Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Jack Porter, CEO of Razorthink (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch to the 30,000-foot question. If you were advising new entrepreneurs to look for open problems in the AI deep learning space, where would you point them to?

Jack Porter: First, I’d point them to the ground zero for where the next big disruption is going to happen. When disruption for AI happens, it’s going to be in orders of magnitude bigger than anything we’ve ever seen before. It’s bigger than web or mobile. Mobile and web put a lot more people on the Internet. When they disrupted their industries, the industry itself was significantly smaller than it is today.

I was in China about a month ago. I was in Beijing and I decided to go up to the Wall for a little trip. I’m driving through rice paddies and we stop at this little restaurant. I’m looking at these 10 rice farmers and they all have smartphones. It’s unbelievable the amount of penetration that has happened with mobile and the web. Artificial intelligence is going to come into the environment, and it’s going to change what it does.

All of a sudden, we’re not the smartest in the world anymore. We’re not the smartest by hundreds of orders of magnitudes. Look for very rich business processes. I’ll give you a feel for it. A large bank will churn about 1.5% of their customer base every single month. That’s 18% per year. The average replacement cost is about $300. The bank we’re working with has 14 million customers. Let’s make the math easy and say they only have 10 million customers. That means 1.8 million of their customers are leaving every single year. You’ve got $500 million going out of the bank every year.

Our product is a very expensive product. An average sale for us is $1 million. Would you pay $1 million to capture $500 million? Most people’s answer to that is yes. There are many business processes in pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, and distribution. Artificial intelligence does three main things. It can detect patterns better than anything on the planet. There’s nothing that can touch deep learning on detecting patterns. It can use these patterns to predict what’s going to occur in the future.

It can say, “They’ve seen this pattern before. I think that after 30 days, this pattern is going to reoccur.” It will do so in 10 days, 20 days, or 30 days. The last thing thing it’s good at is optimization.  Let’s say you’re an airline company and you’re trying to determine routes. It’s great for things like that. Sales distribution and just-in-time distribution control. Those are the three areas that have lots of data. It’s a massive math problem. You have to be really good at math to do this. Those are great areas and billions of dollars flow through these business processes.

Sramana Mitra: That was a very stimulating conversation. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Jack Porter, CEO of Razorthink
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