i3 - January/February 2018 - 42

developer, sees AI's value on several
levels. "Personalization will be ubiquitous and show up in ways we cannot
yet imagine," he says, adding that
"customer experience will be the focus
of all innovation."
The PocketConfidant AI system
offers "a conversational system to
support individuals as they navigate
personal, professional or academic
transitions, helping them develop the
competencies they need to enhance
their critical thinking and problemsolving skills, become more resilient and self-confident." He says
PocketConfidant can "respond with
empathy and smart questions that
get to the heart of the challenge the
user is facing to help them find their
own solutions. AI will become a complement of human beings, not
a replacement," Malafronte says.
Knowmail, based in Woburn, MA,
uses the phrase "We've heard you hate
email, so we fixed it!" to describe its AI
focus. The venture capital-backed
startup builds personalized and anonymized user profiles through data collected from communications services
and device sensors to identify a customer's communication patterns,
social preferences, timetables, favorites
(people/topics), narratives and preferred actions. From this data, it prepares a prediction about each email or
message's priority, urgency, estimated
handling time and next-best-action.
CEO/Founder Haim Senior says
Knowmail combines cognitive analytics and advanced human-to-computer
interfaces, which are being used in
"several joint developments with major
tech companies to further improve our
service and offering to users and businesses." He says Knowmail softwareas-a-service (SaaS) reaches customers
at more than 4,000 companies. Its
initial market is firms with more than
200 employees, where it is used "to
increase productivity, save time and
improve engagement."
The three-year-old company uses
"cognitive research, neural network and
online learning methods to compose
our personalized artificial intelligence
(PAI) engine," Senior explains. He lists
"trust, privacy and loyalty" as critical
challenges for AI to succeed.
42

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018

LEARNING AI LINGO
In the rapidly evolving AI ecosystem, new terms pop up for technologies
and products. Here are some of the fundamental factors.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Software and systems
that perceive an environment
and take actions that mimic
cognitive functions of human
minds, such as learning and
problem solving. Sometimes
called "cognitive computing."

COMPUTER VISION
OR MACHINE VISION
Emulating the human visual
system to view and interpret
digital images; it includes
image processing, pattern/
facial recognition and image
understanding.

DEEP LEARNING
A branch of machine
learning for building and
training neural networks,
allowing network layers to
find patterns in the output
of higher layers.

BIG
SPENDING
FOR AI
A McKinsey & Co. analysis
of 2016 corporate investments
in AI identified the major
categories of current spending
worldwide. (In billions)
Machine learning
Computer vision
Natural language
Autonomous vehicles
Smart robotics
Virtual agents

$5.0 - 7.0
$2.5 - 3.5
$0.6 - 0.9
$0.3 - 0.5
$0.3 - 0.5
$0.1 - 0.2

SOURCE: McKinsey & Company,
Artificial Intelligence: The Next Digital Frontier?

At Deepmind, an AI company that Google acquired in 2014, one of the
key projects is Deepmind Health, which is working with medical clinicians
to provide more accurate analyses and enable patients to get faster treatment.
In initial trials, nurses said that the AI functions are saving them more
than two hours per day, meaning they can spend more time with other patients.
One goal of the AI process is to empower patients to care for themselves
and their families' health.
In a similar vein, GetWell.ai, a stealth-mode startup, is using speech recognition and natural language in its AI venture, aimed at helping people monitor
and treat chronic health conditions. And IBM's Watson AI system took just
10 minutes to analyze a brain cancer patient's genome and suggest a treatment
plan compared to 160 hours for human experts to make a comparable plan.
An AI system is being used to fight counterfeiting, initially focused
on the $900 billion luxury goods sector. Entrupy is a hardware-enabled
SaaS company that uses computer vision algorithms and microscopy to
identify counterfeit luxury products from brands such as Louis Vuitton,
Chanel and Hermès. The two-year-old company has authenticated $14 million
worth of goods using a deep learning-driven database with millions of
I T I S I N N O VAT I O N

http://www.GetWell.ai

i3 - January/February 2018

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