Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Squirro CEO Dorian Selz (Part 1)

Dorian tells a great story of AI applications within Financial Services.

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

Dorian Selz: I’m the Founder of Squirro. Squirro is Zurich-based but global AI company. We have over 40 years of recognizing structured and unstructured data.

Sramana Mitra: Talk about specific points that you solve by applying that technical knowledge.

Dorian Selz: Most companies produce lots of content. 80% to 90% of that data is unstructured. It’s not numeric. It’s not tabular. Hence, it’s difficult to compute. Add this to an Excel sheet and the only thing you can get out is maybe the number of characters in that cell. It’s the last frontier in data analytics to be able to turn this unstructured, nonsensical, and unusable dataset into enabled datasets.

In order to do that, you need to be able to apply machine learning elements to it. I don’t think there is actual true artificial intelligence out there. There are very clever techniques to extract insights out of data elements.

What pain points do we solve? We solve pain points in sales and risk. For asset management houses, we look at their own reporting and funds. We solve pain points in quality reporting, like how their internal research thinks about their funds and how they perform. We also look at research from renowned research houses. We compare that against what pension schemes look for. Pension schemes can look for hundred million in fast-moving consumer good shares. Machines can do that at high-quality levels whereas humans can make use of that data.

We do the same in service. A super simplistic way of looking at our business is we’re finding the needle in the haystack. If the haystack is big, that’s not an easy undertaking to do that not just once but reliably and continuously. Once we have identified the needle in the haystack, we can contextualize that. It becomes really usable for you in your work process.

Sramana Mitra: I’m a computer scientist from MIT, so I understand what you’re talking about. I did two AI startups early on. What you have described, on a horizontal problem-solving level, is unstructured data to structured data. That’s one aspect of the pain point. Of course, you are specifically addressing use case in sales and lead generation, services, and risk. Those are the three.

Dorian Selz: That’s correct.

Sramana Mitra: You talked about research as well?

Dorian Selz: Research is more the input that we use. There are bigger research houses out there that do financial research. The core use cases are in sales, service, and risk.

Sramana Mitra: Are you talking about sales of specific types of product? Are we talking about financial products, technology products, or pharmaceutical products? I did an AI company in lead generation in 1998. It wasn’t quite there yet. It’s a problem that I’ve looked at from many angles for a long time.

We’ve covered a number of companies that you are probably aware of. These are companies like InsideSales, InsideView, and Rev. These are all applying AI and data into the lead generation and qualification problem. Tell me more about the lead generation practice.

Dorian Selz: If you were active in that space as of 1998, you’ve been really ahead of the curve by about two decades. I believe many of these technologies only came to fruition now. Back in 1998, you can think about that but you miss the compute power, data, and also the market maturity. If you went to any business with that proposition, they’ll look puzzled.

Sramana Mitra: It’s not very helpful to be ahead of the curve.

Dorian Selz: It’s not.

Sramana Mitra: To build a successful business, you have to get your timing right.

Dorian Selz: 100%.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Squirro CEO Dorian Selz
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