Kotecki On Tech

If you work in an office, life can dramatically improve when automation takes on tedious tasks.

But what if your job is nothing but tedious tasks? And what if the tool replacing your job called itself ‘people friendly’?

“What is our obligation as automation companies?” asks Catalytic CEO Sean Chou. “What’s our moral obligation to the jobs that we are replacing?”

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His company powers practical forms of computer vision. But Neurala CEO Max Versace has a deeper vision for AI.

“For many years, I thought building AI is actually sort of building a mirror - a way in which we can look at ourselves,” he says.

“...if I can build a copy of myself but it doesn’t do exactly what I do, then the residual is actually what defines me as a human.”

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How do you sell an unbelievable AI product when people literally don’t believe it? James and Dynatrace’s Dave Anderson have a marketer-to-marketer mind meld about artificial intelligence.

“We’re selling to technology people that are quite skeptical. And often our customers will kind of go ‘that’s not AI.’ And then after awhile . . . they kind of go, ‘well, it’s either an AI or it’s magic.’”

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There will be 3.5 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs by 2021, says Bugcrowd CEO Ashish Gupta. “The reason these jobs are being unfilled . . . is that you can’t figure out how to get the right person to the right job.”

His solution? A purpose-driven platform to crowdsource skilled researchers and turn vulnerability assessment into a game.

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Digital transformation leader Dr. Kanishka Bhattacharya joins James on the main stage of the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference.

Recorded live in Cleveland, OH. Hello, Cleveland!

The technology to make realistic-looking videos imitating real people was once limited to big-budget professionals, says Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the COO and general counsel of the Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA). 

“But what we’re seeing is with the ability for virtually anyone to have the technology to do this, there’s an increasing tendency to do this without consent,” he says. 

Hollywood actors - and even you  - could unknowingly, unwillingly star in deepfake porn.

Unpacking the subscription economy and the end of ownership with Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo. He learned a thing or two about offering a subscription service as the eleventh employee of Salesforce.com.

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With a billion-dollar valuation, the security training company KnowBe4 is a newly-minted unicorn helping fight phishing attacks. It’s a moment of celebration for CEO Stu Sjouwerman amid the “never-ending arms race” against the bad guys. One emerging challenge: disturbingly realistic deepfake videos like a recent video of “Mark Zuckerberg.”

“It looks pretty good, meaning it looks pretty real, meaning it looks pretty scary because people just might get the right idea. Training people that they cannot trust what they actually see, hear on a seemingly live person saying things . . . it gets harder and harder.”

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“As a computer scientist, I firmly believe at some point, AI is going to help automate most of the tasks,” says Stratifyd CEO Derek Wang. But Wang's not predicting human-free companies. For him, AI is like a sous chef helping humans cook up complex decisions.

“Business is all about people. I don’t see people going anywhere without inserting themselves in every single step of the business.”

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If you could distill the opinions of the tech world down to a single voice, it would probably sound a lot like Gary Shapiro’s.

He’s the president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), representing over 2,200 tech companies in Washington, DC. CTA is the group behind CES, the massive, news-making tech trade show that happens every year in Las Vegas.

Gary is also the bestselling author of Ninja Future: Secrets to Success in the New World of Innovation, which was a springboard for our conversation.

Like CES itself, we covered a lot of ground, including:

• If every company is a tech company, what does “tech” even mean? (1:46)
• Differences in European, American, and Chinese tech policy (3:28)
• Are AI’s data requirements at odds with western ideals? (6:29)
• The life-changing potential benefits of AI (8:00)
• The reality of working with the Trump administration (9:06)
• The “techlash” from the left and and right (13:32)
• How innovation could save humanity (18:29)

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