1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Daniel Cohen, General Partner at Viola Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I think the capabilities are extremely interesting. You can bring it down to areas where we can actually apply things like that, where there will be immediate value, and we can build a business around that.

I think interviewing candidates is one such application. Instead of ten candidates, if you want to interview 1,000 candidates and filter that down to the ten that are a good fit, that is a great application of this kind of technology or human representation technology that you’re talking about.

The other side of the coin is where the AI can run software and create additional levels of automation. It comes back to the same vertical AI kind of thought process, right? In vertical workflows and in vertical applications, having agent technology available to do additional levels of automation is immensely valuable.

Daniel Cohen: The interesting thing for a lot of people like us is, I think the future is about every team. Companies will include

real people and not real people. Teams will have virtual team members and real team members, and they’re just going to be a part of the work process.

There are still a lot of things that need to be figured out. I think, again, the expectations from anything that is AI is much, much higher than anything that is not AI. In some odd way, you’re willing to forgive me about certain things I’m doing, even on this call right now. If this was an AI, you will be much more strict about how things are said or how things are being expressed and so on. But this is the future.

Sramana Mitra: It is the future, most certainly.

Now, is there a company that you can fantasize about that you would like to invest in? Now I’m switching to ideas that you haven’t yet seen implemented or haven’t yet crossed your deal flow path.

What would you like to invest in in AI?

Daniel Cohen: Well, that’s a great question.

I think there are a lot of companies in these categories, but I’m fascinated, like many people, about the social impact of AI – virtual friends and virtual companions. That part for me is fascinating – how that future will lay out and how people will socialize with virtual friends. I think still for me is the one area which I would love to see.

Sramana Mitra: Yes. It’s a scary idea.

Daniel Cohen: I know. Maybe for us it’s scary, but maybe in the next 50 years, it’s just going to be simple reality.

Sramana Mitra: It depends. It depends on how you play it. I think if you expand your line of thought, I think there is a very interesting use case there that is not scary, not damaging. It’s in the domain of mental health, right?

Loneliness has been a tremendous mental health problem around the world. If you can mitigate that with meaningful companionship that can add valuable input into the emotional process, that could be a very interesting application of that kind of AI.

Daniel Cohen: I totally agree. My wife is a psychologist and she always said, “Well, on one hand, people need human touch. They need to sit in a room and talk to real people.” I think that’s true. That will never go away.

But for a lot of people, the solution of a virtual therapist, maybe is not the best solution, but it’s a great solution. I think we’ll see much more of that in the market.

Sramana Mitra: I think it could be a fabulous solution, actually. Well-designed virtual therapists could be a fabulous solution.

This segment is part 5 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Daniel Cohen, General Partner at Viola Ventures
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