Monthly Archives: April 2017

Saleswhale, a Singapore-based startup that uses artificial intelligence to letcompanies automate their sales emails, has raised a $1.2 million seed round.

The capital was provided by VC firms Monks Hill Ventures, Gree Ventures and Wavemaker Partners with a number of angel investors. Those include early Dropbox hire Albert Ni,Pieter Walraven (who founded now Google-owned Pie),Juha Paananen (who sold Nonstop Games to King.com),Royston Tay (who sold Zopim to Zendesk) andBowei Lee,CEO of LCY Chemical Corp.

We first wrote about Saleswhale last Augustwhile it was in the Y Combinator program in the U.S., and since then the team has returned to Singapore and developed the business. Its product, called Engage, allows companies to set up virtual email accounts which send communicate with sales prospectsthe same way a human employee would.

It isnt a full on sales team replacement at this point,rather it is focused on handling inbound leads or reigniting stale prospects.The AIs can use charts, figures and PDFs and when alead becomes warm again they can hand it over to a designated employee to take things further.

Engage is available for a base rate fee, after which additional cost comes per usuage. Theres a free 14-day trial to allow new users to test the product without that initial commitment, but Saleswhale has removed the free usage option it had in place last year, co-founderGabriel Lim confirmed.The company isnt saying how much revenue it pulls in, but Lim said that base fees account for around 40 percent of income with activity-based fees representing the rest.

Lim founded the company last year with fellow Singaporeans Venus Wong and Ethan Le in response tothe frustration of the repetitive nature of training new sales staff, many of whom move on to new jobs. The team has since added two engineers to its ranks, and Lim said it plans to hire another three people who will cover sales and also more engineers. The current team are all engineers, so adding a dedicated sales team makes plenty of sense for the business now that it is maturing.

Most of the customer leads that Saleswhale itself gets are inbound, and mainlyfrom tech startups, but Lim said the company has begun to hold initial discussions with firms in verticals such as real estate and automotive loans to diversify. But, right now, he told TechCrunch, the company has a huge backlog of interested customers that it is onboarding to its platform, which already counts dozens of paying customers. While he didnt givespecific names, Lim said that,since February 2017, Saleswhale has helped its customers close $130,000 in deals with a further $1.5 million-worth of leads in the pipeline.

This seed money will go towardsthose expansion and hiring efforts. Lim said the company willlook to close a Series A round in around12 months. Interestingly, this investment is a first seed deal for Monks Hill Ventures, the $80 million fund that is primarily focused on Series Acompanies, so Saleswhale may already have a major contributor to its next round depending on how things go.

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Singapore's Saleswhale, which uses AI to automate sales emails, raises $1.2M - TechCrunch

When Slack introduced its new Enterprise Grid product in January, it pledged to bring much of the same day-to-day Slack experience that users have come to know and love to large organizations. Similarly, CRM giant Salesforce unveiled its new Einstein artificial intelligence service this past fall to great fanfare, touting it as AI for everyone. But, as many enterprise leaders already know and would-be disrupters are quickly learning the promise of AI and its reality are, for now, two very different things.

While chatbots, predictive analytics and intelligent search are all the rage these days, AIscurrent business value is typically overstated. One analyst recently called Einstein a great starting point, while IT departments are freaking out over security concerns such as phishing scams due to bots potential to sound a little too much like real people. And thats key most things AI today are just that;potential. While a lot of companies are trumpeting AI as a competitive differentiator, the technologies are still in their infancy and a lot more speculative than disruptive.Thats no doubt a relief for those frightened ofthe self-aware, revenge-seeking androids fromfilmandTV.

A reality check: AIisbeginning to take on the low-hanging fruit of the modern enterprise, such as critical time-saving tasks like streamlining email inboxes, prioritizing/scheduling meetings and creating data-driven,daily to-do lists. Some solutions already use predictive analytics to mine the rich work graph of data within a company, adding valuable context around workflows.

As the technology improves, itwill get much better atanticipating employees needs as well. In the near future, voice recognition technology may even become a type of universal ID, allowing people easier access to information and experts from partner and customer networks, as well as their own companies. But to take AI further along the path from potential to practical, organizations must setaside the hype and get the right systems and processes in place. Heres how.

1. Overcome fragmentation

Dataprovides the brainpower for artificial intelligence. With the amount of dataset to expand to a mind-boggling 44 zettabytes by 2020, the problem for machine learning systems is no longer a lack of information; its the potential for fragmentation. Without unrestricted access to a ton of data, AI cant possibly live up to its promises either real or imagined. Unfortunately, companies are adopting more and more disparate systems, and its not helping that stack vendors are continually adding more disconnected tools to their productivity suites and emerging conversational apps are siloing information in ever-narrower message threads. Companies need their technology vendors to provide open APIs and connected hub solutions in order to make sure valuable data wont get locked inside niche tools, and to ensure the signal doesnt get lost in a clamor of extraneous noise.

