Jordi Torras shares his insights on NLP and Customer behavior.
1. Tell us how you came to be the CEO at Inbenta. How much of your typical day is involved in innovating AI tech for your customers?
I am the founder of the company, and this is how I became also CEO. We have now an excellent team of specialists in AI and semantic technologies, but indeed I like to keep a foot on how the technology is unfolding and what our customers use Inbenta and how new use cases can be deployed with our Natural Language Processing architecture.
2. What are the applications or rather opportunities you seek to have with your product?
The strategy we are implementing in 2021 is to carefully identify how our customers are using our platform. As we try to present Inbenta as a platform upon which customers can implement different use cases, we are now trying to see what common implementations among customers can help us to define vertical solutions that, on one hand can help us extend our business with other clients, but also can help guide what are the challenge that our platform should be able to solve.
3. How did you define the vision of Inbenta? How did you approach your first 100 days as the CEO at Inbenta?
The vision for Inbenta is to produce the best NLP technology, the one that will make interacting with computers indistinguishable from humans, and that will revolutionize the way we use technology and interact with organizations.
As per the second questions, these first 100 days are long gone now! What I remember from these days is that I slept like a baby: I woke up every 2 hours and cried J
4. What are some of the unique lessons you have learnt from analysing your customer behaviour?
As company in the technology space, the user journey is equally important than innovation or uniqueness of the technology. We have seen a shift in the power of corporate buyers, from managers and executives towards final users. Even when an executive might take the decision to buy a particular technology, the decision will not sustain much long if the user experience is not exquisite with all corporate and non-corporate users. Therefore UX/UI is a crucial part of any technology that wants to persist and grow sustainably.
5. What are some of the distinctive features of Inbenta? And how do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?
Inbenta uses a particular kind of AI that we come to call “Symbolic”. Instead of using brute-force machine learning algorithms, Inbenta relies on extended computational linguistics and semantic analysis to produce results. With that, we help our customers dramatically reduce the “Time to Value” of our product, as the amount of training data that is required to obtain smart answers is reduced to practically zero.
6. Inbenta recently announced partnership with IntelePeer. Can you elaborate more on the same?
One of the interesting things that IntelePeer has built is a meta-definition of customer interaction. It allows for companies to define user dialogs throughout different channels and workflows. For example, you can have calling over the phone, having an intelligent conversation AI take care of the call using Text2Speech and Inbenta, and if the conversation is not solved, it can pass the call to an specialized call canter agent. That makes integration of Inbenta with other systems basically a drag & drop operation on a screen.
7. What are some of the common pain points that your customers commonly approach you with?
Vast majority of our customers deal with an overflow of user emails, chats and calls. As they try to handle these interactions the best way possible, they also realize that many of those could actually be automated.The real problem is that users cannot find the right answer at the right time, so our NLP comes really handy when it comes to make sure that every user will find the required information by searching with their own words, or by having a natural conversation with an efficient AI.
8. What advice would you like to give to the upcoming AI-based tech start-ups?
There’s been an incredibly hype the expectations on where AI and machine learning can take us now adays. These overinflated expectations make difficult for new start-ups to present realistic projects that add value to customer. Therefore, my advice would be to make sure they build their MVP around tangible cases that work with minimum training data required.
9. Can you give us a sneak peek into some of the upcoming product upgrades that your customers can look forward to?
Our aim is to provide an AI that can essentially be as efficient as a human call center agent would be. For that, our AI needs to be able to digest a big deal of information from different sources quickly and transparently. We are working now on an update that will these solutions really easy, stay tuned!
10. Which is the one AI breakthrough you will be on the lookout for in the upcoming year?
We have seen the development of advanced machine learning algorithms that are great at digesting data and creating statistical models about the logic behind that data. What current AI is today unable to do -despite multiple claims from different vendors, all unsubstantiated- is comprehend language, to understand from an abstract point of view, and reach conclusions independently. In order to achieve that, we need a much Symbolic AI that is able to work efficiently with symbolic representations as humans do, not just dealing merely with numeric data.
11. What is the one leadership motto you live by?
“Say what you think, think what you say.”
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Jordi Torras
Founder and CEO at Inbenta
Jordi Torras leads a multi award winning technology firm that has doubled in size year on-year, since 2005, he helps clients increase the efficiency of their Call Centre, Ecommerce and Social Media platforms through incorporating Natural Language Search technology They help them by driving down the cost of their customer interaction, while increasing online revenues is the panacea for today’s customer service and online management executives.With leading-edge Natural Language Search technology that their company, Inbenta, has been developing since 2005, he now helps organizations such as Burger King, Citibank & Ingersoll Rand reach this panacea!
