IAM1296 – Scientist Runs a Hyper-Personalised Cognitive Learning Program

Peter Voss, a Pioneer in AI who coined the term ‘Artificial General Intelligence’ and the CEO and Chief Scientist at Aigo.ai. For the past 15 years, Voss and his team at Aigo have been perfecting an industry disruptive, highly intelligent, and hyper-personalized Chatbot, with a brain, for large enterprise customers.

• CEO Story: Started as an electronics engineer providing specialized electronic equipment to the industry in his first business. Fell in love with programming which turned into a software company and developed a comprehensive ERP software package that grew from the garage to 400 people and did the IPO. Then he studied for 5 years on Intelligence and built his AI company.
• Business Service: Hyper-Personalised chatbot customer service just like a concierge assistant. That has a deep understanding, learning, and reasoning.
• Secret Sauce: Fundamental approach of using quality data. A program that has a cognitive engine.
• CEO Hack: Having a good partner in business – trusted and dedicated to the success of the company with competence in an important area.
• CEO Nugget: Start your own company early. The sooner you start and get experience the better.
• CEO Defined: Responsible for the people and the success of the company. Responsible for the customer satisfaction and finances. And have the vision. The character of the company is very much influenced by the character of the CEO.

Website: aigo.ai

Twitter: Aigo.ai

LinkedIn: VossPeter

YouTube: Aigo_ai

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Transcription

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00:16 – Intro 

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, start-ups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00:43 – Gresham Harkless 

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Peter Voss of Aigo.ai. That's A-I-G-O.ai. Peter, it's great to have you on the show.

00:55 – Peter Voss 

Yeah. Thanks for having me.

00:56 – Gresham Harkless 

Yeah. Super excited to have you on and hear about all the awesome things that you're doing and the impact that you're having. Before we do that, I wanted to read a little bit more about Peter so you can hear about some of those awesome things. Peter is a pioneer in AI who coined the term Artificial General Intelligence and is the CEO and Chief Scientist at Aigo.ai. For the past 15 years, Voss and his team at Aigo have been perfecting an industry-disruptive, highly intelligent, and hyper-personalized Chatbot, with a brain for large enterprise customers. Peter, love to hear all the awesome work that you're doing, and the innovation that you're having. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO Community?

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01:30 – Peter Voss 

Yes. Absolutely.

01:35 – Gresham Harkless 

Awesome. Well, let's make it happen then. So to kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit, hear a little bit more about how you guys started, and what I like to call your CEO Story.

01:43 – Peter Voss 

Yes. Certainly. Let me go back a little bit from when I started, my first business. I started out electronics engineer and started a company to provide, specialized electronic equipment to the industry. Then I fell in love with programming, and my company turned very rapidly into a software company. I developed an ERP, comprehensive ERP software package, and the company grew very nicely from the garage to 400 people, and we did an IPO. So that was super exciting. Love to do that again.

So, that was my really first business experience which was quite intense. When I exited that company, I had sort of enough time on my hands to say, alright. What big project do I wanna tackle? And what occurred to me is that software really isn't very smart. In fact, the software is quite dumb. If the programmer didn't think of some particular situation, it'll just give you an error message or crash. There's no common sense. There's no reasoning. There's no learning. So how can we solve that?

So I took off 5 years to study intelligence to really deeply understand what is intelligence, what makes human intelligence so special, how children learn, and what IQ tests measure to truly deeply understand intelligence. Of course, I studied the work that had been done in the field of AI. The combination of that was that I came up with a design for sort of, a thinking machine that would be able to think and learn and reason the way humans do.

So in 2001, I then launched my first, AI company. For several years, we were just in R and D mode, basically, building various prototypes, and exploring different designs, based on the theories that I've developed. In 2008, we then launched fully commercially in the call center space, basically automating call center calls intelligently or at least more intelligently than others. Typically, when I talk to people about it, they say, oh, yeah. I hate it when I call into a company and I talk to a robot and it's just a terrible experience or even press three for sales and four for that kind of thing. So we managed to develop a system that actually gives a much, much better experience.

