This podcast interview focuses on how competitive advantage is shifting in an age of automation. My guest is Josh Entsminger, Senior Fellow at Ecole des Ponts Business School in Paris. He’s an applied researcher in international affairs and the fourth industrial revolution, working on the global governance of technology. Josh serves as a fellow at the Public Tech Lab at IE's School of Global and Public Affairs, working on next generation public services. He also recently served as a research contributor to the Future of Production Initiative at the World Economic Forum. His work as a senior fellow at Ecole Des Ponts Business School connects him to the Center for Policy and Competitiveness, a think tank affiliated with the Microeconomics of Competitiveness network of Professor Michael E. Porter at Harvard Business School. His work there focuses on the shifting nature of competitive advantage in a world where AI and other 4th industrial Revolution technologies make their inroads.  This triggered me, hence I invited Josh to my podcast. We discuss the how these technologies rapidly erode the position of advantage many companies used to have. We also discuss how AI is becoming a platform race, and how having access to the right data is rather than the right algorithms, is becoming the critical factor to create a position of advantage. Here are some of his quotes: I'm particularly focused on the governance of technology in the politics of technology. My background is heavily on government and policy and moving into the commercialization and understanding of what makes a company successful: what are the trends that are driving the viability of competitive advantage It's becoming increasingly hard for me to distinguish what's a technology company and what's not a technology company, The biggest issue I see is something that I'm calling competitive democratization.  This is a drive from some of the big companies to open up access for AI solutions through AI as a service. The thing that worries me is that the means of accessing these technologies is increasingly being controlled or dominated by a few cloud service providers. During this interview, you will learn three things: That defensible differentiation is growing with your ability to create data dominance around a particular area Why the battle of business software will be won by those that will master scale over scope  That the opportunity is exponential for those software companies that can anticipate how we’ll restructure our understanding of what is a firm, what is a career, and what is a job. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on the fuel that drives today’s product innovation: Data. My guest is Auren Hoffman, CEO of SafeGraph Auren is an American entrepreneur, angel investor and author. He founded his first company, Kyber Systems, in his junior year at UC Berkeley, as a way to pay for school. He sold that company in 1997. From there he founded BridgePath (sold in 2002), became the chairman of Stonebrick Group, cofounded Rapleaf in 2006 and left in 2012 to run the Rapleaf spinoff called LifeRamp, which became the largest middleware company that connects marketing applications. In 2014 he sold his company to Acxiom for $310 million.  Auren is an angel investor in over 120 technology companies. He holds a B.S.E. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the UC Berkeley. It’s the story behind his next venture SafeGraph that became the trigger for this podcast. Safegraph was founded to democratize access to data – in particular to help unlock innovation. That inspired me, and hence I invited Auren to my podcast. We explore why data – or better the lack of it – is becoming the roadblock for innovation. We also address the biggest challenge around data – it’s accuracy, and what it takes for companies to deliver ‘the perfect data’ Here are some of his quotes: One of my big passions is about democratizing access to data. Thus far, data has been a real gate to innovation. And folks who are data rich can innovate. But for most innovators, they don't have access to data and that really hampers innovation.  And I'd like to see a world where the data itself is not a gate to innovation, but ingenuity is the core gauge for innovation. If we don't democratize access to data, we're going to have much less innovation in the future. Democratizing access to data will both increase the amount of innovation and also disperse more widely the winners from the innovation. During this interview, you will learn three things: That to become the go-to-source for innovation you have to build your entire company around a core theme – and that becomes your focus to be the best and stay the best Why it it’s key to understand your role in the value chain – are you a ‘solver’ or an ‘enabler’. This defines your value  Why you should treat every employee as a Warren Buffet – a Capital Alligator – Their goal should be to spend money to get leverage – for themselves, their team, the total business. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to democratize the skills of great leaders and make every one of us more productive. My guest is Omar Tawakol. Omar Tawakol is Chief Executive Officer of Voicea which was recently acquired by Cisco.  Prior to Voicea, Omar Tawakol was the founder and CEO of BlueKai which was the leading Data Exchange and Data Management Platform company in the marketing industry. Oracle acquired BlueKai in 2014. At Oracle, Omar was the SVP & GM of the Oracle Data Cloud (ODC). The ODC pioneered the Data-as-a-Service category and was used by 97 of the top 100 US brands to create a 360o view of their customers across all channels.  Omar earned an MS in CS from Stanford (BS, MIT) where he researched and published work on AI agents. Their promise: “Voicea transforms your meetings into time well spent”. This inspired me, hence I invited Omar to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in our busy business life that are increasingly loaded with meetings, and what can be if technology and people blend in the right way.  Here are some of his quotes: I was running the Oracle Data Cloud after Oracle acquired my company BlueKai. I'd meet with some great leaders like Satya at Microsoft, of course, Larry Ellison, sir Martin Sorrell, just great business leaders. What struck me when I'd meet them is that they'd be in a meeting with me completely focused on our conversation. They didn't have their laptop open so that they could take notes and then get distracted. They weren't looking at their phone, they were looking at me. And when they left the meeting, there was an email with a follow up, and you realize, of course, they have a staff around them. That's helping them, but they also had some excellent skills themselves. And so, given how much time we spend in meetings, it's one of the largest time sinks of all knowledge workers, I saw that there was an opportunity really to help democratize the skills of these great executives. During this interview, you will learn four things: That a new generation of applications is arising around the concept of a Voice First UI – and that this could open up a wealth of innovation opportunities for you Why the best way to solve a problem is often to do the very opposite of peoples’ natural reaction. Voicea for example transforms habits such as the fear of missing out to the joy of missing out. How big impact is created by looking for areas where you can have a position of data advantage or ideally data dominance. Why you should aim to embed elements of virality in your solution – elements that people talk about, and create desire amongst others. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on what’s real and not real in the world of AI, and my guest is Daniel Faggella, founder and CEO of Emerj AI Research Called upon by organizations like the World Bank, the United Nations, INTERPOL, and global pharmaceutical and banking companies, Emerj CEO Daniel Faggella helps business and government leaders navigate the competitive landscape of AI capabilities, and build strategies that win. His company, Emerj, helps governments and enterprises reduce risk and maximize the bottom-line impact of artificial intelligence capabilities. They map the capability-space of AI across major sectors (banking, pharma, retail, etcetera), helping leaders see what's possible, what's working i.e., where’s real ROI and traction, and what to do about it. Being an active reader of his weekly update on the world of AI and got inspired by Daniels down to earth and challenger view on the topic. This is why I invited him to my podcast. We explore the challenges in adoption of AI in the market and what’s the deeper causes behind that. We also address the approach business leaders need to follow, and the VC mindset they need to embrace, in order to avoid the challenges.  Here are some of his quotes: I was getting out of grad school at U-Pen, it became pretty obvious that a lot of these corollaries with neuroscience with cognitive science around how we learn, we're being experimented with and explored in machines. By the time I got out, I sort of realized that, should this trend continue, this is going to be some really wacky wild future we're headed into in 20 years, if AI continues to be able to do what it could do in vision. So, I decided I should get dedicated to this stuff and understand its impact for humanity in the long term. Everybody, I think, usually expects me to be the hype, man of AI, you know, talk about how awesome and transformative things are. And certainly in the long haul, I think that we're in for a pretty wild ride. I think that probably in the next 40 years, we'll see post human intelligence potentially. Right now, it's a lot of struggle to be honest with you. So, most AI, you know, quote, unquote, kind of AI innovation efforts within the enterprise, are really at a pilot level at a proof of concept level. And if we look at a space like banking or insurance, is it safe to say that most of these pOcT fail rather than win. There are very serious major challenges During this interview, you will learn three things: Why, in order to create sustainable competitive advantage, data-dominance is the foundation to strive for That succeeding in AI requires you to step out of the sand-box, and stress test your application with your feed in the mud, and overcome the real-world data challenges Why solving a big problem with your solution is not enough. Getting a deep understanding of the objectives and objections that move the needle in the hearts of the people that need to buy from you is what’s required as well. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation focuses on the blended power of humans and AI to get clear answers to how their business or even the world might evolve years ahead of us. My guest is Bulent Ozel, Co-founder and CEO of LucidMinds Bulent is data science consultant, researcher and lecturer. He likes building bridges between business, technology, science, and policy making. He is a hands-on software architect and enjoys coding. He has provided data-driven business consultancy and services for over 10 years, and these experiences have lead the foundation of Lucidminds.ai.  Bulent has published more than 50 peer-reviewed and citation indexed articles. The thing that triggered me to invite Bulent for my podcast is their creation of an agent-based simulation engine - presumably the most advanced and complex simulation model for macroeconomic systems. It enables researchers and policymakers to collaborate on creating insights and clear answers on complex policy questions like green finance, housing market regulations, and exit or entry policies for economic unions similar to Eurozone. We explore the challenges around creating solutions that are required to look 10, 20, or even 30 years into the future and the ways to overcome such challenges Here are some of his quotes: There's a possibility to solve or approach the way we use emerging technology, which means we can have control over AI. It's just a technology, nothing different than a wheel. How we are going to use the wheel depends on the choices we make.  If we don't look into how things are suggested, how AI has been developed, that can go out of control. We want to be able to work on limited incomplete data sets. More importantly: if you don't have complete information […] you need the input of human and usually human domain experts are the best decision makers. The problem is how can get humans in involved in the process.  Humans can always have be better choice maker, they have more insights, the algorithm can have certain bias that the human can overcome, or for other practical reasons, there might not be enough data set that is using to train the algorithm. During this interview, you will learn three things: Why having a lack of information doesn’t have to be a problem to support complex business decision making How creating combos of humans and AI can give businesses of all sizes insights that can be turned into clear competitive advantage That using gamification frameworks inside your solution can help users solve complex problems together. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in HR that has the power to inspire growth and ignite culture. My guest is Ronni Zehavi, CEO of Hibob Ronni has over 25 years of experience in multinational, hi-tech companies. Prior to setting up hibob, he was an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Silicon Valley based Bessemer Venture Partners. He's the strategic advisor and co-founder of Team8 Cyber Security, a powerhouse developing disruptive tech in the cyber security space. Ronni was also the co-founder and CEO of Cotendo, a content delivery network which in 2012, just four years after it was founded, was acquired by Akamai in a $300m.  Ronni has a BA in History and Educational Management from Tel Aviv University, and a MA in Organisational Sociology from Bar-Ilan University.  I’ve got intrigued by the big idea behind Hibob and in particular it’s fresh approach to HR to manage the typical employee of today, and hence I invited Ronni to my podcast. We explore what’s broken around the approach of the HR systems we have become used to over the past decades and why that approach won’t work any longer if you want to grow your business and the impact of today’s workforce.  Here are some of his quotes: ‘The shift that we are tracking right now, this is the opportunity: There's a new type of employee and a new type of relationship between employers and employee. This will drive this market going forward. They are bringing a new mindset, new values, and new behavior that did not exist before. It will change completely the way people work. So, we think the future, it requires a new approach, a new architecture that will be in line with those ongoing changes. We believe the future is all about system of relationship. So, the focus is the employee. The focus is the tribe - the employee and the team, the small groups within the company. The notion of ‘We Are One Big Family of 800 employees’ is fake news It's all about the small teams and the tribe.’ During this interview, you will learn three things: Why creating a clear vision about the change you want to make to the world is essential to making the right product decisions That to leverage your success it’s essential to get very clear ‘who’s it for’, and ‘who’s it not for’ And that maximum value is created if you home in on the unique DNA of your customer with your solution i.e. strengthen their core strengths. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to accelerate sales cycle and reduce the costs of customer acquisition. My guest is Olin Hyde, CEO of Leadcrunch. He wrote his first line of code at age 12 on a home-built computer. Since then, he has started eight companies. Today he’s the CEO at LeadCrunch, a B2B lookalike marketing platform that uses artificial intelligence to find your ideal customer targets audience and then engage them with your content to accelerate the sales process. Olin is one of the principal architects of the company’s DeepFind™ machine learning platform, the secret behind its success. Olin is also an investor and advisor at Bruvida, advisor and shareholder at UpCycle and Company, and Investor at Ginger Shots. Prior to this, he was a business advisor at Connect and was VP, Business Development at Ai One, Inc. He holds a Bachelor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Studies in Mathematics, Economics, and Marketing from Miami University (Ohio) and a Masters of Advanced Studies in Architecture-based Enterprise Systems Engineering from UC San Diego. The promise of Leadcrunch is compelling: Get artificial intelligence. Just pay for leads. Get higher Conversions, more pipeline and happier sales people. This triggered me, hence I invited Olin to my podcast. We explore how the process of targeting leads is broken in most businesses and why this can’t be solved by people alone. Beyond that we discuss the power of building defensible differentiation – and how this results into a sustainable win-win for both your customers and you as a technology provider Here are some of his quotes: ‘I’d like to leave this earth better than I found it. So, I really like to find big problems that really help people live better lives. A very idealistic way to look at it is technology that enables the human spirit. The problem we solve is that targeting, in other words, how to pick your next target for your marketing or your sales is actually very broken. The symptom of that is that sales, people usually hate the leads that are given to them by marketing. I know personally how incredibly difficult it is to find the right audience to market to. And then how do we engage that audience on the path for them to become a customer. So that’s the problem we’re solving. Our customers consider our technology to be their unfair advantage. Our revenues have grown 20% per month, for two and a half years. That’s an indication that technology works.’ During this interview, you will learn three things: That by focusing your business on a valuable outcome will help to unlock markets you possibly didn’t even consider Why focusing your efforts on business model innovation will give you the fastest route to defensible differentiation. How giving your customers something they can’t live without is your secret to unlock double digit monthly growth. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation with Audio Intelligence that has the power to impact human wellbeing on a global scale. My guest is Dagmar Schuller, Co-founder and CEO of AudEERING Dagmar has conducted applied research in the field of AI, machine learning and big data for more than a decade. Her passion is to bring trendsetting ideas into real-life concepts, thus enabling businesses to intelligently enhance their products and processes and – ultimately – personal lifestyles. At audEERING she shapes the strategy, business development and operations. With a lot of passion and dedication she led audEERING from a startup to a multi-million company. Prior to her work as CEO of audEERING, Dagmar was working as Management Consultant for Ernst & Young in Vienna and New York, as CFO of a New Media company, and as Senior Vice President for an international investment of Hubert Burda Media. She studied Economics and Business Administration at the Wirtschaftsuniversität in Vienna, International Management & Marketing, Finance and Information Technology at the University of New York, as well as Law at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in München. I got triggered by the big idea behind audEERING, and hence I invited Dagmar to my podcast. We explore the opportunity that’s created when AI and Audio are blended into common solutions and introduced to everyday situations. We also discuss what it takes to turn ideas into remarkable solutions and what this requires in terms of mindset and leadership approach. Here are some of her quotes: “In the 80s and early 90s, when we were teenagers, there was one series that we really found quite fascinating, which was Knight Rider starring David Hasselhoff. It wasn't actually David Hasselhoff, I have to admit, but the car, KITT, which was so intelligent, that we always thought: ‘That would be really, really great, it would be so great to talk to a machine and the machine really understanding what you want, and really recognizing what you want, it would help so much, and it could be used in so many things.’ So, we got inspired and thought ‘Is there a possibility to make this type of fiction reality.” “So, that is actually what's driving us - making the fiction reality but in a very positive way; How can we utilize those fictions, those ideas? How can we innovate ourselves, move forward, improve what we have, and avoid negativity?” During this interview, you will learn four things: How a user with a critical or even negative attitude can be turned into an advocate when technology becomes a true companion. Why in order to be successful in the mass market you have to put the money where your mouth is and convince your most critical audience: yourself How you can create exponential scale by betting on an ‘embed’ strategy – but for that you have to be very clear what you stand for. That true value is created when you take a holistic view on the problem: not only finding the needle in the haystack – but also figuring out how it arrived there in the first place. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation around customer support that has the power to 10x your ticket response times. My guest is Rob May, Co-founder and CEO of Talla. Rob has a background in engineering, business development, and management and holds a Bachelor of Science  in Electrical Engineering and a MBA from the University of Kentucky. In October 2008, he co-founded and became CEO of Backupify which provided a secure second copy of cloud data. Their clients included companies like Salesforce, Google apps, and more. Backupify was acquired by Datto in December 2014 and Rob became the SVP of business development overseeing the Backupify's integration after the acquisition. In August 2015, May co-founded and became CEO of Talla which develops machine intelligence, virtual assistants, and conversation UI/UX for enterprises. In addition, Talla is launching a decentralised bot registration and marketplace platform, BotChain. When I learned about the positive impact Talla’s has on support organizations I instantly invited Rob for my podcast. We explore his views on what’s broken in market for ‘search’ and how that’s actually leading to unwanted behavior. We also address his learnings on technology adoption, and why this is not only of fundamental importance to increased user productivity, but also to keep your solutions always in sync with the reality of the business. Here are some of his quotes: Talla is in the customer support automation space. And what we do is we take your, not just your ticketing data, but your actual support content, we ingest it and understand it. The biggest thing that we see in our customers, and the reason that they do this is, you know, hiring is a is a challenge right now, at least, you know, here in the US, the labor market is pretty tight. And so we've sold to a lot of very high growth tech companies who need to hire 150 support reps this year, and they just can't. So they're looking for ways for how they make their existing support reps more productive. And we know that, you know, with Talla that can be anywhere from sort of 20 to 60% productivity increased, depending on the nature of their business. During this interview, you will learn three things: How you can kill two birds with one stone by adopting a UX/UI driven way of thinking about Machine Learning Why succeeding with AI is not so much about segmenting the market by traditional demographics but more one of addressing the right mindset. How to make solid progress by following a ‘test and invest’ approach.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that’s transforming impact marketers can make in cross-channel marketing scenarios. My guest is Vijay Chittoor, Co-founder and CEO of Blueshift.   Vijay has a wealth of experience in AI, marketing technology and e-commerce domains. He was an early team member and the director of product management at Kosmix which was acquired by Walmart to become WalmartLabs. In 2010 he co-founded Mertado and led it as the CEO for two years until it was acquired by Groupon and became Groupon Goods. This prepared him for his new venture, Blueshift, which he co-founded in 2014.   Vijay is a graduate of Harvard Business School’s MBA Program. He also holds Bachelor’s and Master's degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.   Blueshift enables B2C marketers to automate segment-of-one marketing on every channel. They’re on a mission to put AI in the Hands of Every Marketer.   This triggered me, hence I invited Vijay to my podcast. We explore the transformation of digital marketing, and the scaled revenue opportunities that now provides to companies of all sizes. We also discuss how AI is enabling marketers to reclaim their creative and strategic role again, and create a flywheel of value that’s pretty hard to stop once in motion.   Here are some of his quotes: Every few years a technology matures to a point when non-technical people can start using it, and when that happens that unlocks a lot of enterprise value   What's happening is that you and I, as consumers, we are interacting with all these brands on digital and mobile and social. And when we do that, we are leaving behind 1000 times more data than we used to leave behind 10 years ago.   With all the data we're leaving behind marketers, and brands now for the first time have a way of understanding us as the dynamic individuals that we've always been. Doing that is exciting, but it's also challenging, because dealing with thousand times more data, dealing with 10 to 15 times more channels, that is very difficult for marketers.   Obviously, humans are not best equipped to operate at that scale. Humans are created for guiding how the engagement should be driven, how that engagement should be humanized. Where the machine can really come in is to help the human marketer become excellent at that scale of decision making and make each decision truly intelligent. That's what we do with the Blueshift platform.   During this interview, you will learn three things: How thinking differently about key customer challenges allows you to build solutions that have transformative impact because of their simplicity. That AI alone is not the solution – the synergy really kicks in when humans and AI systems are working well together and even impress the customers’ customers That to deliver remarkable solutions you have to stay true to your vision – no matter how enticing the short term opportunity is.     See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to intelligently help the telco win the fight against fraud and revenue leakage. My guest is Rui Paiva, CEO of Wedo Technologies. Prior to co-founding WeDo Technologies in 2001, Rui Paiva was System Information Director and Deputy of Optimus Communications’ Executive Committee. Before that, Rui was the Consultancy Director at Hewlett Packard Portugal, following a career at Telecel, which then became Vodafone Portugal, heading up their Infrastructure, Operations and Help Desk Department. in 2010 Rui won the Best Leaders Award for Wedo Technologies, and In 2017 he received the Tech Personality of the Year Award by Exame Informática He is an experienced Board Member with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. A strong business development professional skilled in Business Process, Marketing Management, Negotiation, Business Planning, and Requirements Analysis. He holds a post-graduate degree in Management and Administration from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, as well as a BSc in Applied Mathematics The potential behind the problem Wedo is solving triggered me, hence I invited Rui to my podcast. We explore the growing challenges companies in the Telco industry face around revenue leakage and fraud and how their platform approach is enabling the business to stay in control. We also explore the magic behind Wedo’s ability to constantly stay relevant as a business software vendor in an industry that’s changing at the speed of light. Here are some of his quotes: On my last job was being the CIO of a telco company. One of the things that we faced at that time was, we have the main building blocks, which are typically the ERP, the billing system, the CRM. But all the additional tools that are in the middle of that normally they have to be developed from scratch in each of the implementations in each of the operators. That takes time. That means the cost of maintaining and support and evolve. All of that was a nightmare. We created a technology, Raid, to validate all the integration between different applications and guarantee that the customer at the end of the day they are not losing money, which means that without having more sales or being efficient, they can improve the bottom line directly. During this interview, you will learn three things: How to stay relevant with a platform approach – both in terms of its’ ability to meet constantly evolving industry requirements as well as being industry agnostic to scale out. Why a customer-cooperation-strategy is a very effective approach to win the hearts of 80% of the market, and never lose a customer ever. What are the 8 secrets for a software business to stay as relevant and as fresh as the moment you were founded – in Wedo’s case – 18 years ago. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation around AI that has the power to adjust at the pace of business. My guest is Zehra Cataltepe, Co-founder and CEO of Tazi.AI Zehra co-founded tazi.ai together with her husband Tanju, and their focus was to develop continuously learning machine learning solutions for the banking, insurance and telco industries. Besides her role as CEO she’s also a professor at Istanbul Technical University, Faculty of Computer and Informatics.  Zehra received her Master of Science and Ph.D. degrees from the California Institute of Technology in Computer Science. She has more than 20 years of both industry and academia experience in Machine Learning, and in that period, she delivered 21 patents and over 80 publications on the theory of machine learning and its applications in finance, health, energy and transportation. Tazi was recently selected by Garner as May 2019 ‘Cool Vendor in AI Core Technologies’. Tazi’s products are changing the way AI is used in business – keeping business in the driver’s seat with an automated Machine Learning platform that continuously learns and adapts to new circumstances. This triggered me, hence I invited Zehra to my podcast. We explore the challenges with today’s AI and machine learning technologies in rapidly changing business circumstances. We then discuss what’s required to get AI right – both at the side of the vendor and readiness level and mindset at the customer side.  Here are some of her quotes: ‘What drives me personally, is a dream of making AI usable by everyone. Democratizing it so that it becomes a useful technology like automobiles or electricity. When you consider business processes, life always changes. So, you know, as an insurance company, for example, your products that you offer to your customers, your customers ability, or incentive to buy from you, your competitors’ behavior, the regulations, all of these change in time. So, you have to keep adopting whatever you were doing to new changing conditions. You cannot just have one machine learning model or one rule set, which just learned what to do, and keep doing that forever.  You need AI which can continuously learn, we can continuously adopt.’ During this interview, you will learn three things: Why it’s key to micro-segment your customers if you aim to deliver remarkable value How designing for scale helps both your own organization as well as your customers That taking a platform approach can turn customers into fans by allowing them to solve unusual problems See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in Recruitment and my guest is Nachi Junankar, CEO of Avrio He’s got a passion for building long-lasting companies that build amazing technologies that change the world. He’s been an entrepreneur for over 20 years, and in that period founded five companies. It all started with Live Wire, where he successfully imagined and built an enterprise apps company before it was fashionable to do so.  His second company, Retail IQ brought him into the optimization space, and specifically real time price and offer optimization. It’s this knowledge of optimization and matching that’s part of the secret behind Avrio.  Built on the thesis "Let humans do what they are best at and machines do what they are good at,” Avrio built an AI platform that uses machine intelligence to bring people and companies together way before there’s real urgency. Avrio strongly believes the hiring process is broken. With increasingly limited resources and an increasingly competitive market for talent, recruiting is harder than ever. That’s what Avrio is set out to solve.  That inspired me, hence I invited Nachi to my podcast. We explore why the hiring process is broken and what challenges that brings to both employer and future employees. We then discuss the details behind the fresh approach Avrio is taking by turning a very reactive process into a pro-active process – and what benefits that provides to everyone involved.  Here are some of his quotes: The premise of Avrio is to significantly accelerate the hiring cycle. So, when there is a crunch in the kinds of numbers of jobs available, that people would be able to move around a little faster so that they're not that poorly affected by it. The thing is not that there's not going to be enough jobs. There’s not going to be enough jobs all the time The hiring cycle right now is six to nine months, which is just ridiculous. Our vision really is to be predictive about where somebody is going in their career and their career path and where companies are going; into new markets, into new industries and having new kinds of jobs available We would really like to be able to match people six months before they have to look for a job and, and start the conversation. During this interview, you will learn three things: That true value is created when you choose not to further improve a traditional process, but instead approach the problem from the other end of the spectrum and turn something that’s reactive into something pro-active. Why the value of AI and Humans is not an either or. Combining the two forces in areas such as recruitment creates beyond expected results How to create solutions that help your customers grow, and make them more money at the same time. