Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Iterate CTO Brian Sathianathan (Part 1)

In this interview, we explore the priorities of enterprise decision makers through the lens of an AI platform vendor.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing the audience to yourself as well as to Iterate.

Brian Sathianathan: I’m the co-founder and CTO of Iterate.ai. I’m a serial entrepreneur. I worked eight years at Apple where I worked in a lot of product introductions. Then I started a video streaming company. I did venture capital for a while. I did one or two companies in between and then Iterate.

Iterate.ai is an advanced low-code platform. You can drag and drop and start building fairly complicated solutions. It’s targeted primarily to enterprise companies. Companies whose core is not technology. That’s what we do. It’s been about eight years now. We have 80 people in Silicon Valley, Denver, Texas, and a few people in Sri Lanka, India, and Slovakia.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down into where in the enterprise are you seeing adoption. I’ll go a bit further. Is it in the CIO’s office that you start or in the business groups?

Brian Sathianathan: Typically, enterprises have had a lot of requirements, especially with digital transformation. If you look at digital transformation, it’s going to be a $2.1 trillion market by 2030. A lot of companies are battling with a lot of forces of innovation. IT is quite busy because they are transforming the CIO’s office. Primarily he is looking at major platform transformations.

A lot of our traction is coming from the General Managers either from the Marketing or CTO group. A few years back when you had mobile coming in, they would go to an agency to do a mobile app. That’s all table steaks now. That’s all done.

What’s interesting is the advanced technologies. Can they do recommendations based on my past transactions? AI, IoT, Blockchain are coming in. They are under the business operations team. Those GMs responsible for it are working with us closely.

Sramana Mitra: What is your top use case? Is it in marketing?

Brian Sathianathan: I’ll give you some examples. We actually power frictionless gas pumping experience for one of our customers. You could imagine you are a consumer. You are part of a loyalty program. You can register your credit card and license plate. You go to the gas station and the camera recognizes your license plate and automatically releases your pump. There’re a lot of machine learning and IoT integrations there. That’s one use case.

This is actually in Europe. It’s deployed in 10 countries. It’s in US as well in a couple of states. Another use case that’s interesting is damage estimation. Say your car gets into an accident. You get a dink in the back. You take a picture and send it to the brand. Our technology identifies the damage. It’ll also look through millions of transactions in the past for that type of damage. It’ll build an estimate for you. That is very accurate. We have lots of use cases like that.

Sramana Mitra: How does the business work? What is your go-to-market strategy? Are you finding these use cases by partnering with system integrators? Are you going direct?

Brian Sathianathan: We have three offerings in the company. We license our software. Then we also have apps – basically solutions. That’s the second part. Digital transformation is still in its infancy. You have to teach these leaders how this can progress. We work with third-party system integrators as well. Sometimes, the AI models and training is done by us. We work with their application engineers to bring all of that into fruition.

We have a direct channel. We go directly to the customers. We also have partnerships with various service providers who implement using our software as well. We started in retail, so we know the sector very well.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Iterate CTO Brian Sathianathan
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