Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Starmind CEO Marc Vontobel (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You have chosen certain markets to go after. What’s happening in the broader ecosystem that you’re playing in with the same kinds of applications and use cases but in different geographies or maybe different use cases. Who is playing in your space that you’re watching from the corner of your eye?

I’ve seen the solution that you’re describing. Today, AI is at its most mature state. I still remember companies that I saw in exactly the same application, but they failed. Timing is a big deal. For you, this is good timing. Who are the other players in your space that you are watching?

Marc Vontobel: There is a very cool product from OpenText called Decisive. It’s close to Starmind but just focusing on large law first. That also makes a lot of sense because the dynamics in law firms are different from lots of other organizations. You want to be able to bill every minute. Otherwise, the whole business model doesn’t work. Also, the language spoken within that domain is different from other domains. They did an amazing job building an application for that vertical. For us, that’s a no-go.

We also see Stack Overflow with their teams offering to try to get into the development teams within large organizations. They have a huge benefit that every developer knows them. The adoption within the development team is probably pretty straightforward.

Their challenge will be more to get out of the developer space into more business-related space. We see that the concept and what they believe in are very similar to what we do. We believe that you have to connect with the right people at the right time. The expert shouldn’t be forced to curate the profile and shouldn’t be forced to put a lot of time into being found.

Then there are tools that seem very close. On the one hand, you’ve the whole collaboration tools like Slack. There was an interesting statistic about how people tend to speak only to their immediate team. Slack or Teams don’t really connect you outside of your existing network. We integrate into those platforms.

Another category is this enterprise search or wikis. We see some trends there. They’re going in the direction of more snackable information. That’s also considered knowledge. People think we’re in the same space, but we really focus on human knowledge and connecting people.

Sramana Mitra: Last question, the examples that you gave are fabulous use casea. Is there a use case out there that is not addressed by you or any of the players that you would go after if you had bandwidth?

Marc Vontobel: If you manage to get into the big governments with a solution like Starmind, you could be very successful as well. I don’t know how easy that is. The potential is very big. The amount of knowledge in there is huge. That could be a good use case if you have a background of selling to governmental institutions.

Sramana Mitra: Also there are languages. Most of Latin America works in Spanish, French and all of the European languages.

Marc Vontobel: We already implemented in 20 languages. We have four official languages in Switzerland. Everything we do is multi-lingual. Even if people understand and speak English, they don’t really feel comfortable sharing in English.

Sramana Mitra: Wonderful! Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Starmind CEO Marc Vontobel
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