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation around water transportation that has the solve some significant climate change issues. My guest is Jean Francois Barsoum, Canadian Leader, Smart Cities, Water and Transportation at IBM. Since joining IBM, Jean-François Barsoum has provided strategy advice to a diverse set of clients: financial institutions, higher education, professional associations, pharmaceutical companies and telecoms. He has also been invited to speak at conferences on the subjects of innovation, smarter transportation and climate change on four continents. For the past decade, Jean-François has participated in numerous conferences on water and environmental management, and led IBM's ties with some related research organisations and NGOs. He helped develop some core smarter cities concepts and has deepened IBM's involvement with several North American cities as a result. He is among the few Canadians trained by Nobel Peace Prize Winner Al Gore, and regularly presents the material seen in the movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ -- and subsequent scientific updates -- to audiences across Canada. He is on the board of the Climate Reality Project and of the Canadian Water Network, and is a member of the David Suzuki Foundation's steering committee. He is also a member of the Intelligent Transportation Experts' Committee, a forum initiated by the Quebec Association of Transportation (AQTr). When I learned about Jean Francois’ ideas on how to utilize technology to solve some of our largest global challenges I instantly invited him to my podcast. We explore the size of the challenge and how, by using various technological layers together, we start to reimagine transportation the way we have come to know it. We also address the need for organizations at both public and private level to work closely together to maximize the potential of the impact. Here are some of his quotes: What started it all was really a concern around environmental issues The problem is so bad that in some urban areas, if you take a look at cities that were especially growing after the Second World War, so many of the North American cities, the space that is dedicated to cars is about two thirds of the surface area of the city. So we dedicate twice as much room to our cars as we do to ourselves. And that is clearly not a sustainable or even preferable thing to do financially. So there's clearly a need to improve that. And I think that that's where the interest of autonomous cars is.  Even assuming each individual car is not shared by multiple families at once, or multiple people at once, you could still reduce the number of cars by about a third just by sharing the existing cars that we have now.  And if the cars are autonomous, and could move from one place of the city to another, to correspond to demand, it's quite possible, you could reduce the number of cars required by 80%. During this interview, you will learn three things: That to create large scale change you have to think global, but implement local Why it’s in the benefit of everyone if we remove the silo thinking in our business – not only in transportation, but universally How the change we hope for can only happen if we succeed in changing behavior. Our easy options need to be replaced by even easier alternatives. That’s clear room for innovation.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that boosts the return on investment of our advertising by turning every ad into an ethical one, and my guest is Amy Williams, Co-Founder and CEO of Good Loop. Amy is an active member of the Women in Tech and Tech For Good communities. She was recently named by Forbes as one of the 30 Under 30 most influential people in media & marketing and has recently been listed in The Drum Digerati as one of the 100 outstanding individuals excelling in the UK digital industry. Amy has worked in the advertising sector all her career. At the age of 15 she first stepped into an advertising agency. She cut her teeth at one of the world's largest advertising agencies where she worked on everything from global TV ads to scrappy social campaigns. During this time she realised that it’s really difficult for brands to get their message in front of their audience in a cost-effective and positive way.  The more she learned about the industry the more she started to see a disconnect between brands and the people they were trying to talk to. Too often the transaction between advertiser and viewer is at best impersonal and at worst unpleasant. As ad blocker downloads continue to rise and quality journalism continues to suffer the consequences, she sensed that it was time for a more positive solution. That's why she founded the ethical video advertising platform, Good-Loop. This inspired me, hence I invited Amy to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the advertising industry and why current approaches to get the maximum number of eyeballs for the minimum possible cost will only make things worse, not better.  We dive into the concept behind Good-Loop, and how it’s found an ingenious way to connect people, brands and publishers in more meaningful, and consequently more effective way that’s creating a winning case for everyone involved.  Here are some of his quotes: The big idea behind my business is that your time, your attention and your data, all of these things online, they are valuable to someone. They're valuable to advertisers. And so, we want to basically harness that value and use it to make the world a better place. The reason I called it Good Loop actually was, I was thinking about this idea of creating a virtuous cycle: Advertising is such a big business and it funds the free internet. But it's something that people inherently resent. There's a huge erosion of public trust around advertising online. It’s illustrated by how many people use ad-blockers. Hundreds of millions use ad blockers, and then it kind of leaves you the question: ‘How are we going to keep the internet free if we can't find a way for advertising to be perceived more positively?’ So, we're on a mission to make ethical advertising the new normal. And that means that whenever you see an ad online, it shouldn't be something you block, it should be something that you're pleased to see because it means that the world is being made a better place. During this interview, you will learn three things: Why, in order to create breakthrough innovation, it’s key to frame the problem in the correct way i.e. name the true villain in your story How, by making your solution outcome oriented, or in other words only make customers pay for success, you can create an offer that’s a no-brainer for every stakeholder to get involved in Why, by simply starting, you will be 10 times further ahead than most people who just talk about an idea, but hope for all stars to align. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on the responsibility for all of us to ensure the AI’s we invest in are ethical and deliver explainable, transparent output. My guest is Vikram Modgil, founder of TheGoodAI.org Throughout his career Vikram has helped his clients succeed in achieving their goals by truly leveraging the power of data that they already own using Machine Learning. To do so, he’s built an ecosystem company - Pi Square – that consists of employees, associates & partners located in US, Europe & India. Prior to founding Pi Square, Vikram was part of multiple successful startups and wore many hats including business portfolio management, consulting and delivery of AI services.  Recently he founded “TheGoodAI.org” in Seattle, which brings together groups of professionals & leaders from business, non-profit, education, legal, and technology backgrounds with the mission to empower every human to contribute by spreading awareness, facilitating engagement and inspiring actions towards ethical aspects of AI. And this triggered me, hence I invited Vikram to my podcast. We explore the reasons why ethical AI is so important to sustain a world we like to live and work in. We also discuss the various aspects of ethical AI and what we can do as individuals, groups or organizations to ensure we get what we want and hope for. Here are some of his quotes: “There are some unnecessary, or unconscious biases that come into our businesses. They creep in. And if you're not conscious, if you're not alert, they can impact lives. That is something that should not happen. So, with that thought, knowledge and understanding, I wanted to contribute back and I started looking for forums where I could get involved. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything, which was exactly what I wanted this to become. Normally, everybody is hesitant on starting something like this on their own, because it takes a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of people. I wanted to challenge that thinking and start something which is focused on helping one person at a time. And even if two people showed up, that would be a success. The three big things that we want to empower people to do are: create awareness, engagement and actions around the ethics and biases of AI and trustworthiness of AI. Being in Seattle is a is a very huge advantage for us. If we could influence Seattle, we can influence the whole world” During this interview, you will learn three things: That in order to encourage innovative ideas from within your organization on areas where AI could deliver impact, simply stick to 4 basic rules: It has to deliv ver a shift in value, be feasible, scalable and responsible. Why the quality of your ideas for innovation will increase significantly once you ensure diversity in the room to look at the problem through different lenses That it’s every software vendors responsibility to raise some very tough questions whether their AI technology is ethical, explainable and transparent – It all starts by doing the right thing – and that can be very profitable. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation focused on democratizing access to AI across industries that haven’t got the connections and salary budgets of the Tech Giants. My guest is Naomi Goldapple, Head of product for transportation and logistics at Element AI. Naomi’s career combines technology and business consultancy and entrepreneurship. Her specialties are Business & growth strategies, product commercialization and marketing plans. She has an International MBA, specializing in developing markets in Latin America, from the Schulich School of Business as well as a Bachelor of Commerce from McGill University. She was the Director e-business for Royal LePage Commercial, one of Canada’s largest commercial real estate companies.  She started up and ran Maman, bébé et café inc., which won various awards, and worked at ModelCom, using her expertise to help technology entrepreneurs with strategy and financing.  She was the VP Business Development at Nexalogy, responsible for commercializing the suite of products, forging channel partnerships and growing the sales. Nexalogy developed a next generation software for mining, cleaning and analyzing unstructured data with powerful data sculpting capabilities.  And this experience has led to her current venture as Program Director with Element AI, an innovative model that works with and creates companies that are leveraging artifical intelligence. The goal is to spin out hundreds on AI-first companies in Canada over the next 5 years. This triggered me, hence I invited Naomi to my podcast. We explore how the momentum around AI is picking up fast, but how various industries experience significant challenges to get access to AI talent, and in line with that, solutions. We discuss how Element AI is solving this issue, and how this helps chronically understaffed industries and attack large global problems such as safety and climate change. Here are some of her quotes: “The big idea behind the company, if I had to sum it up in one word, is really to democratize the access to AI. One of the issues that is happening right now is many people are getting excited about AI, however, there really isn't enough talent out there. They're usually courted away very quickly by the tech giants. The manufacturing industry, insurance, other industries that are not one of the tech giants, they really don't have access to this talent. So, our role was really to concentrate in some of those verticals, build products specifically for them and kind of allow them to leverage these technologies to really improve their businesses.” During this interview, you will learn three things: That significant value can be delivered to the quality of human work by using AI to eliminate Dull, Dangerous and Dirty work Why it is key to first learn about the impact AI can deliver, rather than to regulate it upfront How the sum of the parts will be far greater when every organization takes an active approach to share its data with its peers See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on [product innovation] that has the power to [xxxx], and my guest is Sachin Duggal, CEO of Engineer.ai. Sachin Dev Duggal is an innovator, serial entrepreneur, and an advocate of enterprise software that touches lives and benefits the world at large.  His profile is an unusual mix of experiences & serendipity. Sachin started his public foray very early in life. At the age of 12 he went on stage in front of 1200 people and the world media to demand something be done about the state of the environment. He worked for the United Nations and helped write the declaration of youth rights before he completed his first degree from Imperial College. At the age of 15 he co-founded nivio with a view to disrupt the old compute model. Four years later, nivio was selected as a technology pioneer at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where at the same time he made history in being the youngest attendees. Sachin’s an avid and recent believer of Vipassana and that life is a zero-sum game – so its essential to spend our time giving; this is one of the main reasons he and his partner put aside stock in all major businesses to their foundation that’s on their 100x50 mission i.e. educate 100m kids in 50 years. He’s been awarded MIT TR 35 Indian Innovator of the Year, the PriceWaterhouseCoopers Leader of Tomorrow, Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist, the BBC Young Asian achiever of the Year and UNEP Global 500 Youth Award.  His aim is to build technology that simplifies the lives of every day users and increases the penetration of information technology to those who do not have it today. And that’s what Engineer.ai is all about. Engineer.ai is on a mission to democratize software development. Their promise ‘Together we bring your idea to life. Twice as fast. 1/3 the cost. Enterprise grade.’ That intrigued me, and hence I invited Sachin to my podcast. We explore the state of the market in which technology is often not delivering on its promise. Beyond that we address why the traditional approach to starting and delivering software projects is broken, and how a new, fresh approach, could transform things for the better, not only for large enterprises but also the small business owner. Here are some of his quotes: “One of the things that I'm driven by every day is the ability for technology to transform people's lives. We're in a world today where a lot of folks feel somewhat disenfranchised by the technology promise, something that was meant to help them grow, help them make more money, help them have more time at home. And instead, it's done, in many cases, the opposite. We think that there's a really strong opportunity to transform how software is built. We're moving from a world where software means working with a cottage industry, where everything is slow, requires traditional know-how, is inefficient, and super risky. And so, there's often a tradeoff that we see in our customers between the fear of being irrelevant, then they come up with an idea, and then it's basically the fear of failure. Until they cross the line of fear, they're not really building or moving ahead. And really, that's the problem we're solving” During this interview, you will learn three things: How traditionally unserved markets can be unlocked by eliminating conventions and traditional barriers, and beyond that, think exponential  That segmenting the market by need, rather than size or segment, opens up new ways to create differentiation That to create momentum you have to exceed expectations, not meet expectations. So instead of delivering on-time on-budget, start delivering ahead of time, and ahead of budget. