Thought Leaders in Big Data: Greg Moran, CEO of OutMatch (Part 1)

Read how Big Data is influencing hiring.

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

Greg Moran: Thanks for having me. I’m the CEO of OutMatch. We are a company that provides data analytics around the hiring and development of talent within large organisations primarily in retail, hospitality, and restaurant chains. We basically help organisations identify the patterns associated with great hires and what makes somebody uniquely successful for them. Then, we help them understand how they can screen and develop that person once they’re part of your team.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a little bit about the company. Where are you located? What scale of a company are you? Is it a venture-funded company? >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Colin Sutherland, Co-Founder of Geotab (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Why did you pitch for Internet of Things story?

Colin Sutherland: The product that we’re actually delivering is data. That’s where our entire industry is moving. The practical application of the data in reducing accidents and improving fuel economy is terrific. You can collect information and store that on the cloud. It is an asset that enables managing, not only where the data is. but also with outside sources like weather.You can then match the weather-related data and the vehicle performance to alert the driver that five miles up ahead, the road is about to freeze.

This is the type of information that’s coming on now—the accessibility of data in the vehicle and making it available in a Big Data environment, sharing it with smart cities so they know where the most risky intersections are so they can make this intersection more safe. >>>

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: Conversica CEO Alex Terry (Part 2)

Alex Terry: It is really outstanding when you look at the change in the last 10 years in terms of how companies and individuals use marketing and sales. The third category we talk about is machine intelligence. That includes the trifecta of technologies that we leverage where we focus on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing. We look at that bundle of machine intelligence as the newest and one of the most exciting of those three waves.

In a sense, we think Conversica is surfing off those three important industry trends. We think they’re all pretty exciting. In terms of the specific problems that we solve for our customers, Conversica really addresses two common customer complaints. We hear this all the time. I’m sure you probably hear them as well. We hear marketing organization complain that the sales teams that they work with do not thoroughly follow up on all the leads that the marketing teams generate. A second complaint we hear is that sales teams are complaining that the marketing is generating low-quality leads. There can be a little bit of finger pointing going on in some organizations. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Conversica CEO Alex Terry (Part 1)

The use of intelligent agents to automate various functions is an area that I am personally very interested in. This conversation dives into the specific area of Intelligent Sales Assistants.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some introduction about Conversica and yourself.

Alex Terry: I’m the CEO of Conversica. We’re a private equity and venture capital-backed technology startup here in the Bay Area. Our headquarters is in Foster City although we have our development office up in Washington. We also have a large sales team in Kansas City, Missouri. We’re a little bit spread out. We’ve built an artificial intelligence-based sales assistant that helps any organization improve their sales and also their marketing and sales alignment. I can go into more detail on what that means later on. At the high level, we have an AI-powered sales assistant that operates at the top of that sales funnel. It engages and qualifies inbound leads and helps sift out the good leads and elevate them for immediate sales attention. It can also sift out the time-waiting leads and does it in a fully automated way so that it doesn’t waste the time of the sales people. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Kevin O’Malley and Patrick Shea, Co-founders of AdDaptive Intelligence (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: So you have to basically manually speed the algorithms with the parameters. You’re almost providing certain constraints within which the machine is learning, as opposed to a completely unconstrained learning environment.

Patrick Shea: That’s exactly right. Similar to guided learning, which is very popular in artificial intelligence, we’ve always said that our process is a human-guided algorithm. That really helps describe what AdDaptive Intelligence is versus what artificial intelligence brings to the market.

Kevin O’Malley: If there’s one other trend that I would add that I think is important to the space, it would be the blurring of the line and the merging of the online world and the offline world. Traditionally, offline marketers have collected tremendous amounts of information from the number of times you get an oil change to what you buy in a retail store. Online data has always been based on your digital footprint. In many cases, a bit more anonymous than the offline data. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jerry Melnick, CEO of SIOS (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You gave an overview. If you were to go out and start a company today, have you heard any customer point out a specific problem that needs to be solved but there is no vendor out there that’s addressing this problem?

Jerry Melnick: We are going to rely on cloud services just like the way we rely on our computer systems today. They are at a level of maturity and accessibility that is not exactly at a level that data centers are today. The opportunity, at least in the space that we live in, is how do I build on or harden that cloud? How do I make that cloud capable of supporting the kinds of service and service levels required for the applications that are most important? Clearly, if cloud can do that, I get the advantage of not just the cloud flexibility and utility and the cost savings, but I also get high value out of its foundational security and availability. What kinds of technologies do we need to provide those high-value services? How do I make my cloud do more? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jerry Melnick, CEO of SIOS (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If you look at the industry in your space and the adjacent spaces, where do you see open problems that new entrepreneurs could be working on?

Jerry Melnick: The real movement today is clearly around service-based versus product-based offerings. When I say that, I’m referring specifically to cloud service. Utility computing is finally being realized in the cloud space. Probably the applications that we make highly available are the laggards in the industry in terms of moving into the cloud in providing services, mainly because of the conservative nature. >>>