Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Gurjeet Singh, Co-Founder and Chairman of Ayasdi (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How were customers finding you?

Gurjeet Singh: Just through media. The launch in January was such a huge event. There was a lot of media and buzz around it. It felt like it was a pretty successful time, and it definitely gave us a false sense of complacency.

What we realized was while we could sell across these verticals for various use cases, it turned out to be very difficult to be able to train a sales force to sell across all these use cases. It was difficult to train a bunch of people who had made their career selling software to this multitude of users, use cases, and customers.

About a year or so, we made the call to focus the company on two major verticals. Today, we are heavily focused on financial services and healthcare. We’ve been able to grow very successfully in these two verticals. As time goes on, we expect to add more verticals to this mix.

Sramana Mitra: What verticals did you settle into?

Gurjeet Singh: Financial services like large banks and healthcare.

Sramana Mitra: No longer pharmaceuticals?

Gurjeet Singh: That’s correct.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down these two verticals and walk us through some representative use cases of how you’re adding value to financial services and how you’re adding value to healthcare.

Gurjeet Singh: As a company, we have a general-purpose platform that can be used for a large number of intelligence-oriented tasks. The opportunity that we see ahead of us is we believe that a lot of white-collar work will be heavily augmented, if not outright automated, in the near future.

The strategy that we are following is, we have built a platform that contains three major ideas. It contains this idea of intelligence that I can describe in a second. It contains an idea of being able to work at enterprise scale. Thirdly, it contains this notion of an application framework. We realized that often the people who are best suited to learn from data usually do not have an interface themselves. Usually, you have to look at Excel.

We made the decision that we wanted to build end-to-end workflow-based applications for subject matter experts. That’s what we’ve done in these two verticals. As an example, we have built two major applications that solve two problems end-to-end. The first problem has to do with regulatory risk modeling.

To give you a sense of the problem, around 2008 when the financial crisis happened, pretty much all the regulators across the globe came up with what are known as stress tests in which banks have to produce models of their revenues and then prove that in adverse scenarios, they will have enough capital to be able to weather through. These stress tests are exceptionally onerous. Across the banking industry, about a few billion dollars gets spent every year on constructing these stress test models. It’s a huge model. Regulatory risk modeling product essentially largely automates the process of constructing these stress test models and producing the documentation. The biggest problem that’s left after our customers use our software is to schedule meetings around it.

The second example has to do with anti-money laundering. As your readers might be aware, most of the large global banks have huge amounts of anti-money laundering fines where either their processes are inadequate or their data is not good enough. What banks are doing in response is that they’re hiring thousands of people to monitor transactions that look suspicious. A small number of those investigations lead to filings with the regulators that claim that these are suspicious activities.

To give you a sense of the scale of this problem, banks like JP Morgan or HSBC employ anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 people to go through this transaction review investigation process. Our product automatically detects patterns in transaction data and allows our customers to reduce their investigative load while still maintaining the quality of the suspicious activity report filing.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Gurjeet Singh, Co-Founder and Chairman of Ayasdi
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