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation around seemingly ‘ignored’ areas of data, and my guest is Danny Goh. Danny is a serial entrepreneur and an early stage investor. He is the General Partner of G&H Ventures fund, which invests in early-stage start-ups primarily in Southeast Asia. G&H Ventures has invested in more than 20 portfolios in deep tech and is building its third fund to help start-ups into the growth stage. He has also co-founded Innovatube Frontier Labs (IFL), which later merged with Nexus. Innovatube is a technology group that operates an R&D lab in software and AI developments and acts as an incubator to foster the local start-up community in Southeast Asia. It has a team of researchers and engineers to develop cutting-edge deep technology to help start-ups and enterprises bolster their operational capabilities. Danny currently serves as an Entrepreneurship Expert at the Said Business School, University of Oxford and is also an appointed Fellow at the Center for Policy and Competitiveness at the École des Ponts Business School. He is an advisor and judge to several technology start-ups and accelerators including Microsoft Accelerator, Startupbootcamp IoT, and LBS Launchpad. Danny serves as a visiting lecturer at various universities in Europe and he is a speaker at various conferences including TEDx and World Economic Forum. Last but not least he’s the Founder and CEO of Nexus FrontierTech, an AI research firm that easily integrates AI into organisations’ processes by using natural language processing to transform idle information into structured data, enabling them to run better, leaner, and faster. And that promise intrigued me, hence I invited Danny to my podcast. We explore the enormous value opportunity that millions of organizations leave untouched around unstructured data simply because the ‘can’t manage it’. We also explore Danny’s vision on how the world is changing from an app-centric world into a skill-centric world and how that will influence the way we can create solutions going forward.  Here are some of his quotes: One key area that has been helping clients the most, which is to actually help clients to manage their data in a better way. And the biggest problem is, they don't know how to manage those data. And when I say those data, they are like, maybe PDF, graphics, and so on. Those data are not really useful. And what we did, we created the engines, the machine learning engines, to read those documents, and then extract it out. And then human can use all their analytical skills and statistical models to create something out of it. The advantage that we give to them, is they’re one step ahead of their competitors. That to the client is unimaginable before The efficiencies and the accuracies that we bring to them allows them to imagine a lot more. It allows them to create more business opportunities. When they have a new tool that suddenly upgrades their level to the next level, then suddenly they know they can go beyond their limits. During this interview, you will learn three things: That incredible innovation opportunity is often right in front of us, we are just too busy or too ignorant to see it How ‘skills’ will be the answer to making AI and Machine Learning more accessible and change the way we’re creating solutions  Why, in order to be successful, you have to stay persistent and remove the temptations to drift away from your vision See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on a product innovation that has the power to radically change the way recruitment is done. My guest is Tulika Tripathi, Founder and CEO of Snaphunt. Tulika has been in the recruitment space for almost two decades and has worked across many countries. She’s worked as a Managing Director for Michael Page in Singapore where she was responsible for South East Asia. Later on, she took on the responsibility for Michael Page’s entry strategy into India as well as setting up and growing its Indian operations. In 2013 she took on the MD role at Hudson, where she led their recruitment business across Asia. And in February 2017 she founded Snaphunt. It was the big idea behind Snaphunt that triggered me, hence I invited Tulika to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the recruitment industry and how that is slowing down complete sectors. We then discuss how, by taking a radically different approach to the problem, hiring cost can be reduced by up to 99% and hiring speed increased by at least 30%  Here are some of her quotes: The best way to describe Snaphunt is this: Snaphunt is a specialist recruitment agency, with no human recruiter. What I realized over the course of my career is that recruitment hadn't changed much in the last 20 years. I just realized over time that there was a way to leverage technology to do the same thing in a much more effective way. I saw this trend, and I felt rather than trying to reshape an existing business model to meet this, there was a phenomenal opportunity to create a new category of recruiting solutions from scratch. I didn't want to be the person who said, I also had this idea a few years ago, but I didn't do it. So I've done it, because it needs to be made. So I'm disintermediated the whole thing. During this interview, you will learn three things: That by taking a platform approach you can deliver unexpected shifts in value for your customers. How elegance and simplicity always wins – and that this requires you to cut everything away that seems ‘cool’. Why you should be open to agree on the outcomes you want, rather than being fixed to how you think you are going to get there.   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on the power of entity resolution, and how this powerful technology has the ability to give any organization a competitive advantage. My guest is Jeff Jonas, Founder and CEO of Senzing. Jeff Jonas is an acclaimed data scientist. He is at the forefront of solving some of the world’s most complex business and big data problems for governments and organizations in a variety of industries.  A former IBM fellow, Jeff is the leading creator of entity resolution systems. National Geographic recognized him as the Wizard of Big Data, and today numerous organizations rely on his systems to extract useful intelligence from tsunamis of data. He has tackled many high-profile challenges, including identifying potential terrorists, detecting fraudulent behavior in casinos, connecting loved ones after a natural disaster, and modernizing voter registration systems.   Jeff is a three-time entrepreneur and sold his last company to IBM in 2005.  Jonas is a highly sought-after speaker. He regularly meets with government leaders, industry executives and think tanks around the globe about innovation, national security and privacy. In 2016, Jonas founded Senzing, based on a one-of-a-kind IBM spinout of the G2 technology. His team and patent portfolio – and was founded on the vision to revolutionize and democratize entity resolution.  The story behind Senzing inspired me, hence I invited Jeff to my podcast. In the podcast, we explore the power behind entity resolution as the fuel to create the most advanced fraud detection, scoring, recommendation or intelligence systems. We also address the need to democratize this type of technology, so that it can be of benefit to anyone anywhere. And last but not least, we address what’s required to create solutions that people want to tell others about.  Here are some of Jeff’s notable quotes: “I became particularly focused, well really obsessed, with this thing called entity resolution, which is technology that figures out when two people are the same. It's a hard problem for folks, and when you can solve that well, you can solve all kinds of problems and create all kinds of competitive advantage. But if you look at these solutions, they primarily require experts to make them operate. They're pretty darn expensive, the good stuff’s at least a million. So, the big idea is to democratize that. Not just to help the big elite organizations understand who-is-who in their data, but what about the small nonprofit who just got duplicates in their Christmas mailing list? What about them? That's the big idea. If you can take 10 x out of the complexity of getting it going, then why not take 10 x out of the price? So, when you change simplicity that much, and you change cost that much, it opens the door to being able to democratize something.” During this interview, we hope you’ll learn these three things: Why you should sometimes bite the bullet to make the hard parts work in order to create real shifts in value That with today’s technology there’s a multitude of opportunities to democratize capabilities that up to now were only available to the elite  What the ingredients are to create the solutions that turn customers into evangelists See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the enterprise business software that has the power to turn average companies into disrupters in their category. My guest is Frederic Laluyaux, President and CEO of Aera Technology. He’s got more than 20 years of experience as a leader in the Enterprise Performance Management sector. Fred has built his career focusing on providing solutions that help organizations worldwide achieve financial and business excellence. Fred started his career in the area of CPM, otherwise known as Corporate Performance Management, leading ALG‘s global operations until it was acquired by Business Objects.  When Business Object was acquired by SAP he acted as the SVP and GM for SAP Applications for EPM, GRC, and Finance Line of Business.  He then became the President and CEO of Anaplan which he led for over 3 years. That’s where he joined Aera Technology. I got intrigued by the promise of Aera Technology – being the company building the cognitive technology enabling the Self-Driving Enterprise – hence I invited Fred to my podcast. We explore how a variety of industries around the world are being disrupted, and why many traditional business software solutions are not up to par anymore. We discuss why many businesses need a different breed of solutions to rethink everything they do in order to thrive, not just survive in their market. Here are some of his quotes: I remember writing this paper one night, I worked all night on what is the next big wave post transaction automation.  So basically, the massive wave of globalization fueled by the relational database and the ERP layer. The next big idea is how do we tackle the big pyramid that sits on top of those ERP systems. The question that I was asking myself is: Why do companies grow so deep, so fat, when they grow big? How are our decisions being made? So I’ve been thinking about this for a long, long time, and really being convinced that the next topic would be delayerisation, organization getting flatter, more nuclear, as opposed to these big, rigid pyramids. For that you need to enable decisions to be closer to the point of impact. For that you need to enable people to measure in real time the impact of the decisions that they have to take. There is a whole logical flow. During this interview, you will learn three things: Why the way to survive as a business software vendor is to aim your product strategy at solutions that allow your customers to do things differently, rather than do the things that have not changed for decades a bit better. How solutions that are connected outside-and-in, always on, thinking, learning and autonomous in their behavior will create the winners of tomorrow To become remarkable as a software business you have to surround yourself with people that are not attached to the traditional way of doing See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help marketers become best in class in marketing, and my guest is Parry Malm, Co-founder and CEO of Phrasee Phrasee uses AI to power email subject lines, Facebook and Instagram ads, and push notifications that outperform copy written by humans. Some of their global clients include Virgin, Domino’s, and The Times. Phrasee won 2017’s Most Innovative AI Company by CB Insights, and was one of the first AI companies in the world to implement an AI ethics policy. Parry is a well-known digital marketing dude and an unconventional thinker. He has worked with countless brands and media outlets to help them optimise their online results, and is one of the world’s leading experts on email marketing. He started his career coding middleware for CRM software, then sent out millions of emails for global brands, before running the strategy department for an ESP. He holds a BBA in Marketing & Statistics. It was indeed the unconventional approach Phrasee is putting across that triggered me, hence I invited Parry to my podcast. We explore how he and his team have created a new category, something that ‘experts’ in the market perceived to be impossible. We talk about how Phrasee’s solution is creating a win-win for digital marketers and the business they represent, and what was required to achieve the level of impact they are creating.  Here are some of his quotes: To synthesize our big idea into one statement is, we believe that marketers can use technology to produce better copy than they had done previously. So what we have now is a very advanced deep learning system that can predict the efficacy of language before it's sent out. So, would you mind those two technologies, what you got is the most luminous copywriter on the planet who can create more copy then 1000 monkeys on 1000 typewriters, with the best predictor of effective copy in the world? What that means is our customers get a small amount of very effective copy every time they log into our platform. So, what we're actually doing is, we're alleviating the least favorite task, which humans are not well suited to, just because we get sort of desensitized or we just sort of get bored of doing the same thing over and over. So, we take away that burden, and we let humans focus on the copy that humans are good at. During this interview, you will learn three things: How, with the right mindset and persistence, you can do what’s never been done before and succeed Why it can be a blessing to finish second in a pitching contest – and as such have to hustle to win real customers and build a product which has wide appeal Why creating Human/Machine combo’s ultimately delivers more value than the sum of its components See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the Utility industry, and my guest is Abhay Gupta, CEO of Bidgely. Abhay founded Bidgely, with the mission of leveraging data to transform the utility industry. Today, Bidgely is very well positioned with the technology and knowhow to not only help the utility industry go to market quicker, but also how to optimize their customer engagements. As the CEO of Bidgely, Abhay has led the company from concept to market leadership. Prior to Bidgely, Abhay worked at a combination of energy and technology companies including Grid Net, Echelon and Sun Microsystems. He holds a Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, a Master of Science from University of Southern California and M.B.A. from Santa Clara University. It was the big idea behind Bidgely and the fact some of their customers decided to mention it in their television campaigns that led me to invite Abhay to my podcast. We explore the challenges the utility industry is facing on three levels: Their infrastructure, their operation and their customers. We dive deep into the opportunity that’s ahead of us, and why this can only be solved with the support of the latest technologies.  Here are some of his quotes: I ended up in product management and building smart meters for the energy industry somehow in my career.  And we were building smart meters, we realized all this data that is produced by smart meters has so much potential. It's just not being used for its potential.  So, we identified this opportunity to disrupt the decision-making process and the whole opportunity energy industry because if you look at the retail, internet, medical, any of the industry the data is used for so much and so much personalization.  So much of value creation. The energy industry is lagging behind massively. The utility industry has not changed for decades.  The primary business for most of the utilities in the world has been about how to keep the lights on, how to build power plants, how to keep the distribution and transmission of the energy correctly happening. This is the opportunity for the utility and energy industry to completely change and morph themselves into something, what I call at par with the Google and Amazon of the world. During this interview, you will learn three things: How a byproduct of your core innovation could end up giving your customer the ultimate point of differentiation How to make strategic decisions in situations where there are multiple solid routes to solving a problem How focusing on customer experience can result in radical cuts in internal operational cost at the same time. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the marketing arena, and my guest is Paul Roetzer, Founder of the Marketing AI Institute.  