This week, the SphereCast team speaks with Michael Kohen, Co-Founder and CEO at SparkAI. Kohen’s impressive resume includes senior-level experience at Zoox — an AI-powered autonomous vehicle company that was eventually acquired by Amazon. In his career, Kohen has learned that, though an automation product may have loads of momentum, it always slows down before market deployment as the team perfects the machine learning algorithms. SparkAI partners with companies to push their automation products past the finish line and get to market faster.

Having been on the front lines of automation product development, Kohen is intimately familiar with these development pains. However, as with every good entrepreneur, Kohen has created an innovative solution to meet a real market need. On the podcast, Michael dives into SparkAI and the benefit his company brings its clients and also discusses the freedom of spending your life in a job that you truly love.

Noteworthy Quotes:

"With automation products, it's seemingly easy to make early progress that lets you get in front of your first customers. Show some demos; show some progress. But it's really that back part — the back 10 percent of that automation challenge — that's very difficult."

"It's interesting. Both my cofounder and I had a front-row seat to the promise and excitement of automation and robots. But we also had a front-row seat to some of the challenges and frustrations of what it took to get to market."

"The most successful career paths are the ones where people can look back and say, 'Listen, I was doing the thing that I would have been doing if this was the last day of the universe.'"

"In our careers, at the end of the day, all of us are figuring this stuff out for the first time. And we're learning things along the way — in many cases, the hard way. But over time, each of things we learn — those experiences we have — make us better people and make us better professionals."

"Ultimately, you need to find that thing that you are absolutely passionate — that keeps you up at night... when you find that thing and throw yourself at it, you will inherently be successful. You will work harder. Think faster. Think better and more broadly about that problem because you are deeply attached to it."

"The greatest successes that I've had in choosing what my next moves are are the times when I've let my decisions be guided by the things I deeply care about and the things that inspire me. And, frankly, the things that I find myself still thinking about after hours, when I'm not on the clock."

Bullet List of Resources – 

Michael Kohen

• LinkedIn

SparkAI

• Company Website

LinkedIn

Ever wonder what goes into developing an AI-powered product?

A lot of joy. A lot of heartache.