Michael Louis, CEO and Founder at Cerebrium. Cerebrium is a platform to deploy machine learning models to serverless GPUs with sub-5 second cold-start times.

Episode Highlights:

- Michael Louis started OneCart, a grocery delivery platform in South Africa, which saw explosive growth during COVID-19, scaling to $200K/day in revenue before being acquired by Walmart.
- After leaving Walmart, Michael founded Cerebrium to simplify AI infrastructure, inspired by the challenges of deploying machine learning models at OneCart.
- Cerebrium optimizes AI inference with GPU checkpointing, direct disk-to-GPU data transfer, and efficient container runtimes, reducing latency and compute costs by ~40%.
- Michael advises startups to validate AI use cases with OpenAI before committing to fine-tuning or custom models, emphasizing usability and business impact over technical complexity.
- He predicts AI will shift company expenses from salaries to compute costs, with voice AI and automation leading the next wave of adoption.

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Connect with Michael Louis:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-louis-94104a113/
https://www.cerebrium.ai/

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Simrat Singh, Co-Founder at Hooman Labs. Hooman Labs a startup building voice agents to help companies communicate with their customers over calls more efficiently.

Episode Highlights:
- From consulting at McKinsey to private equity, Simrat realized he wanted a more hands-on role in building businesses, leading him to co-found Hooman Labs.
- After exploring edtech and healthcare, Simrat and his co-founders pivoted to voice AI, recognizing a strong demand from companies struggling with call center inefficiencies.
- Hooman Labs’ approach focuses on automating 80% of customer interactions end-to-end, integrating directly with CRMs and backend systems to resolve issues without human intervention.
- Unlike Western markets where cost savings are the primary driver, Indian businesses prioritize efficiency, workforce stability, and improved customer experience over just reducing costs.
- Simrat emphasizes that AI startups don’t need deep technical expertise but rather a clear understanding of how to solve real business problems using existing AI tools, prompt engineering, and API integrations.

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Connect with Simrat Singh:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/simratsingh96/
https://hoomanlabs.com/

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/

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Pablo Palafox, Co-Founder and CEO at HappyRobot. HappyRobot automates communication across channels with AI workers that integrates with your systems, manage conversations, & log data.

Episode Highlights:
-Pablo reflects on their journey, sharing how initial failures and setbacks, such as focusing too much on computer vision, led to critical insights and a deeper understanding of the logistics sector.

-He also highlights the importance of pivoting in their journey, discussing how embracing change during pivotal moments, like Demo Day, helped him find their true passion for automating communications in logistics.

-Drawing inspiration from co-founder Javi’s direct experience in logistics, they identified a key pain point: the need for streamlining and automating communications for freight brokers and carriers, which became the foundation of their platform.

- Pablo also shares how they built around AI’s strengths, automating repetitive tasks to enhance productivity and operational efficiency, while leaving complex decision-making to humans.

-He emphasizes the customer-centric approach they’ve taken, continuously refining their platform based on feedback from the logistics sector to ensure real-world value and address genuine business pain points.

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Connect with Pablo Palafox:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/pablorpalafox/
https://www.happyrobot.ai/

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/

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Vaibhav Saxena, Co-Founder at Infer, is our first guest to make a second appearance on the AI Minds Podcast. Infer are a company which accelerates revenue growth with AI voice bots automating phone conversations and executing tasks like humans for insurance and lending.

Episode Highlights:
- Vaibhav explains how tailoring voice agents to user preferences—such as tone, pitch, and cadence—can significantly enhance engagement and conversion rates.

- Vaibhav highlights the importance of testing one variable at a time, such as voice characteristics or script style, to uncover what resonates most with different customer segments.

- Vaibhav discusses how factors like age, location, and user behavior influence voice preferences, enabling more effective and relatable interactions.

- Vaibhav Introducing natural speech imperfections like "ahs" and "ums" makes voice agents feel more human and relatable, addressing the common criticism of robotic interactions.

- Vaibhav shares his aspiration for a future where voice agents intuitively understand and adapt to individual user preferences, creating seamless and empathetic customer experiences.

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Connect with Vaibhav Saxena:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vaibsite/
https://www.infer.so/

Connect with Demetrios:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/

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Abdulrahman Jamjoom, Co-Founder and CEO at Arini AI.
Arini is the complete AI solution for patient communication in Dental.

Episode Highlights:
- Abdul shares his journey from Saudi Arabia to Jordan and then to the U.S., recounting his experiences at Threads and his determination to create a startup before even graduating from Harvard, which eventually led him to co-found Arini AI.

- Abdul discusses the origins of Arini AI, explaining how he and his co-founder, Rami, identified the chaotic nature of healthcare front desks as an opportunity to create an AI solution that would streamline patient communication, starting with the dental sector.

- Abdul dives into the innovative AI solution Arini AI offers, focusing on its ability to handle scheduling, rescheduling, confirming, and canceling appointments by analyzing phone calls and text messages, reducing the burden on dental office staff and enhancing patient satisfaction.

- Abdul talks about the technical challenges of building scalable AI systems, highlighting the complexities involved in managing interruptions, minimizing latency, and ensuring accurate transcription, particularly in sensitive contexts such as insurance data.

- Abdul emphasizes the importance of user experience in AI interactions, sharing how small adjustments like asking for a caller’s name early in the conversation can significantly boost patient confidence and lead to higher conversion rates in the AI system's success.