Paul Roetzer is also the founder and CEO of PR 20/20. He is the author of The Marketing Performance Blueprint and The Marketing Agency Blueprint, and creator of the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference (MAICON). Paul is an international keynote speaker on the topics marketing talent, technology, strategy and artificial intelligence. He’s a graduate of Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, and he has consulted for hundreds of organizations, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. I’ve been following Pauls work for a while and got triggered by his efforts to educate marketing professionals on what to anticipate now that AI is entering the marketing space. This is why I invited him to my podcast. We explore how the marketing space is changing due to the capabilities of AI, where the changes are most profound today. Based on that insight we discuss a range of approaches for Marketers to prepare themselves. Here are some of his quotes: I believe the industry is just going to transform like, nothing we've ever seen before. If you think about what email and mobile and the internet itself did, I truly believe AI is going to dwarf that. It's just going to transform everything in the next decade, and that includes career paths, and what we're teaching at university. The great irony of marketing automation is that it's manual. So if you're using a marketing automation platform, CRM platform, you as the humans set all the rules of what it does. When AI really gets into the picture and is infused in everything we do, it starts doing that. It starts learning and it never forgets. If you think about the ability we have now to manipulate behavior, to play with emotions, to use fear to trigger actions.And we're doing that with very basic level technology. Now, when that technology is 10 times more powerful or 100 times more powerful, there's very real concerns that you use those tools to do evil instead of good, and it might not be intentional. It could spiral out of control. During this interview, you will learn three things: Why we have to be more pro-active in understanding the impact of AI on our jobs and the impact we can make on the business That every marketeer can benefit from AI today, and it’s our responsibility to explore those opportunities That as an industry we have to drive the conversation to steer the effect AI could or should have on jobs, education and the humanization of our brands See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the ERP space, and my guest is Vinnie Mirchandani Vinnie is the founder of Deal Architect - a Technology strategy and negotiation firm listed as a leading "boutique" by the Black Book of Outsourcing. Vinnie also founded IQ4hire, a projects marketplace and Jetstream Group, a sourcing advisory firm. Earlier in his career he had various technology consulting roles at PwC (now IBM) in the US, Europe and Asia, and worked as an industry analyst at Gartner.  He wrote various books about the evolution and future of the enterprise software, amongst which Silicon Collar, The New Polymath and The New Technology Elite. His latest book is SAP Nation 3.0, and this triggered me to invite Vinnie again to my podcast. We explore the changes in the ERP landscape over the last 5 years, in particular amongst the big 3 – SAP, Oracle and Workday. We explore why after 20 years of ERP in the cloud today there’s still not enough traction.  Here are some of his quotes: “In the last five years, two things have changed. One is SAP has been a product launch machine. I mean, they have launched more products than any other I would say technology vendor. The other thing I saw pleasantly with SAP was how much more open they were this time. One of the disappointing things about cloud has been, you know, it's 20 years old now. NetSuite was born in 98, Salesforce was born in 99. But if you do a breakdown by global world region, by industry, by business process, only about 20% is filled. So, the vendor community hasn’t delivered enough. And on the other hand, the buyer community has been very slow to adopt it. I raised an alarm. I go, this is scary guys. After 20 years, both the buyers and the vendors are just not moving. Something's not right.” During this interview, you will learn four things: Why it’s key for ERP vendors to not just modernize the technology. Modernize the business processes. That a big opportunity is left virtually untouched and that is: leveraging the biggest benefit of the cloud: Data, and utilize that to introduce real value shifts Why it’s key to wake up and realize it’s urgent after 20 years to start moving ‘by-standards’ i.e. ERP legacy customers.  Why systems integrators should start to apply machine learning and automation to their own business. Stop just selling bodies, and leverage the learnings and data from millions of CRM and ERP projects to make these projects faster, cheaper and a lot less risky See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to deliver upon the promise of self-healing-systems. My guest is Mohit Gupta, Co-founder and CEO of Opas AI Mohit has spent the last decade working on wide variety of interesting problems in Infrastructure, Big Data, and ML. He has run and managed infrastructure at massive scale and felt the pain of operating them first hand. This pain combined with his experience in Big Data and ML led to the incubation of Opas AI. Before founding Opas AI, Mohit has held multiple roles at BloomReach, Groupon, Google, and Amazon. He has a Bachelor in CS from IIT Kharagpur and Masters from UCDavis. The vision behind Opas AI me to invite Mohit to my podcast: to create a single solution that can find, diagnose and fix even the most complex performance and availability problems in your applications and infrastructure.  We explore the fact that today’s applications and infrastructure have evolved far faster than the technology used to measure and manage them. We dive into the challenges that this provides to IT teams as they drown under the weight of too many tools, too many dashboards and too many meaningless alerts, and most importantly, how technology such as AI and Machine Learning can help remove these challenges and risks for good. Here are some of his quotes: “We are in this journey of building self-healing systems. It doesn't matter what kind of IT systems you're running. The cost of failure has been growing higher and higher. There was one thing in early 2000 if Amazon site was down for 15 minutes probably wouldn't turn up on New York Times homepage. However, a few minutes outage on your site [today] can become a massive PR issue. And the cost is not only the lost revenue. That's definitely something that you see right away but the bigger cost is in the negative PR. And God save you if you are providing service to other SAAS providers. We can win customers. We can buy contracts. But buying credibility, winning credibility is a long-term process. You may be doing very well for the last five years; a two-hour outage will basically wipe out that credibility.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: What are the key ingredients that are required to build self-healing systems What the art of listening to customers really means – the key is not to hear what they are saying, but to understand what they are meaning That you should be problem focused, not solution focused to become truly successful  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on the power of curiosity in innovation and my guest is Dr. Diane Hamilton, author of ‘Cracking the Curiosity Code’ She has contagious passion for improving interpersonal communication. In addition to being a nationally syndicated radio host, award-winning speaker, author, and educator, Dr. Hamilton is a thought leader in the fields of leadership, sales, marketing, management, engagement, personality, curiosity, and motivation.  To help improve relationships in the workplace — and performance as a result — Dr. Hamilton draws on her decades of work experience in software, computers, corporate training, pharmaceuticals, real estate, mortgage lending, social media, education, and publishing. She’s a sought-after expert in emotional intelligence, and her research has been published widely in peer-reviewed journals. She is the creator of the Curiosity Code Index® and the author of four books sold worldwide: Cracking the Curiosity Code, The Online Student’s User Manual, How to Reinvent Your Career, and It’s Not You, It’s Your Personality. Her book regarding personalities was required reading at an Arizona-based university, where she was also nominated for an honorary doctorate in addition to her traditionally-obtained Ph.D. in Business Management. The release of her latest book ‘Cracking the Curiosity Code’ triggered me to invite Diane to my podcast. We explore why curiosity is such a key trait to develop in relation to innovation and dealing with top business issues. We do a deep dive on the four factors that impact curiosity, and what to do to start growing the curiosity level inside your organization. Here are some of her quotes: “I first started writing the book because I was very interested in what kept people from being curious. I really found four factors impacted curiosity which were Fear, Assumption, Technology and Environment. My hope was to help individuals and organizations to develop what I think is a such a key trait. It's the spark that leads to motivation and to drive and for you to get anywhere with communication, critical thinking, leadership, creativity, teamwork, engagement, you name all the top issues that leadership struggles with. Once you're able to get all those factors in line and then once your innovative you're productive and you know everybody's engaged, it kind of solves all the problems and so that's what I thought was so fascinating. What I was trying to do was just kind of figure out what's the spark behind it all that's that we could fix and, and that's what I kept coming back to was improving curiosity.” During this interview, you will learn three things: That what made you successful in the past, isn’t likely going to help you survive in the future – And growing your curiosity index is the key to your success Why you have to watch out to avoid aimless curiosity in your organization, and what to do about it That, a critical way to grow a culture of curiosity starts when top management shows they way – they need to walk the talk. Get related ideas from a few blogs  Why your product roadmap fails to deliver remarkable value  How to stay relevant in your category?  Are you in the comfort zone, or where the magic happens? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform the impact Marketers can make by generating more leads, of higher quality, with less effort. My guest is Yonatan Snir, Co-founder and CEO of CliClap, an AI Powered autonomous lead generation and qualification solution He is an expert in data driven marketing with over 16 years of experience, helping organizations utilize technologies to improve business performance. In 2016, he founded CliClap together with Arie Zaks, who now acts as their CTO. Prior to CliClap he opened a marketing agency, focused on helping brands transform their marketing operations into a data driven organization. And before that, he served as the Director of Global Marketing Operations at NICE Systems. It was this big idea behind CliClap’s product that triggered me to invite Yonatan to my podcast.  We explore why so after so many years of marketing automation the tools we use still suggest visitors to our website the wrong topics of conversation (which is awkward) or ask people for their commitment way before the time is right (which is annoying and pushy). We then address how technology such as AI is offering us a completely different approach to the challenge, one that delivers results almost too good to be true. Here are some of his quotes: “We have a lot of traffic on the website that's not converting today, and many tools and many new tactics are being used to try and fix that. But eventually, we see that only friction converts. The numbers the benchmarks that are stated today by Forrester, Marketing Sherpa and other research, is that we looked at talking about 2 to 4% converting to leads, and only half percent is converted to opportunities. The reason for that, at least from what we found, is that on B2B you give the same experience to everyone. The fact is, it's not a one size fits all. A lot of people are being missed out, because they're not used to getting this kind of experience in today's world, where everything is becoming much more simple in our consumer head. So, the idea is to try and understand for each visitor when, and what's the next best thing. And when it's ready, ready to stick and move to the next level of engagement.  Not too soon, not too late.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: How, by staying curious and challenging the established and accepted ways of doing, it is possible to deliver remarkable impact How in a crowded, red-ocean market, it is very possible to get customers to shift from a competitive solution to yours by having clear differentiation. Why the traditional cloud solutions for marketing have been focused on the wrong metrics of delivering scale and quantity (i.e. output), where the real impact is created when you focus your product strategy on quality (i.e. outcomes). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform how the enterprise does business. My guest is Heidi Messer, Chairman and Co-founder of Collective[i]  Heidi has been an active entrepreneur and investor in the digital economy since the commercialization of the Internet. She is the Co-founder and CEO of World Evolved, a platform for global investment and expansion. She is one of the founding members of the Zokei Network, a global network devoted to encourage innovation across art, science, business and technology. In addition, she is an active angel investor in and advises numerous startups. Prior to Collective, Heidi and her brother, Stephen Messer, co-founded LinkShare Corporation, which is host to one of the world’s largest online affiliate networks representing some of the largest and fast-growing publishers and merchants on the web. The company is widely considered to be a pioneer in the world of digital advertising. Heidi is a frequent speaker at conferences around the world and universities on entrepreneurship, digital marketing and advertising, business intelligence and the Future of Internet services. She has been cited in various publications including, The New York Times, Inc. Magazine, and The Nikkei. She has received several honors including being selected as one of 2012’s 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs by Goldman Sachs.  The mission behind Collective[i] is to remove uncertainty and inefficiency around how B2B companies generate revenue through their sales organizations. They do so by using AI to remove tasks, identify important social connections and guide sales professionals to the activities that will yield the highest ROI. This approach often gets them referred to as the “Waze for sales” – And this triggered me to invite Heidi to my podcast We explore why today’s salesforce is wasting 70% of their time on non-revenue generating activities, and why, in order to solve that challenge, you need to go beyond automation. As such we explore how the combination of network-based technology, community-sourced and proprietary data in combination with AI/ML enables to predict buying patterns and provide levels of visibility and actionability previously unattainable for sales teams Here are some of her quotes: “My co-founder and I got together and said: “What is the next big opportunity?” after watching the marketing world transform, and we saw on the enterprise side and the revenue management side, specifically sales, as being the next big thing. That’s what led us to found a Collective[i], which is short for collective intelligence.” “The entire enterprise will be transformed using a combination of data networks and artificial intelligence. And when I say transformation, what I mean is not automation. I think that's a common misconception. Instead, what we looked at is; Where areas where humans are underutilized? Where are areas where their jobs have become something other than what they were originally intended? And for us, we looked at revenue and in particular sales organizations as a ripe place for this, where this technology could completely reorganize and allow human beings to shine and show their true talents.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: Why taking a network approach to creating insights has the power to solve some of our most valuable challenges How, by using AI as a guide, we can raise the potential to increase both the value humans produce as well as the way they value their work. Why being a fast-follower doesn’t work with AI, because the advantages are so far superior. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the Procure-to-Pay space. My guest is David Griffiths, CEO of FISCAL Technologies, a leading provider of forensic solutions that empower procure-to-pay (P2P) teams across the globe to protect organizational spend. David has 20 years’ experience in growing technology organizations and has spent the last 15 years working with hundreds of Accounts Payable teams to help protect their corporate spend by preventing fraud and reducing risk. Prior to becoming the CEO of Fiscal Technologies, David was Head of  Marketing for Bottomline Technologies, and Commercial Director for European Internet Technologies, a supplier of e-business solutions. David holds an MBA and Honours Degree in Business & Accounting. What triggered me to invite David to my podcast was his vision to enable the finance function to prevent high risk transactions from creating reputational damage and become more proactive at the same time in optimizing performance. We explore the fact we are living in a world where Risk & Fraud are increasing rather than reducing. We discuss why current solutions on the market appear to be so inadequate. How that results in reputational damage, leakage of working capital and underperforming financial performance. And finally, how technology such as AI can be used to deliver remarkable impact. Here are some of his quotes:   The whole Procure-to-Pay space is dominated by hundreds of different technology vendors and really sit in two core areas.   Firstly, around procurement and automating the whole procurement process and driving purchase order compliance and POS and three-way matching, and then the other side is about managing invoices and paying those invoices. There's a lot of technologies around automation.   The more feedback we received, and the more research we did, we realized there was nothing to oversee all these different technologies to look at fraud and risk. We found that three-way matching doesn’t work. It hasn't evolved over the last 40 years. So our big idea was to provide oversight to this process, as a lot of organizations now are really exposed to unprecedented levels of risk and fraud.   By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: As the velocity of our world increases and our options to get work done enriches as technology evolves, we are creating new foundation for fraud and risk to grow exponentially. That the value of AI is not only to give insights to identify fraud and risk, but possibly more important to also reveal totally new patterns that allow us to prevent these challenges all together. That a lot of value is destroyed due to inertia in the market – the self-believe that ‘everything is under control’ – and that’s not only in the Procure-to-Pay scene. It’s universal.   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation around marketing automation that has the power to transform the way can turn customers into buyers by using the power of content personalization, and my guest is Jon Shalowitz, CEO of LiftIgniter Jon brings a wealth of experience in building innovative, fast-growth companies. He was CEO at XDN where he transitioned the company​ ​into a category leader for application delivery services and led the company to a​ ​successful acquisition by Fortinet. He then co-founded CloudUP Networks and led the company as CEO to capture a critical part of the cloud data management market.​ ​ He then became the CEO of Badgeville, a leader in Enterprise Gamification that got acquired in July 2016 by CallidusCloud, where in turn he created a new division to address the $20B Customer Experience (CX) market. CallidusCloud got acquired by SAP in august 2017, from where Jon moved into an interim CEO role at SnapRoute with the prime objective to re-focus the business. In April 2018 he then became CEO of LiftIgniter – a Series A stage startup that helps B2C and B2B companies optimize their Web-based and app-based customer experiences in real-time. The way LiftIgniter does this intrigued me, hence I invited Jon to my podcast. We explore the challenges marketers have these days in meeting the expectations of their prospects and customers in the digital world we live in, while at the same ensure we are 100% compliant with data privacy regulations like GDPR. It has become impossible to keep up with manual segmentation and tagging as we all expect our suppliers to give us a personalized experience based on our behaviors – in real time.  Here are some of his quotes: “I truly think that the marketing stack is in a position to move from evolutionary change that we had with marketing automation, to now something revolutionary with AI and machine learning. The big idea is that customer interactions, customer experience, digital customer experience need to be number one real time, need to pick up on signals in real time. And, related to that, need to be behavioral based, or need to understand your behavior in the moment, or the users’ behavior in the moment, versus the traditional way of tracking and segmenting and really focusing on who you are. It's what you are, what you're doing what you're interested in, in the moment, not who you are, and what you've clicked on at 10 other sites where you came to me” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: How you can leverage your 1st party data effectively and drive the best possible Customer Experience.  That true breakthroughs in technology can only be achieved by taking a distance from the conventional ways of doing things. Too often we get too engaged with improvement on improvement on improvement, where we should really start with a clean sheet Why as a CEO it’s your duty to gear your company at the most valuable challenge of your ideal customer, not the most interesting challenge. You need to apply a level of adaptability, and with that you’ll turn customers into fans See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the sales execution space that has the power to help companies gain 99% accuracy in their sales cycles, hence achieve big leaps in productivity, and my guest is Dr. Cindy Gordon, Co-founder and CEO of SalesChoice, an AI SaaS Predictive and Prescriptive Guiding Selling Company.  Cincy is an expert in SaaS, AI, business innovation, early-stage software commercialization & sales /marketing practices. She has held senior leadership and partnership roles in global B2B Enterprises, including: Accenture, Xerox, Citicorp and Nortel Networks. In addition, Cindy has also been a founder, VC, and an angel in emerging software companies. She is recognized for her innovation and thought leadership, has written over 13 books, and won numerous awards.  Cindy’s passion is the constant pursuit of sustainable innovation and the creation of  differentiated experiences to make our world an incredible place. That’s what triggered me, hence I invited her to my podcast. We explore the large-scale challenges sales professionals have in making their targets. The fact that 30% of sales professionals suffer from attention deficit disorder, and that attention span has dropped 50% over the past 10 years are likely making this worse than better. AI is coming to the rescue here. It’s interesting how Cindy defines it: AI is not then new energy, it’s the new oxygen – we have to breath it to be able to do things we’ve never held possible. Here are some of her quotes: “What drives me day to day is probably just ensuring that what is possible is real, and giving people the confidence that they could actually mobilize the change. It's all about building the confidence to just simply be, enjoy, and make it happen. Too often, we get paralyzed. And I think with the speed that has accelerated in businesses worldwide, people need to make more choices about where they're spending their time and what they're working on, The roots of the company are very much focused on that specific problem. The problem is that 30 to 60% of sales professionals don't make their sales plan targets or quotas in the b2b market segment. The speed acceleration or the age of distraction dynamics, b2b sales professionals have one of the hardest jobs in the world because of the noise factor.  So that's the backdrop and we thought the thesis was: “Could AI, with predictive analytics and other AI methods, absorb all the historical dynamics of a firm and actually guide them?” During this interview, you will learn four things: Why it’s key to always look for audit trails once you add AI to your solution – Someone needs to be accountable for the predictions. And if you can’t stand in for it, the legal issues will be pretty significant That the new way to deliver your solutions is not to give your users individual insights, but rather universal intelligence of all ‘the moves’. This will enable them to add even more value. That one of your responsibilities and opportunities as a vendor is to ensure the data keeps improving – that bias isn’t there – and that your predictions are transparent Everyone knows that to succeed you have to stay focused. Possibly more important is to stay curious. To be looking around the corner for the market dynamics and the edge plays. Leave yourself and your people time to pause, reflect and time to think. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the sales & marketing space that has the power to increase sales productivity by over 80%, and my guest is Ilan Kasan, Co-founder and CEO of Exceed.ai. Ilan has built an 18-year career in general management and product management for leading global technology companies including, Cisco, WebEx, Comeet and others. During this time, he’s proven to be a successful product leader with a track record in product, user experience, sales, marketing and building products users and enterprises love. September 2016 he co-founded Exceed.ai around the believe that sales reps time is precious and shouldn’t be wasted on menial, error-prone tasks. As such they developed an AI Sales Assistant that automatically contacts and engages every lead in a personalized and timely manner in order to qualify and book meetings directly on the reps calendar – allowing the reps to be laser focus on high priority prospects. This triggered me, and hence I invited Ilan to my podcast. We explore the challenges every sales person has in performing in their job and how the bulk of their time is spent on tasks that doesn’t use their competence in the optimal way. We also assess why a combo of Sales + AI delivers better results than simply trying to replace Sales with AI.  Here are some of his quotes: “I was exposed to what I would say, the middle of the funnel, how difficult it is to manage a huge stream of leads. I saw how much time reps are spending in qualifying, getting back and trying to set appointments, talking to the wrong people. How much leads that marketing created, nobody actually does anything with them, or follows up one. So I understood that there is a real problem here that is not necessarily related to the size of the company, but rather the nature of the business. The problem is that when you get all those leads at the top of the funnel, you get a lot of noise. It takes a lot of time to work through all the leads and filter out the noise, it’s a very manual process. And we said, okay, this is repetitive, it repeats itself. So let's find a way to automate it.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: That to stand out in your market you have to deliver value beyond what ‘the others’ are delivering. Going the extra mile pays off – and sometimes this means pivoting your business That the value is in the data – and often the data is not there – meaning you have to find clever ways to gather it. This way you are not building a product, but a platform that gets smarter and smarter with every interaction. How your biggest competitor is often ‘doing nothing’ because of inertia or simply being sceptical (or fearful). The ultimate way out is positioning.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform how we hire and manage talent going forward, and my guest is Caitlin MacGregor Caitlin is the CEO and Co-founder of Plum. After being President/Director of two startups, Caitlin founded Plum in order to transform talent processes to prepare business owners, like herself, for the future of work. Shortly after that Plum was awarded 2015 Gold Stevie International Business Award for best new product or service of the year. The company was also selected as one of the top 10 businesses led by women by Springboard Enterprises NYC. Plum's mission is to help companies hire, grow, and retain top talent with the power of AI and Industrial/Organizational Psychology. By measuring talents such as leadership, innovation, communication, and more, Plum hosts the single largest database for quantifying human potential at every stage of the employee journey – from predicting successful hires, to informing professional development, strategic workforce planning, and high-potential capability. This inspired me, hence I invited Caitlin to my podcast. We explore the challenges in the talent acquisition and talent management space, and why so many companies are challenged with hiring top-talent. We also discuss how the changes in the marketplace require a different approach to hiring, reskilling and redeploying talent – and why assessing where someone went to school or previously worked are not the things to look for. Here are some of his quotes: “Some of the statistics say that, you know, it's a 5050 chance of hiring the right person. a lot of companies don't have 50% turnover. So a lot of the times what happens is that they're putting up with mediocre people maybe 20% of their organization are top performers. But if you understand what makes a top performer, a top performer and you can quantify that you can actually change that ratio so that you can get more people that that meet that criteria. It's really understanding that every single person has the potential to be a top performer, just not in every role, that that each person has a unique set of talents that makes them a top performer.  So it's really about how do you figure out what makes somebody exceptional, and then figure out the jobs that will allow them to succeed.” During this interview, you will learn three things: How looking for scarcity can you help uncover hidden market gems that you can open by democratizing access That to maximize your success as a software business it’s key to align every aspect – all the way from product strategy, to marketing, to Sales, to Service How new business ideas are born by looking with a fresh eye at what it takes to avoid costly investment decisions. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the financial market place that has the power to transform the way we know it in two ways: 1)   Avoid disruptive shifts in financial market mood by predicting subtle changes in perception bias 2)   increase shareholder value and impact by offering a new framework of decision-making such that early insights into market dislocations and even market crashes can be timely converted into new and persistent high-impact alpha opportunity centres My guest here today is Efrem Hoffman.   Efrem Hoffman is the CEO, Founding Architect, and Thought-Leader of RunningAlpha., an independent Canadian Innovation Think-Tank, headquartered in Toronto. As stated on his website, he is employing patented and proprietary insights at the intersection of physics and finance to exploit market uncertainty for competitive advantage.   He is a thought-leader in Smart-Data Analysis Architecture and developer of Quantum-Behavioral Trading Machines; Efrem has 145 citations and multiple info-tech patents referenced in patents granted to Fortune 500 Companies & Research Think-Tanks.   His vision is rethinking the way we can collaborate with nature in order to better exploit uncertainty. With that in mind he’s developing solutions that help investors build intelligent portfolios and see investment opportunities before they arrive and get noticed; From there he helps them navigate around value traps to ensure they maximize the value of their portfolio. This inspired me, hence I invited Efrem to my podcast. We explore the challenges and risks of today’s financial market and how technology can help investors gain early access to opportunities previously only discoverable by the Wall Street influencers.   Here are some of Efrems’ quotes: “My passion has always been about understanding the physics that underlies very unusual events I did a thesis, which was basically on applying vision techniques in three dimensional radar in order to use AI in a more constructive way, where humans don't make assumptions about what's actually happening in the surroundings I patented technology and there was a couple people one from the University of Manitoba some of the professor's there that noticed that some of the applications of that AI approach that was used for atmosphere Tornado prediction could be applied to the financial markets and understanding you know extreme behavior and what causes it to take shape during manias and panics I'm most proud of actually being able to make predictions of it in very narrow windows and, and persistent windows for when market crashes are likely to take place, so that I could actually protect investors portfolios during those events”   During this interview, you will learn three things: 1)   Why the best decisions can only be made when bias and sentiment are taken out of the equation – this is a clear area for technology to play a significant role 2)   That the solutions we create gain in value exponentially when they not only predict a certain high risk event accurately, but also provide the ingredients to prevent it all together 3)   How to find new sources for innovation by searching for use cases that are driven by extreme uncertainty. Tackling uncertainty can turn into clear competitive advantage.   