Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Unbabel CEO Vasco Pedro (Part 5)

Vasco Pedro: From a more NLP perspective, there are a lot of use cases inside the enterprise that need an AI-first approach. They are not so obvious, but they are the scaffolding that enables other stuff to work.

For example, evaluation of human translation. We have a state-of-the-art system in quality estimation that does look at the output of machine translation and then it makes a real-time decision whether that’s good enough or if human intervention is needed. No one has figured that out for human translation.

That would be amazing because that is one of the biggest issues that we find all around language operations in general. How do you estimate and evaluate the effort of humans and if the translation good enough? Humans are error-prone. Human error is, by definition, something that exists quite often. I would love to see that solved.

Sramana Mitra: You are of Portuguese origin and it sounds like you have a sizable operation in Portugal. Is that correct?

Vasco Pedro: That is correct. Our team is mostly divided between San Francisco and Lisbon. Now, we also have an office in Pittsburgh. We also have people from New York and Boston.

Now because of COVID, we are at the beginning of adopting a hub model. We are going to have hubs in New York, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco. In Europe, we will have our hubs in Lisbon, London, and Berlin.

Sramana Mitra: How big is the Lisbon operation?

Vasco Pedro: The Lisbon operation is about 130 people.

Sramana Mitra: That’s great. It must be interesting for you to be able to do something significant in your hometown.

Vasco Pedro: Pre-COVID, I was spending 50% of my time in each place. They are both interesting cities for me. San Francisco feels like what Florence would have been during the Renaissance where people come from all over the world to start conversations. It’s a place for exploration and a place for the creation of new ideas.

Lisbon has a bit of that. We have always been surrounded by Spain and for us, the outlet was always the ocean and the outside. It drives us to explore. There is a bit of that mentality.

Right now, Lisbon is going through an interesting phase. It has a combination of a good infrastructure, everyone speaks English, and it’s very safe with great quality of life and great weather. Even within Europe, It’s having a renaissance period. That is exciting to see the energy.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve known Paolo Rosado of OutSystems for a long time and that was a success story coming out of there as well.

Vasco Pedro: Paolo is an amazing CEO. I love his talks and the way he thinks about stuff. There are a few interesting companies. I don’t know if you’ve met Tiago Paiva from Talkdesk. It’s also an interesting success story. They are now worth $3 billion. They are in the CRM space. Veniam is in autonomous driving. There are now a few far-fetched Portugal-UK companies. There are a few companies coming out of Portugal, mostly Lisbon, that are quite exciting. Obviously, it’s not the critical mass of San Francisco. The traction that we were getting initially is because of the good technical talent in a much more affordable location.

With COVID, that has gone away. The top 1% of global talent is being hunted by everyone. Since everyone is location agnostic, that’s creating a lot of opportunities for folks in Lisbon that are incredibly talented. In the short term, it means that talent is harder to attract, but in the long term, it’s beneficial for the ecosystem.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Unbabel CEO Vasco Pedro
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