Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Samir Addamine, Founder and Chairman of FollowAnalytics (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Is your largest adoption in retail?

Samir Addamine: Retail and financial services are the biggest.

Sramana Mitra: Mostly enterprise customers at this point?

Samir Addamine: It’s enterprise only.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers do you have?

Samir Addamine: Around 60 customers.

Sramana Mitra: It’s quite good adoption.

Samir Addamine: It’s mostly Fortune 500 companies.

Sramana Mitra: In your customer engagements, how deep is people’s understanding of AI and its possibilities in the kinds of use cases that you’re talking about?

Samir Addamine: Definitely. They’re not buying any product that is not adding any AI capability. Intelligence is helping them get better conversion rates on their marketing campaigns. There is also an issue with privacy. GDPR is also involved in AI. The blackbox is going to be something that GDPR will refuse. A bank for example that is using an algorithm to respond to a loan request has to be transparent on the way they say no.

Sramana Mitra: How feasible is this though? I think you and I know a thing or two about AI. It’s very difficult to regulate. Once a learning algorithm starts to learn, it’s not easy to control that learning or even fully understand how it’s learning.

Samir Addamine: Exactly. That’s a big concern today. The next thing is about GDPR. They’re starting to explore how they can regulate. Here, it’s getting more complicated. There is an alternative that we call explainable AI. We started to look at that. It’s being more transparent on how your algorithm is going to make decisions. It’s complicated.

Our customers are exploring all the AI capabilities of our product and the other products they’re using. We’re not selling AI. Our product is AI-augmented. I’m not sure that many companies are selling AI today. If they don’t have some AI capabilities, they get in trouble.

Sramana Mitra: Help me with this 30,000-foot level perspective. Where do you see the open problems from where you sit? Where would you steer new entrepreneurs to look for opportunities?

Samir Addamine: We are entering Web 3.0. We’re moving from profiling to privacy. This is an opportunity. This is a huge opportunity. Using privacy by design approach, we can rethink many of the existing software and ways to solve problems with this approach. If I were to start a new company, I would focus on that. Around Blockchain and the privacy concerns, there is definitely some opportunity that can be leveraged by new entrepreneurs on the software. I see a lot of them happening in Europe. In the US as well.

There’s a company called OneTrust that is helping enterprise companies in their GDPR. This is very interesting. It’s not even a European company. These guys moved from six people in 2016 to 300 today. They are really one of the companies that is tackling this privacy opportunity. It’s a really interesting one.

The horizon is going to be about the privacy approach. As a company, how are you going to assure that all the data is not going to be leaked? It’s very complicated. I see some solutions. On the mobile channel, I see some opportunities. I mentioned mobile retail, mobile finance, and mobile banking.

Sramana Mitra: Very good. The most interesting insight that you brought to this conversation is the whole complexity around explainable AI and GDPR. How is AI going to be regulated in the future? It will have to be regulated because there is so much power that AI has when it’s fully deployed. It can get quite out of control. We are going to hear a lot more about this topic in the future.

Samir Addamine: Explainable AI is one answer to transparency and regulation but I’m sure there are lots of other things that are going to come soon.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Samir Addamine, Founder and Chairman of FollowAnalytics
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