If you want to learn more about Running Alpha’s latest product “Capital Market Trends,” visit CapitalMarketTrends (use promo code: xIqpTTo2, to get a +55% discount on this monthly subscription service for up to 12 months; Coupon Expires March 22nd/2019; you can cancel at any time without getting charged for the following month). Disclaimer: This is strictly for educational and informational purposes – and only reflects the output of Running Alpha’s Market Intelligence.    See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product strategy principles that, if applied, have the power to deliver transformative innovation with triple digit ROI. My guest is Richard Boyd, CEO at Tanjo.AI   Over the last twenty-six years Richard has led or helped create some of the most innovative game technology companies in the industry. He has served as a game technology consultant for a wide variety of industries including energy, healthcare, education and motion pictures. At Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin he created and led a group of innovative engineers and designers across all mission areas called Virtual World Labs. Richard joined Lockheed Martin in 2007 with the acquisition of 3Dsolve, a North Carolina-based computer game technology firm where he was founder and CEO.   Prior to that, Richard was CEO of 3dVillage.com, which was acquired in 2001. 3dVillage was a spin out of Virtus Corporation, where he served for a decade on the executive management team that created several pioneering computer gaming companies including Red Storm Entertainment, with author Tom Clancy; iRock Entertainment with Ozzy Osbourne; and Timeline Computer Entertainment, with author Michael Crichton.   Today he’s the CEO of Tanjo.AI, whose mantra is “improving businesses, industries, and people’s lives by bringing machine learning and automation to the world.” This triggered me, hence I invited Richard to my podcast. We discuss how a pragmatic approach to solve every day problems can result in transformative impact. We, too, often don’t realize the solution is right in front of our eyes, and the technology is already there to solve it.   Or, as William Gibson once quoted: “The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.”   Here are some of his quotes: “The sort of thing that drives me is bringing technologies to bear on problems to solve them in ways that humans alone cannot. it's looking at whatever activity you're engaged in, and trying to figure out, what should humans be doing with our effort and our attention? And what should we be turning over to machines? The answer to that question changes almost every year, almost every month now, Organizations who understand that, and figure that out, will prevail. And those who don't, not only won't be competitive anymore, but they'll appear to be handicapped very soon. If you can do something one time and have it not only pay 10x return on investment, but have that return be an annuity... something you're going to get every single year... the earlier you do that, the more effective and competitive you're going to be. That's why everyone should be waking up and looking at this carefully. You cannot afford not to look at machine learning”     By listening to this podcast you will learn three things:   The key to machine learning innovation is to not overthink or over reach. Don’t paralyze yourself with endless research with uncertain outcomes, but instead be pragmatic. Look for proven applications with low risk -the low hanging fruit problems unique to your industry, that have a certain outcome, can be applied immediately, and scale radically i.e. can bring a lot of positive impact to many people very quickly Every organization has big data today. But it is a big leap from big data to information (data that has been organized) and an even bigger leap from information to Intelligence (information that has been computed so humans can act upon it) Machine learning is uniquely designed to help your organization make these leaps. The next century is about simulation. So, those who become adept at harnessing data intelligence to predict the future and be prepared for it, those companies will prevail.     See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to 10x the impact financial auditors can make, and my guest is Robin Grosset, CTO at MindBridge Ai. Robin has a track record as an entrepreneur having worked in and founded successful software startups. This resulted in him joining IBM in 2008 through the acquisition of Cognos, where he was appointed IBM Distinguished Engineer. He has over 20 years commercial experience in the field of Business Analytics. He was formerly the technical lead and chief architect for Watson Analytics, a ground breaking cognitive analytics system. Robin holds many patents in the areas of analytics, data processing and security.  Today he leads the development of the next generation MindBridge Ai Auditor that helps professionals detect and prevent financial anomalies, including fraud. He’s created a vision around Human Centric AI, and shared that vision recently at TEDxOttawa. This triggered me, hence I invited Robin to my podcast. We explore the challenges in the financial auditing practice, and how, even after decades of automation, much of the practice is still very manual and sample based, leaving huge opportunities for fraud. Beyond that we discuss why a human/machine approach will always provide the optimal combination to create exponential impact.  Here are some of his quotes: T “The existing ways that people were analyzing or auditing financial transactions were inadequate. So typically they would use rules based systems to do this. With the rules based system, you're only going to catch something, you're going to find something that you anticipate So, you have to imagine the circumstance to find the rule and then it will work it will never find anything you don't anticipate. We think it's a significant problem in the world. There's a group called the ACFE, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners and they estimate the amount of fraud, misconduct, irregularities that are caught each year. They say that that's about $200 billion a year. But they also estimate the amount we don't find. So, these are not detected by any method we have today. And that amount is about somewhere north of $3 trillion per year. So, if you put that number in perspective, that's a little under $500 for every person on the planet” During this interview, you will learn three things: Why human-centric AI is the key to take the impact and insight of virtually any solution to a different level How to overcome inertia for AI driven innovation, especially in an industry that’s sceptical by design That to truly disrupt an industry you need to avoid looking at the conventions and existing standards See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation around competitive and market intelligence, and my guest is Jonah Lopin, Co-founder and CEO of Crayon, a market intelligence software company based in Boston.  Jonah started his career as a strategy & operations Consultant at Deloitte where he led projects for Fortune 500 clients in the Manufacturing, Consumer Business and Healthcare industries. After that he worked at eBay and UNICEF.  In 2007 he joined Hubspot as the 6th employee, and served as Vice President of Customer Operations as they grew from 0 to 50M$. In 2012 he co-founded M80 Labs Inc, and from there he co-founded Crayon to solve the problem virtually any business suffers from: a lack of competitive and market intelligence. This triggered me, hence I invited Jonah to my podcast. We explore the challenges many organizations face in making informed decisions based on market intelligence that’s often incomplete, dated or completely absent. We also review the flaws in the business software industry in providing solutions to the wrong problem. Here are some of his quotes: “The belief behind the business where we believe strongly is that businesses should be as good at understanding and acting on everything happening outside the four walls of the business as they are at understanding and acting on all of their internal data When it comes to these, like fundamental questions about your market, and your competitive set, and your brand, and your customers, and what's happening outside the four walls, the business, many companies just have never had a good way to get insights there. Marketing's not about arts and crafts anymore. And it's about data and science. And that was really true. But we never helped our customers apply that data driven execution to what was happening outside the four walls of the business. And so, you know, we would help our customers generate tons of sales leads, but we never helped our customers figure out how do you close those.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: That the opportunities to create new categories are for grabs, as long as you ask the right questions That too build a credible software business you need to move far beyond ‘the Shiny Object’ syndrome and solve the ‘complete problem’.  How persistence to stay laser focused, stay in the fight, and making progress each and every day will be paid with remarkable results See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on the product innovation that has the power to transform the advertising industry and the way marketers can make a remarkable impact, and my guest is Peyman Nilforoush. Peyman is the CEO and CoFounder of inPowered, which is the AI-driven content amplification platform of choice for the world’s largest brands. inPowered has been named the 2018 OMMA awards finalist for Artificial Intelligence and Native Advertising, the best content amplification platform by Digiday and one of the top tech marketing companies to watch by VentureBeat. Peyman along with his brother Pirouz previously founded NetShelter in 1999, which became the world’s largest technology property on the web before being acquired by Ziff Davis in 2013.The company’s fast growth earned numerous distinctions in the Inc 500|1000, Deloitte Technology Fast 500, Profit 100 and the San Francisco Business Times Fast 100. He’s a visionary tech and media entrepreneur who has been a featured TV guest on Fox Business with Maria Bartiromo, BNN and quoted regularly in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and was named to the 2010 Who’s Who in Business Publishing by BtoBOnline’s Media Business Magazine. He was also a recipient of Profit 100’s Young Entrepreneur Award for being the youngest CEO on the Profit 100 list of fastest growing companies in 2009. The claim on the InPowered website states this: “We help brands discover and amplify credible, trusted content so that they can contribute to a more informed marketplace.” This triggered me, hence I invited Peyman to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the advertising industry, and how this is resulting in single-sided benefits for only the advertising platforms. We then dive into an approach that’s not only transforms the way we’ll advertise in the future, but also the way we have to step-up our marketing game in general. Here are some of his quotes: What we saw in the journey leading up to imPowered was essentially interruptive advertising not working. You're looking at point 0.05 percent, not 0.5 percent, not 5%. 0.05 percent click through rate on a banner ad on average. And that's after using tons of technology and targeting and everything that you can imagine. This is not about technology. This is not about targeting, it's not about audience or any of that. It's really about the form, which is when you're interrupting somebody, they simply don’t want to engage. They simply tune out. There's got to be a way to do this in a much more consumer friendly way. In a way that it actually adds value to the consumer. So, what if, instead of putting banner out and interrupt their experience, we actually turned articles reviews, blog posts, any kind of contents, into an ad, and we got them to read that content? I did it as an experiment and ended up delivering a 65% increase in consideration. it just blew every single advertising they had ever done. By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: Why, If you want to deliver real impact you’d better do away with the conventional wisdom, and approach the problem from the opposite direction That to truly disrupt a market you not only need to have excellent product, but also a revolutionary business model. Shifting from consumption to outcome based charging for example How it’s not only possible to deliver remarkable impact with a solution, but also create many new jobs. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on the impact of product innovation on our society and in particular our changing role in that society, and my guest is Brett Frischmann, author of the book Reengineering Humanity, which was recently selected by The Guardian as one of the Best Books of 2018. Brett is the Charles Widger Endowed University Professor in Law, Business and Economics, at Villanova University. In this role, he promotes cross-campus research, programming, and collaboration; fosters high-visibility academic pursuits at the national and international levels; and positions Villanova as a thought leader and innovator at the intersection of law, business and economics. Brett’s work has appeared in leading scholarly publications, including Columbia Law Review, Journal of Institutional Economics, and Review of Law and Economics. His research spans various disciplines and topics: infrastructure, knowledge commons, and techno-social engineering of humans (i.e. the relationships between the techno-social world and humanity).  This is what the scope of his latest book Reengineering Humanity is all about. And that triggered me, hence I invited Brett to my podcast. We explore the evolving impact of product innovation and technology and the influence this has on us in our day to day professional life. We discuss examples of how we engineer ourselves, and how we are engineered by others. In particularly the latter can become a risk to all of us. Therefore we should ensure that the focus shifts to making humans better and more valuable, rather than using smart technology to actually make the user dumber. Here are some of his quotes: “Humans have always developed tools and technologies. They often augment who we are, enable us to grow, develop, pursue our passions, and develop capabilities.  The big idea is that we're on a slippery slope path toward a world in which more and more of our lives, of who we are and who we can be as individuals and collectively is managed and governed by supposedly smart techno‑social systems. The idea that one of the most important constitutional questions in a lower case C sense for us to be considering in the 21st century is how are we going to sustain our freedom to be off? To be free from the engineered influence of others. We're building the world for our children, for future generations. Sometimes, we don't stop to think about whether we're happy about the world we're building and why we're building it a certain way as opposed to another way.”   By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: That we need to be very considerate about the type of solutions we’re building and why we’re building them in a certain way. Humanity’s techno-social dilemma is already large enough. Why the real value of the technology potential is in Human Augmentation – i.e. becoming better – but only if that’s in the light of who we want to be, how we can remain to have choices and be different. That we should challenge ourselves whenever we use the word ‘smart’ in relation to our product innovation and solutions – How is it smarter? What benefits does it give, and to whom? Too often it’s the user that’s made dumber…. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation to dramatically increase the productivity of sales people, and my guest is Mike Schneider, CEO and co-founder of First, a data science company that helps real estate agents win more business by focusing their time on the right relationships across their network. Prior to starting First, Mike worked with a private equity firm working on pipeline deals and doing financial and market due diligence. It’s from working in this space that got Mike fascinated with the world of AI and Machine learning – which is exactly why he left the VC world, to start First. Their claim “Fundamentally changing how service providers find their next customer”, triggered me, hence I invited Mike to my podcast. We explore what’s required to differentiate in the world of Real Estate, and the reasons why top agents are missing two third of the deals from people they already know. From here we discuss what’s required to transform the impact agents can make and how the combo of intelligence augmentation and human connection make an unbeatable combination. Here are some of his quotes: “I became fascinated by this combination of vertically targeted software and machine learning platforms that could, you know, power previously unimaginable products. The big idea here is that in this industry, an industry where most business over 75% of business comes through relational connection, we actually have the opportunity to target people's outreach and their time. So when you're in a service business where you are, what I would call an undifferentiated service provider, your connections matter and your time is the most limited thing in terms of generating business. And so, the big idea is that we actually know who is most likely to sell. Thanks to a lot of the models we've built. We also know that you, as a service provider, as a real estate agent, have an incredibly valuable asset in your network. And we know how likely those people are to work with you based on their relationship with you. And so the combination of those two things means we can make your time 10 times more productive in terms of who you should be talking to today.” During this interview, you will learn three things: That in order to formulate your V1 version it’s critical to do deep customer discovery, thereby looking beyond the known conventions and patterns. It’s not so much about what’s predictable, but more about what’s unpredictable Why providing all the answers to the problem with your product is often only half the solution; changing behavior is the other half – that’s where the real impact is made That creating a compelling vision is key to stay focused, stay on track and deliver impact – so much that it could lead to products so valuable that your customers don’t want to talk to anyone about it because it has become the secret to their success. