Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Sonny Tai, CEO of Actuate AI (Part 1)

Sonny talks about AI in the physical security industry.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as to Actuate AI.

Sonny Tai: I’m the CEO and Co-Founder of Actuate. We are a New York-based AI startup. I was born in Taiwan, but I grew up in South Africa. I’m an immigrant to the United States.

The reason why that is relevant is because South Africa has one of the highest rates of gun violence and crime in the world. Unfortunately, while growing up, some of our family and friends were impacted by gun violence including a family friend who was shot in his own home. This is a big reason why I’ve always had a deep interest in protecting other people and doing something about public safety.

I ended up coming to the US when I was was 13 with my mom and my sister. I joined the Marine Corps after I got my green card. I served in the US Marine for 10 years between reserve and active duty. I got out of active duty in 2013. I applied to business school when I was deployed in Afghanistan in 2012. I went to the University of Chicago and got my MBA.

Like you, I was a management consultant for a little bit. But I realized two things. One was I had zero passion for consulting and I wasn’t even that good of a consultant. I’ve always wanted to start my own company. It’s been a dream of mine since I was little. If I were to start my own company, I want to start it in an area where I can have some semblance of a social impact.

After the Las Vegas shooting in late 2017, I decided to look into how to use technologies to save lives during crisis situations. In my research, I found out that computer vision models are increasingly accurate, but I didn’t really see that there was a credible product in the security industry that leveraged these capabilities to detect threats on existing security cameras. I set out to build it with my co-founder Ben Ziomek and the rest is history.

Sramana Mitra: Talk a little bit about how you go about doing what you set out to do. Explain with use cases and some of the technical nuances of how you achieved that value.

Sonny Tai: We deploy AI models in the cloud that connect with a customer security camera system that enables their cameras to automatically detect threats. As you might imagine, there are 85 million security cameras deployed across the US today, as of 2021.

The vast majority of these cameras are not monitored. People don’t look at them. They sit there and record footage. If something bad happens, they go back to review the footage and try to decipher what happened. What we’re doing is we’re turning the security camera into a more proactive measure. We’re helping security teams so they can get guards at the right place at the right time.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Sonny Tai, CEO of Actuate AI
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