The AI in Business Podcast

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Matteo Berlucchi, the founder of Your.MD, which uses artificial intelligence to create one of the first personal health assistant platforms in 70+ countries. Berlucchi talks about the challenges in making an AI do what you want, specifically helping people self diagnose and seek proper treatment. He discusses the multiple approaches to AI that are blended together in order to yield optimal results, and touches on the sometimes stark differences between what AI can do in the lab versus the functional application for tens of thousands of people. If you're interested in the diverse applications of AI and the challenges in running a startup, Dr. Berlucci's makes for an interesting episode.

CTO and Co-founder of Sumo Logic Christian Beedgen gives his take on how to glean return on investment from applying machine learning to companies. There are no easy answers, but Beedgen boils down simple concepts for thinking about humans thinking through causation, machines working out correlations, and how the combination of the two can glean us better ideas and get to answers faster than humans could do alone.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) are often seen as different trends, but there is a lot of overlap in these areas, where you might not expect. Lucid VR's CTO Adam Rowell speaks today about how AI plays a role in making VR work, augmenting the accuracy of images and making a more immersive and convincing experience for users. Rowell also touches on non-gaming VR apps that he and his company are excited about launching in the future.

At Facebook headquarters, I learned there are 1 billion active users every month. In a more recent interview at eBay headquarters in San Jose, l learned that the well-known digital store has over 1 billion products for sale. eBay is, without a doubt, the world's largest marketplace, and there's enough incoming data to keep a large team of data scientists busy for years. I speak with Zoher Karu, eBay's Chief Data Officer, about how eBay leverages data and machine learning to create a better experience for its customers and also their sellers, shedding light on important lessons for anyone looking to sell a product online.

In this week's episode, I speak with Igor Baikalov, Chief Scientist at cybersecurity company Securonix, about the trends in data security and where security itself has had to take a step up in the last five years. Igor touches on major meta-trends that have forced data security to advance, as well as what has made AI and machine learning a 'requirement' of modern data security strategy, something that has changed significantly in the last decade. Igor sheds light on these issues and likely future trends in cybersecurity over the next five to 10 years.

In this week's episode, we feature an in-person interview from Facebook's headquarters with Hussein Mehanna, director of engineering of the Core Machine Learning group. Mehanna and I talk in-depth about the topic of personalization, touching on the pros and cons, how it works at Facebook, and how his team is working to overcome technological barriers to implement personalization in a way that improves the customer experience.

When one thinks through important industry apps of AI, law or legal apps are not usually the first to jump to mind, but there's certainly a need. Richard Downe, Ph.D. is Vice President of Data Science at Casetext, a startup working on improving search and natural language processing and democratizing legal information. In this episode, he speaks about the current bottlenecks for people trying to get more out of legal case documents, as well as some of the apps on which the Casetext team is working, to make these processes easier and to gain a strategic advantage in this industry.

Learning about the research behind machine learning is always fun, but so is learning about the real-world applications. In today's episode, we're joined by the CEO and founder of Wrike, Andrew Filev. Filev speak about where Wrike is currently applying machine learning and AI in their fast-growing, data-driven company. He shares his insights as to why he thinks marketing might be the most ripe for disruption by AI, and also discusses how most companies can prepare to take advantage of machine learning in any industry.

Today we have a guest who has interviewed more futurists than anyone else I know. While at TechEmergence a lot of our interviews focus on executives in AI, Nikola Danaylov has had the pleasure of interviewing some of the finest futurists and forward-thinking minds in the world, including Ray Kurzweil, Verner Vinge, Marvin Minsky, and many others. We speak today about the trends he's seen aggregated (if any) amongst futurists, and about how technology may be dragging us farther into a transhuman future, whether that be closer to a utopia or a dystopia.

A lot of companies in the San Francisco Bay make the claim that they can do something great with data; many fewer are at a degree of scale to make this vision possible. Today we speak with Nicholas Clark, CEO of DoubleDutch, a company now powering thousands of events nationally and implementing machine learning into their operations, including predicting business results from actual attendees. DoubleDutch is at the beginning of its journey with predictive analytics, having to make hard choices around what sort of information and thought processes they need in order to use machine learning and remain profitable. Nicholas gives his perspective on these decisions, as well as how he thinks DoubleDutch's efforts will impact the conference/event industry at scale.