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Building an Artificial Intelligence Software Company from Dallas: Dave Copps, CEO of Brainspace (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year was that?

Dave Copps: That must have been 1997 or 1998. I founded my first company in 1999. I literally found a scientist, and we started writing algorithms. We were using Matlab. It didn’t scale. We went down a few paths. We failed and start over, failed and start over, and failed and start over. Then we found an algorithm that started to do some learning. We were able to ingest, at that point, a couple of hundred or a few hundred documents and have the system learn from them and build it into a search engine. We built a semantic search engine basically. That company grew from about 1999 till about 2006 when we sold it to Marx McLennan.

Sramana Mitra: Did you bootstrap that company? >>>

Building an Artificial Intelligence Software Company from Dallas: Dave Copps, CEO of Brainspace (Part 1)

Artificial Intelligence startups are very hot these days. Read how Dave Copps has built Brainspace from Dallas.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Dave Copps: I was born and raised in Dallas, Texas. My dad was an eye surgeon. My parents had moved down from Wisconsin. They were snow birds, as they called themselves. My mom was a community leader. My dad was very smart. He graduated from college at 17. His dad had the same background. He went to the Navy while his friends were graduating.

My mom funded many fundraising efforts in Dallas. From an early stage, I learned a lot about the importance of education, culture, and giving back. I left for college to go to Westminster College in Missouri and came back to Dallas and finished at the University of North Texas. I’ve been in Dallas ever since. I always thought I’d be off in Europe somewhere. Dallas is a great city. It’s a great place to start a business. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Jonathan Crane, Chief Commercial Officer at IPSoft (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a bit about how you deal with emotions. You presented that as one of your key differentiators. Talk to me about how you achieve emotional parsing in your agents.

Jonathan Crane: Here’s how we basically look at it. If a customer wanted to renew a wireless service contract and I knew that the person I was speaking to was very wrong in the cycle, my emotional intensity at that point is not going to be very strong. It’s going to be a fairly calm and directed conversation. I know this person’s one month to go. I’m going to raise up the emotional tenor of the conversation. I’m going to be intense. I’m going to be sympathetic. I’m going to offer up a number of options for you to consider in order for you to renew. I’m going to be very gleeful when you’ve accepted the opportunity to renew. I’ll have the ability to say, “That’s terrific. We’re really excited about having you on again.” It’s that kind of response. In addition, if you spoke to Amelia wrongly, she has the ability to say to you, “Excuse me. That’s really inappropriate. I hope that we won’t continue at that level of interaction.” She has an opportunity to recognize sentiment as it rises or lowers in the customer’s voice and verbiage and she can respond correspondingly.

Sramana Mitra: That’s like telling the customer to behave. Customers don’t always behave when you ask them to behave. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Jonathan Crane, Chief Commercial Officer at IPSoft (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How big is your virtual agent business?

Jonathan Crane: It’s just started growing because we’ve just released it. Over the last year, we’ve established pilots in every one of the vertical industries looking at how we take this artificial intelligence as we call it and put her to work in insurance, put her to work in a customer service center for a large media company, put her in a bank actually dealing with wealth management and interfacing with high-end user clients. We’ve tried to very much and very purposely look at if we can inject this virtual employee in every vertical industry. So far, the answer is yes.

Amazingly, what’s been stunning to us is the companies that we thought would be conservative and risk-averse have actually been the most aggressive in trying to utilize this artificial intelligence in their business. Why? Very simply, they need to change the cost structure of provisioning the service to the end user. At the same time, they need to elevate the quality of that interaction. As more and more web-based services are out there and customers are, more and more, used to the inquiries and interacting of the web environment, these companies believe that there’s step up from that kind of environment. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Jonathan Crane, Chief Commercial Officer at IPSoft (Part 2)

Jonathan Crane: Amelia is targeted at changing the way we work. We’ve taken these virtual engineers in IT management and we’re now coming up with a virtual employee. We’ve bunched this together and call it digital labor or software-defined labor, much like we’re seeing technologies today like Network-as-a-Service or Software-as-a-Service. Everything is being made into a service offered from some kind of a hosted network solution like a cloud-type architecture.

We’re now talking about labor being provided in a very similar fashion. This changes the perception of cost of infrastructure management. Most importantly in the new release with Amelia, we began to rethink how we do work. All of this is in response to the change in the marketplace. We’re seeing more and more that business processes, which in the old days were managed by people assisted by technology, are now increasingly managed by technology and assisted by intelligent people. This creates a great shift and a need for transformation. Gartner calls it the digital company. We see digital banks, digital retail firms, or digital oil and gas companies. They’re changing the way they’re thinking about how they operate, how they deliver services, how they interface with your end-user client. We see this transformation going about at record speeds over the next three to five years. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Jonathan Crane, Chief Commercial Officer at IPSoft (Part 1)

How far should Artificial Intelligence be pushed to engage emotionally with humans?

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

Jonathan Crane: I’m the Chief Commercial Officer of IPSoft. IPSoft is probably not a company many of you would know. We’ve been a privately held company for 17 years now, grown to nearly half a billion as what I would call a company deploying stealth marketing.

Sramana Mitra: The company is half a billion in revenue? Is that what you said?

Jonathan Crane: Yes, we’re not a small company. The question is how have we been able to do this. What we did is we focused early on on a unique concept of managed services. Many of the companies that have provided managed services always force their user community to come >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Conversica CEO Alex Terry (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You are a venture-funded company, yes?

Alex Terry: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: What scale are we talking? Have you raised a lot of money? What size are you at right now?

Alex Terry: The business was originally founded in 2007, I believe. The venture money came in 2013. The company has raised $22 million to date. I joined the company four months ago. I was brought in by the private equity investors.

Sramana Mitra: It’s about a $10-million company?

Alex Terry: A little higher than that. We are between $10 and $20 million right now. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Conversica CEO Alex Terry (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Yes. I’m not saying it’s not beneficial. I’m just saying that, from a technology and accuracy point of view, it would be easier to do certain things when the range of questions and the range of engagement is more constrained. I think if you’re getting into the realm of enterprise software, the range of questioning may become a lot more complex. But maybe not? You’re saying it’s not.

Alex Terry: You’re correct, but part of what we do when we go into new verticals is leverage, I think, 85 million plus interactions at this point in terms of training, natural language, and AI. We’re pretty good at understanding what comes back to us. The other secret sauce is how we write the outbound messages. We’re not boiling the ocean. We’re not trying to recreate Siri where people can just ask us anything. Since we’re typically responding to some stimulus, we get to control the conversation a little bit if that makes sense. If you think of the company name Conversica, it’s a play on conversation and conversion. We’re having conversations with people where we get to put some parameters around how that conversation gets started. That makes the technology problem quite a bit easier. >>>