Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Unbabel CEO Vasco Pedro (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: One of the trends that I am following closely is Platform-as-a-Service. We are in the middle of it because of what we do. We are working with various developer ecosystems and in conversation with various others to do stuff with them.

The Platform-as-a-Service trend is building up quite significantly, so people are building one use case fully and opening up their platforms to other developers to build other use cases. Is this a strategy that you are following or considering?

Vasco Pedro: It’s something that we are considering, especially because from the language operations perspective, there’re a lot of things to build. If you look at integrations alone, there are probably hundreds of CRMs out there. That is just the CRM and if you start adding MarTech and other quantum systems, it’s a staggering munber. It will be hard for us to cover all of that surface, so it makes sense to have a marketplace approach there.

However, it goes beyond that. Even on the underlying transmission service, we think about translation as one thing but several different AI components are required to make this work.

What I see in the future is more of an AWS approach. The whole idea of language operations will fit nicely with what happened in the DevOps community where you have SysAdmins becoming DevOps as cloud computing came along.

I think you will have local vision managers as we build this platform that enables a lot of different use cases where you can go in and say, “There is a set of services that I want to consume and maybe I want to build on top of that and be able to tackle different use cases.” We are not close to that. There is still a lot of room to grow before we launch ourselves on an open platform, but I think that is inevitable.

Sramana Mitra: That would be my guess too. It’s a force multiplier. You can do your use case on which you are already getting traction. But if you can activate a serious developer ecosystem around your platform, then that is going to be a force multiplier.

Vasco Pedro: More and more, we see the access to large communities of developers, evangelists, and champions as a key aspect of having this force multiplier. These are key to having penetration and adoption. It’s hard nowadays to do everything by yourself. You have to create enough value so that you get other people to say, “Hey, this is interesting. I can leverage this to do something else.”

Sramana Mitra: Awesome. I love what you are doing. If you were to solicit developers to build a use case in short order, what would you like to go after next?

Vasco Pedro: I would love to tackle marketing. The marketing use case is exciting. It is a personal passion that we haven’t done yet because it’s not part of our focus on enterprise. It’s more targeted to the consumer which is having a universal inbox.

Imagine something on top of Gmail that would enable you to send an email to anyone in the world and for that person to receive that email in their native language. From a personal perspective, I’ve always wanted to have that. It was one of the initial motivations of Unbabel. It’s an itch that I want to scratch. We are not quite there yet, but I would love someone to build that.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Unbabel CEO Vasco Pedro
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