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation to solve the challenge of financial crime, and my guest is Vishal Marria, CEO of Quantexa Vishal is a globally recognised leader in solving financial crime and surveillance challenges. He is accomplished at building teams and helping clients to use innovative data analytics for their financial crime challenges. He served as Executive Director at EY, he led major programs at international banks including global Anti Financial Crime technology strategy, data-driven remediation and end to end reviews of strategy and policy. He was instrumental in directing and building the Detica NetReveal business globally. In 2016, he founded Quantexa to solve some of the biggest challenges in financial crime, customer insight and data analytics. His goal is to enable organizations to rethink the way they understand their customers using a wider context. This inspired me, hence I invited Vishal to my podcast. We explore the growing challenge of financial crime, and how addressing and solving exactly that challenge can result in insights that can actually result in top-line gains. Here are some of his quotes: “One of the most growing challenges I continually heard from clients was, you know, we've, we've got all of this data rubbish, Inherently there are challenges within that data around truly understanding a customer and the underlying trends, transactions, relationships. I want the world to think of context, just like human behavior, any decision we make in our brain we are building with context So, the big idea is about building context and being able to do it real time dynamically. We have to combine human intelligence with artificial intelligence. Because if you look at your credit risk officer, that credit risk officer has so much information and trends in his or her head that the machine will never know. So, we need to get to is allowing the data to drive any abnormal predictive nature. But combining that with the years of experience that the human has.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: Why contextual insight is the essential ingredient to make powerful decisions – not only by top leaders, but by anyone in the business How the biggest impact is created by combining the experience of domain experts with power of AI Why taking an open eco-system approach with any solution will bring value greater than the sum of its components. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on the future of work and the increasingly important role AI plays in our business life. My guest is Alexandra Levit, Author of the book Humanity Works – Merging technology and people for the workforce of the future. Alexandra is an American writer, consultant, speaker, workplace expert and futurist. She has written six career advice books and was formerly a nationally syndicated career columnist for the Wall Street Journal. In the last several years, she has conducted proprietary research on the future of work, technology adoption, the millennial generation, gender differences and bias, and the skills gap. In 2017, she became a partner at organizational development firm PeopleResults. Her goal is to prepare organizations and their employees to be competitive and marketable in the future business world. This triggered me, hence I invited Alexandra to my podcast. We explore how the workplace is changing with the future of work, and how this is reshaping our role as business professionals, and what we, people, need to do now in order to create a future in which we can play an even more valuable role. Here are some of his quotes: We're looking at there is the rise of what I call human machine of hybrid teams. I do think everyone needs to be prepared, though, that humans will need to work seamlessly with machines. The critical role that we're going to play is that there's no replacing human beings when it comes to certain traits, like interpersonal sensitivity, and empathy and judgment, and intuition and creativity So what humans need to be doing is looking for ways to add that value in any job that you have, and see the writing on the wall, not bury your head in the sand with respect to what aspects are legitimately going to be automated and look to add value in different ways. My fear is not that people lose their jobs, as I said, my fears that people will not be able to adapt to the new types of roles that they're, they're going to have. How can I continue to add value. And this is a skill set, that's kind of rare, and everybody needs to develop. I think the passive attitude is really destructive. We want to be active and recognize the future is not something that happens to us. It's something that we create. During this interview, you will learn three things: That most value will be created once humans and machines start working as hybrid teams Why every single one of us has to act now to improve our human relationship skills And why beyond that we have to master the way we do personal branding and self-marketing. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform the education sector and my guest is Federico Frattini. Federico is a Full Professor of Strategic Management and Innovation at the School of Management of Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and Honorary Researcher at the Lancaster University Management School (UK). His research area is innovation and technology management. On these topics, he has written more than 200 books and papers published in conference proceedings and leading international journals such as Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, Academy of Management Perspectives, California Management Review, Journal of Product Innovation Management, and many others. In 2013, he was nominated among the top 50 authors of innovation and technology management worldwide by IAMOT, the International Association for Management of Technology. In my hunt for compelling stories for my podcast I stumbled upon an article regarding the launch of Flexa, an AI powered personalized continuous learning platform that was developed under the leadership of Federico. This triggered me, hence invited him to my podcast. During our interview we explore the changes in the market place, and how this is putting more and more pressure on the education system and the students they serve. The goal should not be just to successfully graduate, but to actually be employable after you graduate. This changes the requirement 180 degrees on how students, employers and university’s communicate and collaborate together. Here are some of his quotes: “FLEXA is many things, actually. We can call it a personalized continuous learning platform which is designed for our students. The basic idea is to give our students exactly the knowledge they need to achieve their career goals faster and to make them more employable. It's something that represents a big change in the traditional business model of a business school or of a university. We're not doing that by using only our knowledge, our courses, our programs, but integrating into FLEXA contents, expertise, events coming from any angle in the world. Through FLEXA, we will bring to our student exactly the piece of knowledge they need, when they need it to achieve their career goals fastest. FLEXA exemplifies our view as a school about what is the real value of artificial intelligence, which is not, of course, substituting human knowledge but is amplifying the abilities of people.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: Why it’s so key to take an outside-in approach to arrive at solutions that have transformative impact. That the only way to keep up with the pace of change is radically shorten connections and eliminate noise How it’s possible to drive radical innovation in sectors that are known for their bureaucracy and barriers to making progress. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The theme of this podcast is product innovation, and in particular how the combination of AI and people can create value beyond the sum of its components. My guest on this week’ podcast is Louis Rosenberg, CEO of Unanimous.AI Louis is a technologist, prolific inventor, entrepreneur, and writer. He attended Stanford University, where he earned his bachelors, masters, and PhD degrees. His doctoral work focused on robotics, virtual reality, augmented reality, and human-computer interaction, and resulted in the Virtual fixtures system for the U.S. Air Force, the first immersive Augmented Reality system ever built. In 2014, he founded Unanimous A.I., an artificial intelligence company that enables human groups to amplify their collective brainpower by forming real-time "hive minds" modeled after natural swarms. Unanimous AI became well known in 2016 when its Artificial Swarm Intelligence technology (Swarm AI) made a series of accurate predictions about world events, including predicting the Academy Awards, the Kentucky Derby, the Super Bowl, and the rise of Donald Trump. This triggered me, hence I invited Louis to my podcast. We explore product innovation concept of swarm intelligence, and how this fills an important gap in the evolution of AI. Here are some of his quotes: “We amplify the intelligence of human groups by connecting people together in real time, using AI algorithms to enable them to make more accurate forecasts, more precise predictions, better assessments, judgments and decisions. We use AI to turn network groups of people into artificial experts that can act as a superintelligence. There's actually a scientific name for that, called Swarm Intelligence. In nature, Swarm Intelligence is the reason why birds flock, fish school, and bees swarm. The inspiration for me was to say, "Well, if birds, and bees, and fish can get smarter together, why can't people do it?" The results that we started getting even early on were remarkable, that we could take a group of people and make them so much more accurate by connecting them together.” By listening to this podcast, you will learn three things: How big business problems can be solved instantly by leveraging the knowledge and wisdom of groups of people in combination with AI Why we’ve underutilized the power of collaboration up to now, and how swarm intelligence takes it to the next level That we’re just scratching the surface with regards to how we can amplify human abilities – a mega opportunity for everyone. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this podcast I’ll focus on product innovation in the Higher Education space and my guest is Ray Blackwood, Vice President of Product Management at Campus Management Corp   Ray is a futurist who is passionate about technology, business intelligence and leadership. He’s in particular passionate about solving problems in higher education through technology. As he puts it on his LinkedIn profile: “I invent solutions that run colleges”.   Ray received his undergraduate degrees from the University of Advancing Technology in Multimedia and Digital Animation and Production and his Master In Business Administration and Technology Management from the University of Phoenix. In my hunt for compelling stories about the value we can unlock when technology and people blend in the right way, I stumbled upon Campus Management’s new product: Occupation Insight. It’s promise: “How institutions can better align academic programs and student skills with industry needs”. This triggered me, hence I invited Ray to my podcast. We explore the big changes in the education space, where the focus is now shifting from graduation to employability as the ultimate outcome. We discuss product innovation approaches on how technology can play a meaningful role to help students stay on the optimal path to achieve their aspirations in a world where teachers are a scarce resource. Here are some of his quotes: “It's hard for students to choose the right thing or we have so much advisement to coach the student. That it can be overwhelming I wanted to know what I was going to learn in a class more than what classes I needed to take. How cool would it be if I was a student, and I was sitting there and I just wasn't being told what to take because I needed a certain number of credit, but I could actually see what skills am I going to learn and what careers could I be interested in while I'm in school and be thinking about that." Technology is changing so rapidly. What you're going to learn in the classroom your freshman year might even be irrelevant by the time you graduate. The skill that technologists need to learn is not the technology itself, but it's how to learn. It's how to solve problems and how to think.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: Why the challenge is not to solve the problem at hand, but to prevent it all together How you can create larger impact and circumvent scarcity by changing behavior – and one thing to do that is to inspire curiosity. What mindset you should create as a business software vendor to transform and accelerate your success. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The focus on this weeks’ podcast is product innovation in the area of recruitment, and my guest is Ashutosh Garg, CEO of Eightfold.ai – a company that has the idea and potential to transform the way we’ll look at recruitment forever. Eightfold has recently been designated by Gartner as a cool vendor for human capital management in Talent Acquisition. This is what happens if you build your company around a strong vision – remarkable things will happen. Ashutosh understands this like no one else. He is a true guru of all things AI, with 10 years of information retrieval, machine learning and search experience. Previously, he was Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of BloomReach. Prior to that, he was at IBM research. He is also a prolific publisher/inventor, with a book on machine learning, 30+ papers, and 50+ patents. Ashutosh holds a Bachelor of Tech from IIT-Delhi and a PhD from University of Illinois UC. He has won numerous awards, including best thesis award at IIT Delhi, IBM Fellowship and outstanding researcher award at UIUC. What triggered me to invite Ashutosh was the phrase on their website:  “Uncovering the Future Potential of Talent”. The company was founded around the believe employment is the backbone of our society and everyone deserves the right job. What Ashutosh and his team realized is that up to today you get the job based on who you might know and not what you are capable of doing. Eightfold is solving this problem and thereby changing the paradigm by intelligently augmenting the recruiter as well as the applicant. Here are some of his quotes “when people are looking for a job, they are not switching the job to do the same thing they have been doing. But they want to do something more, something different, they want to grow in their career. And through AI, what we can do today is we can predict what someone is likely to do next in their career. This helps us understand who will be a good fit for this role in which organization. And then we connect people to those opportunities. So, we've changed the paradigm: Instead of people applying for a job we go and recommend them: John and Lisa, these are the three jobs in our company that our most relevant to you. If you're only looking to hire people, based on what they have done, not what they are capable of doing? Losing value proposition. Everyone deserves the opportunity and we want to enable that in people.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: That a lot of value potential in any solution is locked up because we neglect to connect the dots between various data points. How you can change the paradigm with your solution by doing the opposite of the norm Why business could run a lot better if we take the bias out of decision making. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices