Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Danny Tomsett, CEO of UneeQ (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When I encounter Mia, is Mia pretending to be a human? Am I aware of the fact that Mia is a digital avatar?

Danny Tomsett: We purposely want people to not think that she’s a human.

Sramana Mitra: That’s good because that’s authentic.

Danny Tomsett: Also, there are disadvantages to that. The biggest one is judgement. One of the things that we discovered very early on was that the value that customers could gain from digital humans is that they would learn so much more about their customers.

Their customers would ask questions that they typically wouldn’t ask a human, which is really interesting. Judgement influences our dialogue with people. If we’re concerned with being judged about our financial literacy, then we’re going to avoid asking questions. We avoid actually knowing good information.

Misinformation then creates all sorts of problems and lost opportunities. Having people know that it’s not human is a key part of what we’re doing.

Sramana Mitra: Besides banking, what other sectors have you seen this kind of adoption?

Danny Tomsett: Particularly now with COVID, there’s more adoption in healthcare. One of the interesting use cases is around health literacy and how that connects to adherence.

We’re talking between $300 billion and $600 billion problems in the US alone because people are particularly not taking medications correctly or they’re coming out of post-op care.

One of the key areas of health literacy that digital humans do really well is just the ability of someone to be able to ask questions without judgement. Doctors are not always accessible. Information is often hard to digest. Digital humans can help solve that because they can cover a wide range of information in a convenient and non-judgmental way.

Even better, our digital humans can now speak up to 70 languages. If it’s trained in English, it can translate on the fly. That’s another part of the health literacy challenge. That’s an area that we’ve seen quite an uptake.

We also have a growing pandemic outside of COVID which is mental health. People are looking for more companions, more coaching-based roles. Digital humans really add the human touch to digital channels. The fact that a digital human can express empathy and emotion and understand it is a super powerful interface for how we can start to solve this problem at scale. We just don’t have enough people.

The last area that we’ve seen is a cross of many verticals. It’s in the area where digital humans are fantastic at doing outbound conversations. If you think about job interviews and HR or if you’re looking to do interviews across a series of research, there’s a whole range of areas where digital humans are fantastic interviewers and can take the advantage of learning not only what people say but be able to capture multi-modal inputs.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you positioning your go-to market strategy? These are quite a diverse set of use cases. Go-to market requires some amount of focus. Where are you putting your focus right now?

Danny Tomsett: We know that human touch is ubiquitous. One of the harder decisions we needed to make was really about whether we believe that this is a platform and that there’s an ecosystem around this that would have creators and developers that could plug to existing NLP and chatbot products.

We do have a huge ecosystem of NLP and chatbot companies today. We had a decision to make whether we would be another of those companies or think more like Twilio.

Anyone that can build a chatbot can turn that into a full digital human experience in minutes. That’s our go-to market strategy. We have lowered the barriers for any organization to extend the interface beyond text into a more human interaction. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Danny Tomsett, CEO of UneeQ
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