I ended up also exiting that company, selling that company, and then basically went back to another round of development to really focus on increasing the IQ of the system substantially because we're still a long way from human-level intelligence. So, we spent another few years in the development cycle. Then 2 years ago, we launched commercially with Aigo.ai. We're offering a chatbot with a brain as opposed to all of the other chatbots out there that don't have a brain.

04:51 – Gresham Harkless 

Yes. As we know, having a brain is definitely something that's insanely important. But I appreciate you telling your story and the process that you went through and even how you went through and took that time to study intelligence. I think we see all the awesome things that you've been able to create and build. Often, what I love about hearing stories is you don't hear the behind-the-scenes. You don't hear about the 5 years that you took to looking at and studying intelligence in order to build that second company. Then, of course, I'm sure that helps influence the work that you're doing today.

05:20 – Peter Voss 

Yes, absolutely. Once one is successful, it always seems sort of instantaneous. But often, there are many, many years of effort, struggles, failures, and so on. That sort of just gets lost in the story, of having a company, obviously, one can start a company with the goal of just being successful at having a company, and that's fine. But, for me, I've always wanted to have something that I'm personally really totally engaged with, that is really important to me because a lot of my business life is my life. I enjoy it. I love it. That's the way I like to run a company is to really have a mission that I believe in, which makes it easier to also attract partners and staff that enjoy what they're doing and it's not just a job.

06:18 – Gresham Harkless 

Yeah, absolutely. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more, hear a little bit more about how the company works, how you're making that impact, and how it helps to have that brain with the clients that you're working with.

06:30 – Peter Voss 

Yes. One of the examples I can give, one of our big clients is 1-800 Flowers. And the owners of the company basically came to us later. Actually heard a podcast where I spoke about, a chatbot with a brain and how we can really provide intelligent, hyper-personalized conversation. They've had this idea for their incredibly innovative company. They had this idea five, or six years ago, how can they provide sort of a concierge, a hyper-personalized concierge service to their customers? They go back to when we started the business.

We were a little sharp. We knew all of our customers. We knew what kind of things they liked, who they bought gifts for, what the occasions were, and so on. They want to try and have that kind of customer service, that personalized service. They tried to do this with some of the sort of leading, technology companies to implement a chatbot. Basically, that would be the concierge assistant. They just couldn't get it to work. They threw a lot of money at it. The reason for that is that current chatbots use a very simple flowchart-type thing. You ask this question and then you expect an answer to that, then you go down a decision. You either ask this question or some other question. That's not very satisfying to a person. It's one size fits all and you have to force down this path of conversation.

So, with our technology, there really is a cognitive engine that understands, listens to you, understands the meaning of what you're trying to achieve, and also learns your preferences. So if you say, I want to buy a birthday, I wanna buy some chocolate as a birthday gift for my niece, Amy. The system will now learn that you have a niece called Amy who has a birthday coming up and who likes chocolate. And all of that information is potentially available, later on in the conversation.

If you call back a day later, say, oh, I need to change the order, she really doesn't like white chocolate, or whatever. So you have that deep understanding, learning, and reasoning, which enables, a much, much better experience and obviously, customer loyalty. You don't have to wait for an agent. There's no wait time to talk to Aigo. So there are just tremendous advantages in having that. It's really fantastic to see how we are working with large companies to do this deep integration. Of course, with their back-end system, our AIGO can basically have all the relevant information available.

09:34 – Gresham Harkless 

Nice. I absolutely love that. So I want to ask you now for what I call your Secret Sauce, this could be for yourself, the business, or a combination of both, but you might have already touched on this. What do you feel is, your secret sauce?