2. Leverage work graphanalytics

In order for work graph mapping to be effective, its important to choosesoftware vendors that not only enable relationshipsbetween people, applications and business precesses, but that also provide visibility for individual interactions.The systems that most successfully leverage workplace AI are those that let you analyze not just work thats getting done in one particular tool, but also capture all the conversations, content, sentiment, actions, groups, teams and people across multiple collaboration apps. Only then do companies get insight into dynamic relationships across the full spectrum of work, so they can analyze their organizational network and effect positive change for better business outcomes in a repeatable manner. For example, intelligent work graphtechnology could help leaders figure out how to strategically build diverse project teams with the right experts in order to ensure successful outcomes.

3. Embrace a collaboration hub solution that brings it all together

Solving the challenges of fragmentation, as well as those surrounding the natural cultural resistance that exists in many organizations when it comes to adopting AI solutions, will require not only revamping current technologies and processes, but a change in mindset. The payoff, at least according to this Accenture report, will be nothing less than unprecedented opportunities for value creation. Fortunately, many software vendors are already finding ways to overcome the current and future obstacles to AI. Some collaboration hub solutions do a great job of enabling the transparency and ongoing discussions necessary to overcome cultural resistance, while also seamlessly integrating with the applications and tools companies have already invested in (including Microsoft Office 365, SharePoint, Box, Salesforce and others). In fact, without some type of agnostic and heterogeneous place to captureallof the conversations, content, sentiment and actions of individuals, groups and teams (the work graph) where they areaccessible and searchable, AI will never be able to live up to its lofty promises.

The original Einstein (Albert) once famously said, Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand. Replacing people is not (nor should ever be) the end goal of artificial intelligence. Instead, AI by dealing with the knowledge sideof work will augment and expand our inherent human capabilities, including our imaginations, allowing both businessesandpeople to thrive.

By freeing siloed data and lettingindividuals and teams to do their most creative work today, businesses can ensurethat, when the future does come and its coming fast theyll be ready. Remember, despite what youve heard, AI isnt the end of the world. I believe its just the beginning.

Ofer Ben-David is the Executive Vice President of Engineering at Jive Software, a provider of communication and collaboration solutions for business.

Above: The Machine Intelligence Landscape. This article is part of our Artificial Intelligence series. You can download a high-resolution version of the landscape featuring 288 companies by clicking the image.

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Here's a reality check for AI in the enterprise - VentureBeat

If you look past the hype, existential concerns, and fear that Alexa is a CIA mole, there are some genuinely exciting developments happening in the world of artificial intelligence.

Some of these have very specific applications, such as medical imaging, diagnostic capabilities, or satellite imagery recognition. Others, like digital assistants or even robots are poised to dramatically impact how we live and work on a broader scale.

Of course, most of us care about more than just a series of clever tricks. We want AI that does more than the bare minimum which thus far has been defined as tedious manual tasks that are a nuisance for humans to complete. We want AI that can be harnessed to truly augment and enhance human intelligence, to keep in stride with us and act as a personal, contextually aware virtual assistant. IT professionals, in particular, cant wait for the ultimate AI companion, which represents an imaginary best work friend come to life who you can interact with across a number of different interface types.

But what exactly does this look like? First, as were talking about a personal assistant, your AI should have a name; lets call your companion Bender. Bender is a bot that comes to you pre-trained with a number of basic skills and interfaces, such as voice recognition, natural language processing, an augmented reality system, and more. In addition, Bender is equipped with machine-learning algorithms to learn about your work life, work habits, and any real-world factors that affect your job.

So what can Bender do? Lets look at an example.

Say youre a developer at a global company, and you have teammates in India and Brazil. You dont speak Hindi or Portuguese and your teammates dont speak English, but you need to meet on a weekly call to go over your progress and timelines. Bender would translate the conversation for you in real time, and your teammates would have the same done by their own AI helpers. So you would communicatedirectly with an English-speaking interface via Bender, and your teammates would do the same in Hindi or Portuguese. Imagine Skypes real-time language capabilities combined with the magic of Douglas Adams Babelfish expertly trained in the jargon of technology professionals and able to bridge the gaps of cultural idioms and idiosyncrasies. Bender would help break down remote working barriers and increase team cohesion across global borders.

This may seem like a simple start, but now imagine how Bender can assist you across other types of interfaces, such as in AR. That is, Bender sees what you see. Look at an application architecture diagram, and Bender annotates it for you. Scribble things on whiteboards, notepads, or napkins, and Bender remembers what you wrote. Navigate a data center, and Bender can guide you to the right cabinet and piece of equipment.

Using glasses, contact lenses, or some yet-to-be-created neural interface, Bender can be equipped to supercharge your vision and memory recall. Between your workspace, laptop, smartphone, and smartwatch, you likely have a minimum of three different screens to juggle but by augmenting your vision, Bender could replace them all. Need a small, transparent notification in your peripheral vision to get your attention? Done. Need a field of vision in widescreen format to get into the details? Easy. Theres no limit to the ways Bender could augment what you see.

