Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Zohar Bronfman, CEO of Pecan.ai (Part 1)

This is a terrific PaaS company in the making with substantial predictive capabilities.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Pecan.ai.

Zohar Bronfman: I’m from Tel Aviv. Prior to founding Pecan along with my co-founder Noam, I spent most of my days in the academia. I did two PhDs in parallel in supplementary fields. I did one in the field of computational neuroscience, and the other in the field of philosophy.

Sramana Mitra: Wonderful. That’s a rare combination. How did that lead you into Pecan?

Zohar Bronfman: On the first day of my grad school, I was fortunate to meet Noam, who is my co-founder. Ever since, we’ve been working shoulder to shoulder. Noam had this background on top of his data science education of being a business analyst. Coming closer to the end of school, Noam was like, “Data science is so amazing. Businesses are seeing value out of it, but this whole realm runs in parallel to the realm of BI and SQL-based data analytics. Maybe we can build a platform taking the power of data science and serve them to the BI audience in a SQL-oriented platform?” That was the idea since day one.

Sramana Mitra: Do you go to market as a platform company? Do you have apps? What is the structure?

Zohar Bronfman: You can almost build any kind of a prediction by using data science. On the other hand, our challenge is that analytics and BI don’t necessarily know data science or have prior experience with it. We have to help them achieve the data science output that we are set to achieve.

For that we took a template-based approach. We considered a set of the most relevant use cases. We built around those use cases that guide the analyst in building models. From a purely technological perspective, we can be considered a platform because you can basically build any kind of model. From the product perspective, I would see us now as a set of solutions that lie on top of the platform capability.

Sramana Mitra: You have a platform, but you market as a solutions company around specific use cases. Over time, you can expand those use cases. You can also open up the platform as a PaaS for other developers to build solutions on top of.

Zohar Bronfman: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on the use cases that you are currently going to market with and the target customers for that.

Zohar Bronfman: It was a process of hypothesizing but also going to market and seeing what resonates best. We eventually took customer transactional use cases on whether there is going to be conversion or churn. We even took up demand forecasting which is an aggregation of future transactions. There were basically use cases that are designed from historical transactions by consumers.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Zohar Bronfman, CEO of Pecan.ai
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