Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Martin Neale, CEO of ICS (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You’re offering a free data model to your first client. That’s how you get access to the training data.

Martin Neale: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: Give me a little bit of color on the kind of data you were able to access on which you’ve trained the model. What kind of heuristics does the model contain?

Martin Neale: The data are all of the common things that you might want to know from your local authority in the UK. Part of what the local authority does is deal with refuse waste. People always want to know when their bins are going to be collected and what date the blue bin is going to be collected on a bank holiday.

We continue to model what those things are. We use all of the variants in terms of regional differences and how people ask for those things as a series of techniques to provide a high match. Local authorities are also responsible for child welfare. Children under care are a group. 

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk a little bit about the technology stack. You started off by saying that you have worked with the Microsoft ecosystem. Does this venture have something to do with the Microsoft ecosystem?

Martin Neale: Truly functional AI at low price points can only be provided by vendors who are able to invest billions in its creation to sell it at scale across the world. We try to ensure that we don’t compete with core capabilities. We surround those core capabilities with additional features and functions. An example of that is an ethics capability.

We have built an ethics subsystem that can monitor what is going through the platform to understand whether it complies with the chosen ethical values. We are providing the last mile IT and services as well as the highly-specific language models and training. In our case, we work closely with Microsoft almost exclusively. 

Sramana Mitra: So you are building on top of the Microsoft Azure platform?

Martin Neale: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What do you charge? What average deal size are we talking about?

Martin Neale: It varies. You have small ones, medium ones, and large ones. The largest local authority in the UK looks after about a million citizens. The smallest, about 50,000. We charge accordingly. It scales down to as little as £1,000 a month for an assistant and up to a great deal more than that. 

Sramana Mitra: How about the highest point? £10,000 a month or £100,000?

Martin Neale: About £10,000 a month for the biggest. We’re adding more and more products in our portfolio so we started off with a chat assistant. We now have an AI-augmented live chat. We have a mesh data service. We have a whole bunch of things. We can offer it via voice. It depends on how much of an omnichannel deployment the client wants. It gets more and more expensive as they cover more channels. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Martin Neale, CEO of ICS
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