AI Development
November 19, 2024
10 min read
Have you ever dreamt about your own AI assistant that will know everything about you and will be able to do some tasks instead of you? This can become a reality even in the near future and that’s one of the topics discussed in the 9th episode of the Innovantage podcast. The podcast host and Sigli’s CBDO Maxim Golikov invited to his studio Maarten Verschuere, a data and AI professional with more than 20 years of experience in this sphere.
Maarten spoke about his successful project Clever, which was later acquired by Zoovu Ltd, and his new startup MentX.ai. Moreover, he explained the power of emerging technologies and shared practical recommendations for entrepreneurs who are starting their business journeys.
In this article, we will mention the key ideas voiced in this insightful conversation. But if you want to get more details, we invite you to our YouTube channel, where you will find the full video version.
During his career, Maarten worked in different countries in such spheres as data science and marketing analytics. He had the opportunity to see how these areas were changing and what new approaches were introduced as technologies evolved.
In 2015, he founded Clever, a general data science company that later went specifically into chatbots. Why did it happen? Maarten explained that he noticed a serious gap in the market and decided to address it.
But now the times are different and they require new solutions. With this idea in mind, Maarten started MentX which will take AI solutions to the next level in creating AI versions of real humans.
As humans, we communicate and we spend a lot of our time at work and at home just sharing information with others. Now if somebody is not available for customers or internally, there is an obvious communication gap. People need to get information and when a particular specialist can’t talk to them, they have no other choice but to wait.
With AI, such inefficiencies can be eliminated.
What the MentX team is going to do is create a full AI version of an existing human. This AI version will have not only the look and voice of that human but also the knowledge and personality of him or her.
Will this new version of yourself fully replace you when you are just too tired? Probably not. The first goal of MentX is to serve some specific purposes. For example, this technology can be used to create an AI version of a senior lawyer or consultant who needs to communicate not only with colleagues but also with clients and students or trainees. It’s obvious that these experts can’t be available 24/7. But it will be possible to unlock their knowledge to others and make it available around the clock.
In other words, if an assistant needs a piece of advice to get through the first steps of some tasks, an AI version will be highly helpful.
This idea sounds quite promising. However, Maarten admitted that the technologies for its realization are not here yet. He and his partners truly believe that they will be able to digitize all the knowledge and the personality of people. But it can’t happen now. According to their estimates, the development of such technologies will take around 2 years.
Nevertheless, today, the team can run pilots for some specific components. For example, it is possible to create a video of somebody and then have that video version say anything with the voice of that person.
A lot of the components that are required to create people’s AI versions already work within a certain scope. Now, MentX is trying to bring them all together.
Of course, our AI versions won’t allow us to live forever or become superhumans. The soul and the creativity that we have can’t be copied. People will still have their unique value as personalities. However, such technologies can greatly save our time and help us (and other people around us) work more efficiently.
AI definitely plays a huge role in the growth of our productivity. Nevertheless, that’s not something unique about artificial intelligence. It is absolutely true in relation to any technology you can only think about.
Maarten explained that by our nature, we, people, have only basic physical skills. And we need to invent technologies and augment ourselves. For instance, to move faster people started using horses. But to transport themselves faster and go further, they invented cars. Later, they introduced airplanes. Now, businesses are working on inventing space rockets that could become available to a wide audience.
AI is a big invention that can transform humankind. Actually, this transformation has already begun. If previously, traditional breweries needed to hire 100 people, now their tasks can be performed by only two specialists. The same tendency can come to offices very soon.
With mass AI adoption, we will be able to do the same work at a faster pace and with fewer people.
Does it mean that with AI implementation we can just relax and chill while all tasks will be executed by robots?
Even if this option may look appealing, Maarten doesn’t think that people will do that. In his opinion, all these changes are just the beginning of another era. People will still be looking for new tasks and new jobs to fill our lives with new interesting projects.
The name of this section, which coincides with the name of Maarten’s book, may disappoint you. Nevertheless, it’s not the best time to give up. The author of the book has a very clear explanation.
Today AI can do a lot of things for us. It can recommend to us what to watch, what to have for dinner, what to buy at the supermarket, when and where to go on vacation, and many other things. These recommendations are based on the experience of the entire world. All the data that is collected by AI systems allows them to create optimized recommendations for everything in our lives. And if we blindly rely on all of them, we will simply become pets of AI.
Yes, if people feel very comfortable because of not having the necessity of making decisions themselves, then AI will basically replace them.
However, not everyone is ready for that. In his book, Maarten offers an alternative for those who do not want to be replaced. People need to accept the reality and start taking more responsibility for their own future and their own decisions.
It’s also important to consider this situation not only from a personal but also a business perspective.
If you have a business, you also have a lot of things to think about. Is AI going to become something that will wash over you, and transform your sector and your industry? Or are you going to be the one who is taking charge? If the second option sounds more appropriate, you need to define how AI is going to be used in your company and how you can use it to create value for your customers and employees.
In this context, it’s very important to get over the so-called AI anxiety and transform it into an AI opportunity.
