Thoughts on Mita TechTalks 2018
This year we attended Mita TechTalks, an event centered on Tech intelligence and AI, where government, investors and leading tech companies from Silicon Valley and LatAm discussed opportunities and challenges arising from the growth of Artificial Intelligence. These are our thoughts about where we are heading as an industry.
AI industry is transitioning from infrastructure to applications
Just like it happens with many high impact general technologies, before we are able to serve massive markets, we need to build the foundations that allow everyone to access them: long before e-commerce and social networks, we had to build PC’s, TCP/IP protocols, software and OS’s, among other telecommunication technologies that made internet possible.
The same is happening with AI, before we can witness its full potential, we have to finish its infrastructure: algorithms and frameworks, hardware and computer power, data gathering and processing techniques; and those changes will have implicit implications on current processes and business operations, forcing us to redesign entire industries. Today we have access to new tools that 5 years ago used to be a distant sci-fi dream.
Data Science talent is scarce
One of the biggest challenges for companies, especially those that aren’t building core AI technology is to find talent. A data scientist should have strong math and statistics background with prominent coding skills, and the ability to learn and adapt in a fast pace industry that changes every day. These are hard to find. Even when most processes can be automated by the newest tools to the point where no coding is required, models can only be as good as the data used for training, and the metrics used evaluate them. The skills required are difficult for people without experience in data science.
To make it worse, the lack of cultural diversity in datasets leading to bias in the resulting models. In first batches of AI implementations, we witnessed unintended discrimination and ethical issues.
The first tangible AI impact in Mexico is in Finance
Mexico (as many emergent economies) has a huge lack of financial services, leaving many people underserved. This represents a huge opportunity for many companies, today’s tech industry is highly driven by FinTech, where many startups are aggressively implementing AI to leverage their data to be able to compete against well-established banks and financial institutions. This information leads them not only to innovate by introducing new tech in their processes, but to get to know better their customers and provide personalized solutions that allow people to access financial services inexistent a few years ago.
The fast growth of VC’s in Mexico
Even if many traditional VC’s are understandably risk adverse, this encourages entrepreneurs to provide results faster and get to product/market-fit before getting any investment. This risk aversion also limits the industries where entrepreneurs can work on, especially those building core technologies for tomorrow industries (like AI, Blockchain, AR/VR, genetics, etc.) where the adoption is far from being massive. At the same time, corporate VC’s are totally different, they are eager to try new solutions and disrupt their internal processes. We believe that after FinTech, most of the innovation and implementation of AI will come from startups’ collaboration with enterprises.
Undoubtedly, AI will be one of the breakthrough technologies in the following months, helping us to process and perform tasks beyond human capacity, and enabling technology to become smarter simply by interacting with us. At Synx, our vision is to bridge the transition from core AI to applications, helping companies to make use of their data by leveraging the most advanced technologies and integrate them into their current processes without disrupting their operations. We are very excited about what is coming, the solutions we are building and how the Mexico ecosystem is evolving into a global tech hub.
