Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Jack Porter, CEO of Razorthink (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I have a couple of follow-up questions. First question is on adoption. Where are you seeing adoption? What kinds of companies are adopting your technology? One thing you said which completely perplexes me is the example you chose to share was from one of the largest banks in India. Why? We never hear that. Silicon Valley companies, generally, go out to sell to the American banks.

Jack Porter: I do a lot of speaking on artificial intelligence around the world. After I speak, I have customers coming up to me and saying, “Hey, I have that problem that you were talking about.” That’s what ended up happening in this situation. I was giving a presentation of the research board at Gartner Group. The CIO of this bank was in the audience and came up to me after the presentation.

We actually have quite a few customers in India. India is very advanced in its thinking and is quick to adopt. I think there’s a very strong business orientation in India. They’re business people who aren’t scared of technology. I would say they’re not the innovator side where they’re buying technology for technology’s sake. They tend to be the early adopters where they’re in business and they’re looking for a business edge.

The other thing that also happened in India and all through Southeast Asia is that everything is at such a massive scale. When we fully roll out with the telecommunications company, we’ll have 400 million customers. We don’t have that many people in the United States. It’s just a massive scale that you’re dealing with.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a very interesting data point. This is cutting edge technology, and it’s being adopted by Southeast Asian customers. That’s a new insight. It’s not something that we’ve heard before. Where are you seeing the maximum adoptions for your technology right now?

Jack Porter: It’s people with very large datasets. Twenty years ago, we were doing a lot of automating of our transaction systems and hoping to find an ROI around that. When we got it all done, we realized that a lot of the insights were actually in the white space between the transaction systems. We started taking data warehouses and we pulled our transaction systems into data warehouses. Now we have a single location for it. What we realized was a lot of the insights is going to come from how that data is built up through time.

So we started doing Big Data. It’s not a firehose of information; it’s a firehose of firehoses, which is just blasting at you. Small projects will have 100 million rows a day. These large projects get 150 terabytes a day, which is something new. Most people got through Big Data systems in the last three to four years. That’s the reason why people are doing this.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of verticals, where are you seeing the maximum customer concentration?

Jack Porter: Banking. We work with banking, telecommunications, and retail. The finance side is really banking and credit card companies. We work with two of the largest credit card companies in the world doing this exact same thing.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Jack Porter, CEO of Razorthink
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