Maarten mentioned that we are entering the perfect storm of technologies that are appearing at the same time. The pace of development of new technologies has become absolutely crazy. And this thesis refers not only to digital innovation but also to the physical infrastructure and the hardware.
For example, chips produced by Nvidia were critical elements in the growth of OpenAI and ChatGPT. Today, there are huge investments in chip technology as chips really fuel the next wave of innovation.
In the conversation with Max, Maarten mentioned that he is greatly impressed by the progress achieved in data science in recent years. But while speaking about emerging technologies, he also highlighted the significance of edge computing. This approach presupposes that computation and data storage should be brought closer to the location where data is really needed. This is done to improve response times and save bandwidth.
It means that when you are on Mars, your data shouldn’t be sent back to the cloud on Earth to be processed and then returned to your application on Mars.
Of course, AI today differentiates itself from other emerging technologies. It has already started to bring money. That’s why AI is not about hype, it’s about creating value, and a lot of businesses have already realized this idea.
If you pay attention to the new products that appear on the tech market, you will see that a lot of them have AI in their names. But do all of them really rely on AI? Maarten admitted that quite often he notices AI washing cases. Companies just put AI on top of their offerings just to make sure that they are innovative. However, in the back end, we are just still doing the same things.
For example, they used to have a database. Now they still have the database but can call it AI.
Real innovations should have value and ground to be implemented.
20 years ago data was the new oil and it still has value. You need to use your data to create value for your customers and for your business. The same should happen with AI.
To better explain his vision, Maarten shared a case from his practice.
When he worked at P&G, the company started to realize that they could lose their share in the washing detergent segment. It was necessary to find an approach to retain customers and avoid losing profits.
Maarten’s team managed to use data in such a way that allowed them to create a retention model to identify the potential of every customer leaving the brand. By looking at some indicators and retail data, they could see the customers who could leave the brand and understand how it would be possible to retain them.
Further analysis revealed that this model helped the company earn a million dollars, while all the investments in its development and implementation were close to $100K.
It means that it had a 10x impact.
Based on his experience, Maarten insists that for implementing AI, businesses should look for such cases when they could leverage 10x return on investments.
However, that is possible only when you are solving real problems, when you define real pains and address them.
That’s why while consulting businesses, Maarten prefers to talk not only to IT experts but also to other non-tech specialists, like marketers and HR managers. These professionals work with final solutions and communicate with people. They have a very clear vision of what can be improved.
Businesses should focus their attention on how to implement AI to solve problems and to help their employees, instead of replacing them.
Your preparations for AI implementation will greatly depend on the type of business that you have. It’s quite natural that a local bakery will need to deal with fewer tech requirements than a utility provider.
But regardless of these differences, all businesses should have at least basic capacities for the introduction of new solutions. If you are going to use AI to make personalized product recommendations, your infrastructure needs to be able to support this functionality.
When you rely only on legacy tools that were built 20 years ago, your databases will probably work in silos. It will be a serious obstacle.
For implementing AI solutions that will work based on the data about your customers or your operations, your data needs to be in order.
Among other tips on how to implement a good AI strategy, Maarten also mentioned the necessity of formulating the exact reasons for introducing AI and getting the right people on board.
Another important step is to analyze the complexity of potential solutions. If the complexity of implementation is high, then this is not a project to start with. You should begin with easier initiatives to test your AI implementation potential.
It could be also sensible to start with data projects, where your data can be cleaned and prepared for further implementations.
First of all, when answering Max’s question about the challenges of entrepreneurship, Maarten said that he has tremendous respect for all entrepreneurs, regardless of the stage of their business development.
Maarten explained that in his opinion being an entrepreneur is super hard.
These people are creating something, they need to go from zero to one. This process is painful. It is impossible to follow someone’s instructions. It is necessary to follow your vision and try to make it work.
“Don’t become an entrepreneur if you want just to get rich. Don’t become an entrepreneur just to have a cool lifestyle,” Maarten said.
Very often entrepreneurs fail. But it doesn’t mean that they give up. However, when you are building your own business, you always have the choice to get out of the game or iterate.
It can also be hard to get funds. Investors want to see a potential return on their money. If you have nothing at the moment, you need to make them believe in you and your idea. But when you raise money, you get a whole new set of problems. Now you have to deliver the results. You need to deal with other people’s money. So the pressure to deliver is even higher.
The more money and the more customers you get, the more people you have on board, the higher your responsibility is.
Though Maarten was talking a lot about difficulties, he also mentioned one more essential thing.
In his opinion, having fun is a crucial part of the whole entrepreneurial journey. If a person doesn’t enjoy the process, is it really worth all the effort?
Building a new business or transforming an existing one may not be the easiest task. But when you know why you are doing that, everything makes sense. In the Innovantage podcast, its host Maxim communicates with tech and business experts. They share their experience and vision of how AI and other emerging technologies are changing the world around us and how we can benefit from this transformation. If this topic is interesting to you, do not miss the next episode that will become available quite soon.
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