Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Sonny Tai, CEO of Actuate AI (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Technology-wise, you told me the story of winning one competitor and replacing them. What does the competitive landscape look like?

Sonny Tai: We never lose when we’re given a fair shake. What I mean by that is, if a customer does a pilot with us and tests our technology in earnest, we have never lost a deal. We’ve had customers where they deprioritize this initiative. There’s nothing we can do about that.

If they’re to deploy computer vision technology for their security cameras, we’ve never lost. The reason for that is because it’s a feature of the physical security industry that historically has made it difficult for innovators to be successful. The physical security industry is one of the slowest-moving, regressive industries on the Earth. If you go to a security tradeshow, the attendees are overwhelmingly older males. They’re set in their ways on what they’ve been doing for the past 30 years. They’re trying to change that.

There are two types of startups that emerge out of this industry. One comes from within the industry. They don’t have the technical skillset. They will hire offshore developers. It just doesn’t work very well. Or you have some hotshot from Silicon Valley. They can’t sell it because they’re talking to these older men who come from law enforcement. You have to be on the same wavelength. People from outside of the industry struggle.

Sramana Mitra: That’s where your background was valuable.

Sonny Tai: Yes. I was a Political Science major. I enjoyed taking apart computers when I was little. But I’m not an engineer by trade. My co-founder, Ben, is the smartest person I’ve worked with in my entire life. He built AI for Microsoft for five years. Then he graduated from Chicago MBA and graduated top of his class.

He leads our engineering and product team. Without him, we’d be nothing. That just frees me up to not have to worry about the product side. I trust that I can go to battle with the best technology team in the industry and have these productive conversations with our customers.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now? What are the metrics?

Sonny Tai: We’re deployed on 14,000 cameras across a thousand customer sites. In terms of revenue, we’re under $5 million.

Sramana Mitra: That’s surprising to me because we have a requirement that the company has to be above $5 million to be part of the series.

Sonny Tai: My apologies. We’re not too far under $5 million.

Sramana Mitra: Where do you see other open problems?

Sonny Tai: That’s a really hard question. When I was in business school, I used to float these startup ideas by my roommates and my classmates and they’d tell me it was a really dumb idea. I will say though that the physical security industry has traditionally been extremely hardware and manpower-based. They like selling cameras. They like selling MVRs. They like selling guarding services.

Where there’s a significant shortfall is software. It’s almost like when you talk to people in the military. Software is really bad. For companies that want to break into this space, the opportunities are in software. Hardware is mostly maxed out.

Sramana Mitra: Very good. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Sonny Tai, CEO of Actuate AI
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