Probably one of the coolest and most useful ways an AI helper like Bender could be of service is by acting as the front-end entity to handle service calls and incident management. Bender would be your personal gatekeeper to gather all of the necessary background information and details of an incident, including cross-checking for similar customer or vendor reports, analyzing the IT environment for any abnormalities or recent changes, and taking care of anything else you might handle manually if you answered the call.

By the time youre engaged, Bender will have done all the heavy lifting to compile the information you need and eliminate any of the usual suspects behind a problem. You get to stay focused on tasks where you can add maximumvalue, and interruptions are fielded by an AI assistant trained in your ways and environment. And the more you use Bender, the more Bender learns to finish your sentences and anticipate how you would tackle a problem.

Eventually, this kind of AI-assisted incident management could expand to become even more contextual and proactive. Lets say, for instance, Bender wakes you up in the middle of the night with a customer emergency. Bender is well aware that, at this ungodly hour, you wont be anywhere near your computer and you wont pick up your smartphone, but you will immediately put your AR-enabled eyewear on. Bender thus briefs you on the problem via AR first, until you get to another device where you can more deeply tackle the issue.

AI companions represent an entirely new category of IT tools, going beyond monitoring, data analytics, issue tracking, or collaboration. It can become a whole new market fed by an ecosystem of other tools all augmented by person-, role-, and company-specific knowledge. The conversation surrounding AI has accelerated rapidly over the last couple of years, spinning up the latest technology bandwagon that every enterprise and its parent company is hungry to hop on but this is something to truly be excited about. This goes above and beyond the hype.

For busy professionals, AIs like Bender hold the promise of scaling ourselves, minimizing cognitive load, and allowing us to manage the increasingly complex environments in which we operate.

Abbas Haider Ali is the CTO at xMatters, an IT automation company.

Above: he Machine Intelligence Landscape. This article is part of our Artificial Intelligence series. You can download a high-resolution version of the landscape featuring 288 companies by clicking the image.

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AI is now the best friend IT ever had - VentureBeat

In BriefAstrophysicist Lord Martin Rees believes that AI could surpasshumans within a few hundred years, ushering in eons of dominationby electronic intelligent lifethe same kind of intelligent life hethinks may already exist elsewhere in the universe. Fixed to This World

Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and University of Cambridge Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics, believes that machines could surpasshumans within a few hundred years, ushering in eons of domination. He also cautions that while we will certainly discover more about the origins of biological life in the coming decades, we should recognize that alien intelligence may be electronic.

Just because theres life elsewhere doesnt mean that there is intelligent life, Lord Rees told The Conversation. My guess is that if we do detect an alien intelligence, it will be nothing like us. It will be some sort of electronic entity.

Rees thinks that there is a serious risk of a major setback of global proportions happening during this century, citing misuse of technology, bioterrorism, population growth, and increasing connectivity as problems that render humans more vulnerable now than we have ever been before. While we may be most at risk because of human activities, the ability of machines to outlast us may be a decisive factor in how life in the universe unfolds.

If we look into the future, then its quite likely that within a few centuries, machines will have taken overand they will then have billions of years ahead of them, he explains. In other words, the period of time occupied by organic intelligence is just a thin sliver between early life and the long era of the machines.

In contrast to the delicate, specific needs of human life, electronic intelligent life is well-suited to space travel and equipped to outlast many global threats that could exterminate humans.

[We] are likely to be fixed to this world. We will be able to look deeper and deeper into space, but traveling to worlds beyond our solar system will be a post-human enterprise, predicts Rees. The journey times are just too great for mortal minds and bodies. If youre immortal, however, these distances become far less daunting. That journey will be made by robots, not us.

Rees isnt alone in his ideas. Several notable thinkers, such as Stephen Hawking, agreethat artificial intelligences (AI) have the potential to wipe out human civilization. Others, such as Subbarao Kambhampati, the president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, see malicious hacking of AI as the greatest threat we face. However, there are at least as many who disagree with these ideas, with even Hawking noting the potential benefits of AI.

As we train and educate AIs, shaping them in our own image, we imbue them with the ability to form emotional attachmentsthat could deter them from wanting to hurt us. There is evidence thatthe Singularity might not be a single moment in time, but is instead a gradual process that is already happeningmeaning that we are already adapting alongside AI.

But what if Rees is correct and humans are on track to self-annihilate? If we wipe ourselves out and AI is advanced enough to survive without us, then his predictions about biological life being a relative blip on the historical landscape and electronic intelligent life going on to master the universe will have been correctbut not because AI has turned on humans.

Ultimately, the idea of electronic life being uniquely well-suited to survive and thrive throughout the universe isnt that far-fetched. The question is, will we survive alongside it?

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Eminent Astrophysicist Issues a Dire Warning on AI and Alien Life - Futurism