548th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Lloyed Lobo, Co-Founder of Boast.ai (Part 1)

Lloyed Lobo, Co-founder and President of Boast.ai, discusses his failures and eventual success building AI startups. Wonderful conversation!

Sramana Mitra: Welcome Lloyed. I’m looking forward to know you and understanding what you’re doing. 

Lloyed Lobo: Thanks for having me.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Martin Neale, CEO of ICS (Part 4)

Martin Neale: From our perspective, we understand that the Microsoft sellers provide a specialized service. They typically will be happy to talk to you if you have gone through some of the activities required. You are a Microsoft partner. You have signed up through their co-selling program. If you do those things and your proposition aligns, then that is the time where regular communications happen.

Sramana Mitra: The kind of price point you’re talking about, that’s not necessarily very large deals. But you’re saying that the direct sales force still works with that kind of deal size. 

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Martin Neale, CEO of ICS (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The text-to-voice technology is from Nuance?

Martin Neale: It’s not. It might be from Nuance at some point, but Microsoft is already doing their own telephony integration. We use another vendor’s technology for the telephony piece.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the healthcare public service case studies. What kinds of applications and use cases are you using these chatbots around?

4 Udemy Courses on How To Build a Unicorn Startup

Unicorn is a startup with an estimated valuation of over $1 billion. More than 1000 unicorns exist today.

Snowflake, Atlassian, ServiceNow are examples of startup unicorns. They’re massive, multi-billion dollar publicly traded companies now. Yet, they all started as an idea, took one step after another, grew in size, and so on.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Martin Neale, CEO of ICS (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You’re offering a free data model to your first client. That’s how you get access to the training data.

Martin Neale: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: Give me a little bit of color on the kind of data you were able to access on which you’ve trained the model. What kind of heuristics does the model contain?

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Martin Neale, CEO of ICS (Part 1)

Martin has built his AI startup within the Microsoft ecosystem. He shares interesting perspectives on how to leverage Microsoft.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself as well ICS.

Martin Neale: I’m the CEO of ICS AI. 

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Prashant Kumar, CTO of Cardinality (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: C3.ai is exactly like yours. They have a core platform. They’ve gone after the energy market first. They have relationships with the system integrators. Now they’re broadening. It’s a very similar strategy. There’s another company that I’m tracking that has a similar strategy. They come from an open source route which is H20 AI. 

Prashant Kumar: The challenge is that a lot of people are developing point solutions. We focus on what we call a data journey. Your data journey could be data engineering, machine learning, or visualization. C3.ai has an amazing platform. They’ve gone public as well. They’re focused on the machine learning side of things. H20 AI is sitting in a different segment. We don’t play in that space. We integrate with H20 AI. We’re super clear that we’re a data journey platform.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Prashant Kumar, CTO of Cardinality (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: We are doing an accelerator with Datastax. They manage the whole Cassandra stack. Their value proposition is the same – real-time, scalable, high availability, and high velocity processing of information from IoT. Does that make you competitors of Cassandra?

Prashant Kumar: Suppose AT&T wants to use Cassandra, we can push data into Cassandra. That’s the first component in our platform. You can stream the data out to multiple endpoints. We are compatible with all the cloud providers being cloud native.