Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Luca Scagliarini, CEO of Expert System (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Where does your core technology team expertise come from? Where in Italy do you have these computer scientists?

Luca Scagliarini: The actual technology was built through a private effort. It was all done by us. Obviously, we are working with different universities.

Sramana Mitra: When you say we, who’s we? What is the background of the people?

Luca Scagliarini: We have two kinds of technical skills. Obviously, we need software engineers. What we need that is peculiar for a software company is that we need computational linguists. These are people who have studied or developed expertise in using programming environments in human language. There are now specific studies in many universities around computational linguistics. If you look at our R&D, we have 40% software engineers and 60% computational linguists who have the expertise of the language and the expertise of being able to write code around language.

Sramana Mitra: As you look at the industry, where would you point young entrepreneurs to look for new business opportunities in?

Luca Scagliarini: I think you have touched one point, which is if you have knowledge of a specific process inside a vertical. We talked about asset monetization in publishing, production in oil and gas, and compliance in finance. It can be at a more natural level. If you have that specific knowledge and you understand how you need to put together data that are not coming only from database, but also from a human, I think that’s an area where we’re going to see vertical specific applications. The second area, which I think is seeing a lot of investments, is in creating models that can predict certain phenomena. Not only the ones that you’ve been able to process up till today, which are numbers.

Sramana Mitra: What are these companies that you have acquired?

Luca Scagliarini: We have acquired a company in France.

Sramana Mitra: What do they do?

Luca Scagliarini: They’re one of our competitors. They are stronger in certain verticals and in certain geographic areas. We also acquired another semantic technology in Spain. If there are entrepreneurs who are thinking about new ideas, we have a program specifically designed for incubators and startups. We have recently announced the availability of this program in Europe and US where you can access the technology for free to develop your product.

Sramana Mitra: Awesome. I love AI. I’ve done two AI startups myself. I love the fact that AI is going through this rejuvination right now. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Luca Scagliarini, CEO of Expert System
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