09:45 – Peter Voss 

From a technical point of view, there's something very clear. You mentioned in the introduction that I coined the term Artificial General Intelligence, actually together with two other people in 2001, the sort of the secret sauce of why we can do what we can do technically is that our approach is fundamentally different from what everybody else is doing. Now our approach is basically to spend tens of millions of dollars and many, many years to develop this cognitive engine that has the knowledge on how to hold a conversation, how to greet somebody, what the relationship is between people, and has a certain amount of common sense knowledge on how to handle different situations.

That really puts us in a completely different realm and gives us the ability to do things that we can't. Now there are deeper technical secrets as well that we have secret sauce. But, really, fundamentally, the approach is not just using big data statistical systems where kind of just a number. You're just a statistic. But using this, so the quality of data is important for us, not the quantity.

11:02 – Gresham Harkless 

Nice. I love that and I appreciate you breaking that down so much. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanna just switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO Hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have. But what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

11:17 – Peter Voss 

Well, I'm constantly looking at ways of becoming more effective and efficient. I think I don't have a sort of a particular book that I can point to. I've read many different books and sort of picked up different things from different books. But I think the biggest help for me over the years has been having a good partner in business, a co-founder, or somebody who comes into the company who really feels like an owner. They may not have five, ten, or 20% of the company, or they may have 50% of the company.

Really have been able to, it's lonely at the top, basically being able to have a trusted partner in the business who also is totally dedicated to the success of the company and who obviously has competence in an important area, whether that's sales, marketing or technical. It can be more than one partner. But, having one or two partners in the business, I think, is just extremely helpful to run a business.

12:34 – Gresham Harkless 

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO Nugget. So there's a little bit more of a word of wisdom or piece of advice. You might have already touched on this, but I usually say it might be something you would tell your favorite client. Or if you hacked into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

12:49 – Peter Voss 

Yeah. The time machine sort of advice I give younger people who are interested in becoming entrepreneurs is I think that we're looking back, the biggest mistake I think I've made is that I started my first company at 25. I should have started 10 years earlier.

13:07 – Gresham Harkless 

There you go.

13:08 – Peter Voss 

I actually started work at 16, but I worked for various companies and obviously learned a lot. But it's so different running your own company and the kind of things you learn. There's nothing like actually doing it. Of course, you could be doing it part-time while you're studying or while you have a job. But starting your own company or being a partner in a start-up, early on just, teaches you, and there's nothing like actually doing it.

So that would be my one piece of advice if that's kind of the career path you want to take of being a top entrepreneur. I think the sooner you start and get experience the better. Management is hard and learning how to make decisions and how to deal with people, different people, of course, customers, and vendors.

14:06 – Gresham Harkless 

Absolutely appreciate that. I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different, quote, unquote, CEOs on the show. So, Peter, what does being a CEO mean to you?

14:17 – Peter Voss 

I'm responsible for the success of the company. I'm responsible for the people who work with the company, and I'm responsible for customer satisfaction. I'm responsible for finances, ultimately. That's what I see as a CEO. To have the vision, the leadership, the vision has to come from the CEO. I think the character of the company is very much influenced by the character of the CEO on how passionate they are about it, and how much of a vision they have or not. It's both a responsibility and I think the vision and leadership and character.

15:01 – Gresham Harkless 

Just definitely appreciate that definition. I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do now was pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and, of course, how best people can get a hold of you and find about all the awesome things you and team are working on.

15:16 – Peter Voss 

Yeah. The easiest way to get a hold of me is through the website, aigo.ai. Actually, a number of articles that I've written are both linked on the website, but also they're on medium.com. So you can find me, Peter Voss. I'm on LinkedIn, Twitter, and so on. You could just email me, at peter@aigo.ai. Always happy to talk to people who are interested in, bringing in more intelligence to the world.

15:46 – Gresham Harkless 

Yes, absolutely. There's definitely a place for more and more intelligence in so many different aspects. I definitely appreciate you for doing that. We will have the links and information in the show notes as well too so that everybody can follow up with you. But thank you so much again, my friend, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:00 –  Peter Voss 

Thank you. It was a pleasure. Thank you.

16:04 – Outro 

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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