Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Cognitive Scale CEO Akshay Sabhikhi (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Your strategy is to look at the universe as three layers where you have IBM, Azure, or Google underneath. You insert yourself as a middleware. Then you want the domain knowledge of clients where you either code into or the client themselves code that, or there may be verticalized solution providers on top of your layer.

Is that an accurate representation?

Akshay Sabhikhi: Very accurate. We are agnostic to some of the lower-level ML libraries. We work across the spectrum here. We have the verticalized augmented intelligence platform that brings what we have built as well as the tooling that our clients build. Established software companies come to us and say, “We have a lot of data. We don’t have an AI platform. Could you embed your digital brain in our software so we can sell an AI-powered application?”

That is the strategy. I am excited about the fact that the lower level APIs from Tensor Flow, Watson, and Azure have evolved and, in many cases, are being made available to people for free. All that does is it further validates the gap that people are going to see to deliver an actual solution. That’s where Cognitive Scale sits.

Sramana Mitra: In your representation, there is a layer where other entrepreneurs could be playing on top of your middleware where there is sufficient domain knowledge to productize for specific industry verticals where they can bring in their knowledge and build on top of your middleware.

Akshay Sabhikhi: Absolutely. We are already working with some early stage and established companies.

Sramana Mitra: How mature is your SDK or API set to work with early stage entrepreneurs?

Akshay Sabhikhi: Great question. I never want to get ahead of myself here. We are a four-year-old company. We have done a lot to build and, in many cases, fine tune our platform. We are on the fourth version going to the fifth version of the platform. As we open up our business model for people to start consuming this platform, we realize that there is fair bit of work to be done around the tooling.

We’ve made tremendous progress and we have a roadmap. We have a very solid and robust platform. We also put training programs around this. We have what we call a Cognitive University where we bring in our partners, and we are able to train them on the use of this platform and the ability to adopt it. Those models are all evolving.

Sramana Mitra: Very good. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Cognitive Scale CEO Akshay Sabhikhi
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