Digital assistant platform vendor talks AI disruption

Much of the world became aware of generative AI and large language models with the release of Dall-E and ChatGPT last year, but Conversica CEO Jim Kaskade has known about the technology since 2019.

During a walk with a top AI executive at Google, Kaskade said he learned about a lot about where the tech giant was heading with generative AI technology.

Once he became CEO of the AI vendor specializing in digital assistants, he looked for ways to apply the technology in a way that was disruptive on the scale of earlier world-changing technologies.

Kaskade's company's brand of disruption is conversational AI and the generative AI-powered digital assistants that he sees as an automated workforce that will eventually ease the burden of much menial work now done by humans.

The application of LLMs in the form of OpenAI's ChatGPT and other similar systems has seen quick adoption worldwide compared to similarly disruptive technologies such as electricity, telephone communications and television, but not all organizations are comfortable with the technology.

That uneasiness is analogous with the discussion in recent years about public cloud versus private and hybrid cloud, Kaskade said.

"It's just a sequence of been there, done that," he said on Tech Target Editorial's Targeting AI podcast. "Once people get really comfortable with the amount of governance that's put around the public application [product], the public cloud solutions, then the big enterprises will start to move from private LLM to public LLM. It'll take the same period of time as it did with cloud."

The more comfortable companies and people are with AI technology, the more benefits they can gain from it.

"Look at what happened with the computer, the PC, look what happened with the phone, look what happened with the world wide web," Kaskade said. "AI is going to be more disruptive than any of those or all of them added together."

Esther Ajao is a TechTarget news writer covering artificial intelligence software and systems. Together, they host the Targeting AI podcast series.

Shaun Sutner is senior news director for TechTarget Editorial's enterprise AI, business analytics, data management, customer experience and unified communications coverage areas.