Veritone Inc VERI CEO Ryan Steelberg says, “Technology innovation is way ahead of the appropriate amount of controls and disciplines that governments and their regulators can devise and enforce.“
He believes that it’s up to the companies building artificial intelligence applications and software to ensure that fast-paced innovation in the sector is developed and deployed safely.
“As with all classic technologies that have evolved over time, it takes a while for government legislation and policies to catch up,” Steelberg told Benzinga’s Live Trading webcast on Tuesday.
“This is a crazy, exciting time, but it’s also wrought with concerns and risks that we all need to look into and address.”
He says that it is the responsibility of companies such as Veritone, Amazon.com Inc AMZN and Microsoft Corporation MSFT and other leaders in the development of AI and cloud services to ensure transparency.
“So, we’re picking up that mantle in what we’re calling ‘AI For Good,’ to make sure that when we introduce these tools there’s transparency. Because, we as a society, as legitimate enterprises, we deserve to use these technologies.”
He adds: “This shouldn’t just be malware in the hands of malicious people, we need these tools to advance our society and businesses, so it’s incumbent on all of us to drive that ‘AI For Good’ ethos.”
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AI Pedigree
Steelberg founded Veritone in 2014. The company is an enterprise AI solutions and software company with around 3,500 clients from both public and private sectors. Clients include sports network ESPN and film production company Sony Pictures, as well as large federal agencies such as the Department of Justice.
“We help these organizations to build, leverage and deploy AI-based workflows applications. It’s called AIWare and it’s what we launched almost going back a decade.”
Steelberg describes Veritone as one of the “original gangster AI companies,” founded well before the explosion of investor interest around anything AI-oriented.
“Our pedigree comes from where we started. Many of our rivals started as service companies or not true AI companies.
“A lot of the companies like Palantir Technologies PLTR, which are successful companies operating in a big ecosystem, have done a great job in understanding the services component, helping companies who may not have the expertise or people in house, they’ve done a great job.”
Cloud Agnostic Approach
But Steelberg believes that what sets Veritone apart is its cloud-agnostic approach. It partners with operators such as Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS, but favors neither.
“We took a different approach, building a fully functioning extensible platform that’s cloud-agnostic — it supports around 450 different fully-integrated cognitive models. So, our expertise of building these models and solutions from scratch and our cloud-agnostic approach is a big differentiator for us.”
He says the highest litmus test of the quality of its products and services is the company’s high percentile customer retention rate.
“So — once we take on a customer, we must be doing something right, because they don’t leave.”
As the market begins to mature, Steelberg believes the next wave of AI investment will focus less on the hardware suppliers such as Nvidia Corporation NVDA and more on the companies that are pressing home the advantages that deployment of AI models in business can already offer.
He says: “We’re transitioning into the application workflow base — so we need to know what the end customer is using these models for. We’re not trying to sell AI, we’re trying to leverage it to uplift and upskill people or improve on successful products and services.”
He believes that we’ll eventually see a commoditization of some of the models that seem so differentiated today.
“But I don’t believe in a single shot one-AI-is-going-to-rule-them-all — there’s going to be a need for specialized applications.”
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