Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Grant Ingersoll, CTO of Lucidworks (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: As I’m listening to you, I’m trying to answer the same question in this context. As we go along, the notion of composite search becomes critical.

Grant Ingersoll: Could you define that a little bit? How are you defining it?

Sramana Mitra: Context-specific things that are not just finding the data but really highly personalized, context-specific, actionable search.

Grant Ingersoll: Exactly. That is the goal here. Take working with your own email. There’s this case where you’re in this mode of getting through this. You also often have this mode where you’re searching and looking for related information. You want search and search-related things discovery to scale with your needs. In an ideal world, it’s so intuitive that it reacts to your voice or your typing. I travel a lot. I liken it to a really good concierge at a hotel.

If you go to the concierge and say, “What time’s the shuttle to the airport?” I just need an answer. If you say, “What are some good restaurants around here?” You might say, “How do I open up a new account?” I don’t need a list of things that say, “This document talks about how to open a new account. A good concierge might say, “Here’s a form. Let me fill it out for you.” You’re shifting from doing search to engaging a user in the workflow.

Sramana Mitra: Concierge is the right metaphor. What I’m looking for is a concierge who’s not only going to look for stuff but who’s going to do stuff for me. I do a lot of travel for fun as well. I have a trip to Andalusia coming up. It’s a very complicated trip. It’s like 14 places all over Southern Spain. For each, I need to find where to go, where to park. We’re doing a road trip. In every city, where to park. What are the restaurants?

Grant Ingersoll: I took that exact trip about two years ago.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve done this trip once before. I know this general region. Every time, there are new things happening. There’s a guy in Ronda who’s opened a tapas bar. I would like to go there. I would like a reservation.

Grant Ingersoll: You hit the nail on the head. If you reflect back on your last trip or I look back on my trip, that was a lot of work. I think we all wished there was an engine out there that could do all of it for you. We would be happy even with things that took away a lot of the drudgery of that. The current interfaces, as good as Google is, can’t answer that full itinerary. I know attempts started out there, but nobody owns the space yet.

Sramana Mitra: The people who are designing these apps don’t have the experience of traveling this way. There are all kinds of things that you have to think about. There are times when you are walking. What is the walking route from one place to another? What is the driving route from one place to another? There’re all kinds of details that you have to think through. You have to organize an itinerary that optimizes your walking and driving. There are a million decisions to make.

Grant Ingersoll: I think the word is travel agent.

Sramana Mitra: What I’m looking for is exactly that – virtual travel agent. An AI travel agent that I can configure with my own parameters. It’s an intelligent agent. Intelligent agent is a buzzword that was floating around MIT in 1995.

Grant Ingersoll: It’s been around even before that. We face that in our corporate lives too. You might be at work, and a colleague might have a quick question for you. You answer it right away. More often than not, most of us are working across time as well. The current state is, I have a very specific query at this point in time, but there’s this much broader thing of, “What is the project you’re on?” These are not point-in-time things.

Google and Bing are very much point-in-time oriented. Wouldn’t it be great if it could take those ideas that you have and say, “Here’s what I know right now. Do you want me to keep working on this for you?” Away it goes. When you come in the next day, “Here’s five new things that I found.”

Sramana Mitra: Yes. This is a topic that I love. I love AI and I love personal concierge a lot.

Grant Ingersoll: You got me jealous to go back to Southern Spain. It sounds like an amazing trip.

Sramana Mitra: It was a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Grant Ingersoll, CTO of Lucidworks
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