Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Conversica CEO Alex Terry (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You are a venture-funded company, yes?

Alex Terry: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: What scale are we talking? Have you raised a lot of money? What size are you at right now?

Alex Terry: The business was originally founded in 2007, I believe. The venture money came in 2013. The company has raised $22 million to date. I joined the company four months ago. I was brought in by the private equity investors.

Sramana Mitra: It’s about a $10-million company?

Alex Terry: A little higher than that. We are between $10 and $20 million right now.

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to ask you my last question. Given where you sit in this general space of optimizing sales processes using artificial intelligence, what are you seeing? What kinds of open problems stare at you that you would like entrepreneurs to go dig into?

Alex Terry: You mean some of the trends that we’re seeing at the high level or future areas for development?

Sramana Mitra: Trends and future areas for development.

Alex Terry: We are strong believers that everybody will have multiple AI assistants helping them out in multiple aspects of their daily lives.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, and they need to be domain specific because the whole rules engine and the training of the assistant needs to be specific to that function. I agree with you on that.

Alex Terry: Absolutely. At Conversica, we believe that there will be a number of vertical-specific assistants. They get smarter over time. Just in the same way that only a couple of luxury cars had a heads-up display five years ago. Now, a wider number of cars have those. You start off with the high-end use cases. Then the democratization of technology rolls these solutions out to a broader and broader group. We see sales people getting their own sales assistants because it’s really easy to quantify the value of what they do.

We believe that there’s a big opportunity for everybody to have an assistant that helps interact and automate the routine parts of your daily lives. Conversica’s first assistant was really the sales assistant, but it’s not going to be our last assistant. We already have our second assistant built and in beta. We believe that there will be a lot of different assistants helping in multiple parts of people’s lives. Related to that, if you think about the learning systems and learning feedback loops that we all interact with day to day, the emergence of powerful machine learning, whether it’s you telling Google Maps about a road closure. For example, we have over 10,000 people using our assistant. A lot of them are sending training data back to us. If we get it wrong, that data feeds back automatically to our system till we get it right the next time.

The third one is the ubiquity of bandwidth and connectedness. I think a lot of people see that trend. You can have better and smarter assistants. You don’t have to have an incredibly powerful device to process something. Of course, the devices are getting more and more powerful all the time, but having better bandwidth lets you move data back and forth between data centers.

Sramana Mitra: What is the beta product that you have up your sleeve?

Alex Terry: I’d say ask me at the end of this quarter. It’s actually pretty exciting. I think we have a winner on the sales assistant. We’re excited about the next assistant as well.

Sramana Mitra: I really believe that this domain-specific, highly-trained sales assistants in various functions is going to be a very interesting trend and an interesting opportunity for entrepreneurs to work on.

Alex Terry: I think there’s a nice Sales 3.0 stack. If you think about the EverStrings of the world, they’re out there identifying potential contact companies and feeding into additional systems that flesh out the specific individual contacts and then feeding into Conversica to interact with those and sift through those contracts. Then feeding into automated systems in the back-end to upsell and engage. We believe that we sit nicely in that overall stack and we play really well with a number of those sales tools.

Sramana Mitra: Great! Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Conversica CEO Alex Terry
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