funnel. They have to compete on interest rates. What we’ve done is we’ve gone to all the lending institutions that do mortgage origination.

We said, “We will power an entire white label real estate experience for you ran by our Big Data integrated to your lending practices in a way that will provide a far superior home shopping experience to your banking customers.” They’re literally having to compete for their own customers. What we’re saying is they can be at the top of the funnel. You get all the analytics about >>>