Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Francisco Webber, CEO of Cortical.io (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I have two questions. One is about who you see in deals. When you are trying to do these large deals with large customers, who else is showing up in those deals? What other alternatives are these customers considering?

Francisco Webber: You mean in competitive terms?

Sramana Mitra: Yes.

Francisco Webber: Most of our activities are in the field around intelligent documents and intelligent message processes. In the beginning, we saw a lot of the IBM Watsons and Microsoft LUIS and those kinds of systems. Nowadays, it’s mostly companies that have very specific solutions. If we battle for a customer complaint filtering system, we find ourselves next to companies who just produce that functionality. We have the advantage of being quicker in bootstrapping a solution than a traditional system is in configuring it.

We have a second big advantage. We are not bound to a certain model. The user, not even the technical user, as the customer can create his model. That becomes important especially for enterprises who are a bit mature because they know that it takes a lot of effort to train a model.

Once you have trained it, you want to own it. A company that licenses a pre-computed model never has you own the model.

Sramana Mitra: This model can be a competitive advantage. The fact that you allow people to develop their model is a big competitive advantage for consumers. 

Francisco Webber: It’s a more systematic way of digitizing all sorts of processes step by step. One footnote is that in recent times, we often find companies from the RPA sector trying to compete. They are specialized more on the robot part and less on the understanding part of the actual message. They tend to have weaknesses there. 

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the data infrastructure that you are drawing from. When you get these firehoses of tweets, what kinds of databases are you encountering? Are we talking about Snowflake or Cassandra? What are we seeing at the bottom?

Francisco Webber: We typically rather attach to business systems. We speak to a repository, for example, or we get direct calls from some opaque process that provides us with documents and messages. It could also be what we see in specialized cases in the contract area for example. We have to speak to comfort life cycle management. The kind of database that they use is very often opaque to us. We have those enterprise connectors that we need for the major enterprise systems. 

Sramana Mitra: Got it. I more or less understood what you are doing. It is fascinating and it is very interesting. I love your story. I also love the fact that you are doing this out of Vienna. It’s great to see something cutting edge in a different part of the world. 

This segment is part 7 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Francisco Webber, CEO of Cortical.io
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