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Connect with Abdulrahman Jamjoom:
https://x.com/abduljamjoom
https://www.linkedin.com/in/abduljamjoom
https://www.arini.ai/

Connect with Demetrios:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/

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https://deepgram.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/deepgram
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Sumanyu Sharma, Co-Founder and CEO at Hamming AI, the platform automates AI voice agent testing, production call monitoring and governance for AI voice agents. The army of voice AI agents act like real people and place thousands of test calls simultaneously to find bugs, hallucinations and other issues often missed during manual testing.

Episode Highlights
-Sumanyu shares his journey from studying at Waterloo to pioneering in AI, recounting how early struggles shaped his ambition and eventually led him to co-found Hamming.

-Sumanyu discusses his insights from Citizen app, exploring how transcribing 911 calls into real-time safety alerts inspired his focus on building reliable and trusted voice agents.

-Sumanyu dives into the unique difficulties of deploying voice agents in scenarios like drive-thru, emphasizing the need for reliability amidst poor audio quality, slang, and fast-paced interactions.

-Sumanyu highlights the importance of guardrails for voice agents, referencing notable failures like Air Canada's chatbot incident and sharing Hamming's mission to ensure dependable voice AI systems.

-Sumanyu predicts the rise of voice interactions over text, explaining Hamming's vision for self-healing, reliable voice agents that minimize human intervention and improve over time.

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Connect with Sumanyu Sharma:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sumanyusharma/
https://hamming.ai/

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/

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Vaibhav Saxena, Co-Founder at Infer, a company which accelerates revenue growth with AI voice bots automating phone conversations and executing tasks like humans for insurance and lending.

Episode Highlights
-Vaibhav Saxena shares his journey from being an architect to diving deep into AI, inspired by a passion for interdisciplinary learning and a leap of faith into engineering and deep learning.

-Vaibhav recounts how frustrations with consuming and searching for audio information during the pandemic led to creating a semantic audio search product and the challenges they faced with user alignment and scalability.

-Vaibhav explains how repetitive queries in insurance calls inspired Infer current focus on lead qualification voice agents, simplifying complex insurance terminology and boosting conversion rates.

-Vaibhav highlights the importance of transparency when deploying AI, sharing insights into customer behavior when interacting with voice agents and the evolving trust in AI technology.

-Vaibhav discusses Infer vision for automating insurance sales with AI-driven voice agents and their efforts to balance AI innovation with human-like consultation for better user experience.

------------------------------------------------
Connect with Vaibhav Saxena:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vaibsite/
https://www.infer.so/

Connect with Demetrios:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/

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Oren Goldschmidt is co-founder and CEO of Mova.ai which is focused on helping companies understand what really goes on when they have conversations with their customers. Oren has been building software startups since high school but took a few years out to get a PhD before diving back into the startup scene. He’s launched and sold several startups and spent a few years as a VC before deciding that building great businesses is more fun than finding them.

Episode Highlights
-Oren shares his journey from studying computer science to pursuing philosophy, a decision driven by his desire for a more engaging experience, and how it led him back to entrepreneurship.

-Oren describes how Engage provided a scalable solution for banks to offer personal banking services, revolutionizing customer experience by assigning customers to dedicated bankers.

-Inspired by challenges in scaling meaningful customer relationships, Oren explains how Mova AI was created to provide deep conversational analytics, transforming customer service insights.

-Oren discusses how Mova AI leverages AI to analyze calls, identify patterns, and improve agent performance, enabling organizations to understand and address specific customer pain points effectively.

-Oren reflects on the evolving role of AI in enhancing agent training, optimizing processes, and even enabling use cases like clinical note-taking, all while maintaining context-aware and actionable insights.

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Connect with Oren Goldschmidt:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ogoldschmidt/
https://www.mova.ai/

Connect with Demetrios:
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Karun Kaushik, Co-Founder and CEO at Delve. Delve helps fast-growing companies get SOC 2 and HIPAA compliant in days, not months.

Episode Highlights
-Dropping out of high school and college, Karun shares how taking community college classes and conducting research at MIT shaped his entrepreneurial path.

-Karun describes how building a healthcare AI scribe led to discovering the complexities of compliance, sparking the idea for Delve.

-Delve automates HIPAA and SoC2 compliance processes with AI agents, aiming to make security seamless and scalable for startups.

-Karun discusses the challenge of balancing innovation and regulation in AI and regulated industries, envisioning AI-first compliance solutions.

-Lessons in Startups: Karun shares insights on overcoming challenges, learning from missteps, and the importance of persistence and innovation in building Delve.

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Connect with Karun Kaushik:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/karun-kaushik/
https://www.getdelve.com/

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Aaron Wang, Co-founder and CEO of Apriora, on Revolutionizing Hiring with AI. Aaron Wang shares his journey from academia and AI research at Facebook to founding Apriora, a company transforming hiring through autonomous AI recruiters. He discusses the inefficiencies of traditional recruitment, the rise of agentic AI, and Apriora’s innovative solutions.

Episode Highlights
-Aaron’s transition from working on smart glasses and self-supervised learning at Facebook to starting Apriora, inspired by the rapid advances in AI.

-Apriora automates 70-90% of hiring tasks, including resume screening, scheduling, and interviewing, using AI-driven voice and video agents.

-Aaron highlights the adversarial nature of modern hiring, with both candidates and employers using AI tools, and how Apriora helps companies stay ahead.

-Apriora serves large companies handling high-volume applications, helping them quickly identify and engage top candidates.

-Aaron predicts a shift towards AI agents transforming recruitment, making it faster, fairer, and more efficient for all parties.

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Connect with Aaron Wang
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronjwang/

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