The Xs and Os of building and enduring, high ROI AI product | Babak Hodjat, Cognizant
This episode is action packed with advice on standing up a commercially viable AI product. Our guest, Babak Hodjat (CTO of AI, Cognizant), is an incredibly successful AI founder with multiple successful exits. Lucky for us, he also touches on some of his failures and challenges faced when building AI. This is a must listen for anyone building AI products or teams internally. If you are inspired by this episode, be sure to go check out Babak’s new book “The Konar and the Apple”. If your company is looking to scale it’s AI initiatives, head over to Tesoro AI (www.tesoroai.com) – experts in AI strategy, staff augmentation, and AI product development. Timestamps: 2:00 Babak’s experiences as a serial AI entrepreneur | Inspiring the natural language tech behind Siri 6:49 How Babak’s startup caught the interest of Marc Benioff and Sybase 8:52 A hedge fund innovator | Why AI has played a large role in stock market/trading related use cases 14:32 Babak’s role as CTO of AI at Cognizant | moving from research to commercial products 16:28 Measuring the impact/ROI of AI when feedback is not immediate 21:00 A starting point for making AI-driven decisions when there is little data 24:42 Unexpected challenges and opportunities when AI and humans work together 26:40 AI is not about big data, it’s about good data 31:40 How startups with no data can build a differentiated AI-native product 34:05 How your approach to delivering an AI prediction can be your sustainable competitive advantage 39:20 Identifying AI talent that can translate knowledge from academia to pragmatic problem solving 44:32 Check out Babak’s new book! The Konar and the Apple