Talla Inc. has developed a bot platform with the ability to perform mundane tasks typically done by the HR department. The longterm goal, says CEO Rob May is “creating digital workers.” He also talks to James about his involvement in Half Court Ventures and in the space of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency. 

TRANSCRIPT:

James West:     Rob, thanks for joining me today.

Rob May:     Yeah, thanks for having me.

James West:     Rob, let’s talk a bit about what you’re up to in the world of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency. What is it that you’re doing?

Rob May:     Yeah, so Talla is actually one of the few companies playing in both of those worlds. So we started about two years ago and we built a bot platform that has the long-term goal of building digital workers. We did that through two things: Number one, we created a knowledge base which you can think of as the bot’s brain. So you put all your corporate documentations, all your policies and procedures and that kind of information, into this knowledge base, and you can use it like a regular knowledge base; you can just access articles and create articles the way you would, confluence or anything else.

But the difference is, the bots that you can deploy around it also know what’s in the knowledge base. So, for example, if you were to onboard a new employee and you write the information they need to know to be onboarded, you can define how that information gets dripped out to them through a bot. so you might have a bot say hey, on Day Two you need to know this thing, and on Day Three you need to know this block of content and fill out this form, and stuff like that. And these bots get smarter as they interact with your organization. So they learn when content is going out of date, they learn how content is related to each other, we can build knowledge graphs sort of behind this stuff, and you know, so we’ve had paying customers for that for a while, and that’s been a good product for us.

But what’s happened is, we realized that people were starting to deploy more and more bots in these organizations, and these bots were doing more and more types of work, and what’s coming is that these bots are going to start being deployed with reinforcement working models, which are models that learn and change over time. So now you have this problem of these sort of like pseudo-digital workers in your organization who are going to get smarter and change – how do you know what they’re doing when they’re talking to people, to your customers, to employees, or when the bots are talking to each other, how do you know what’s going on there?

And so we saw this as a great opportunity to store what’s happening here in a special way on Blockchain, because the beautiful thing about Blockchain is that it’s immutable. And so we chose the Ethereum Blockchain, and it launched a product, a network really, called Botchain. It’s a cryptographic layer that sits on top of this and manages a whole bunch of interactions for bots of all kinds – related to work, makes them auditable, and forces compliance and different stuff like that.

James West:     This is a complicated proposition. I mean, it’s technology on top of technology. So at the end of the day what this is doing is essentially making workflows more efficient in the corporate level while adding the immutability and certainty of transaction on top of it through the Blockchain Ethereum?

Rob May:     Yes, right. So Talla’s core product is focused on the former there. And the network that we’ve launched,