AI With The Best Keynote Speaker: Dennis R. Mortensen and his AI Startup Funnel
September 2016
Dennis Mortensen is a Big Data expert and CEO/founder of X.ai, AKA “Amy Ingram” — an AI personal assistant. This service allows smart meeting-scheduling with a simple CC to amy@x.ai (or andrew@x.ai — they’re twins) to coordinate bookings, analyzing the entire e-mail thread, conversation syntax and scanning your calendar availabilities.
Three years of creating the perfect meeting-scheduling intelligent agent, X.ai launched to beta-testers last year with a waiting list in the thousands, and Twitter ‘love notes’ aplenty. Those waiting will be pleased to know, Amy and Andrew will be available to the public this autumn.
A visionary in the potential for a vertical AI marketplace, as in, choosing a single problem for the intelligent agent to specialize in, and doing it tremendously well, Dennis envisions eventually having thousands of agents in sync with horizontal AI masters such as Siri, Cortana or Alexa, knowing which vertical AI to call on for particular tasks.
We asked Dennis to share his wisdom for startups looking to make waves in AI. He shares his top 3 tips:
1. Find an extremely narrow “job to be done.” Then focus! Accept that any Intelligent Agent you build will be a verticalized AI (highly specialized) in a world where Apple, Microsoft and Amazon will likely deliver the horizontal mesh that ties them together.
2. Define the universe in which your Agent operates to the nth degree. You should be able to conceptually describe all outcomes in this universe.
3. If you’re developing your predictions for the aforementioned universe in a supervised learning environment, make sure you have extremely precise annotation guidelines and proper measures to verify the quality of said dataset. Only at this step, which could take a month or a year, will you begin to model things out (AKA machine learning) :-)
Dennis’ Pulse post earlier this year, Bring Your Own Intelligent Agent (BYOA) is coming. What happens when it’s here?, explored using multiple vertical specialists to make our lives easier, begging the question: Eventually, “WHO exactly is it you are hiring? Are you hiring an employee, or an employee augmented by nine agents? And do you care?”. Exciting times, people!
Dennis will be talking about “The Current AI Landscape, and Why we’re Building Vertical AI” Saturday 24th September 10am at ai.withthebest.com
