Sonny Patel is the 25-year-old CEO and founder of Insurmi, a conversational-AI powered customer engagement platform for insurance carriers. But it's the human story behind the company that both resonated and inspired me.

While working as a sales director and financial advisor at a local life insurance company, Sonny realized the process of buying and selling insurance was unnecessarily cumbersome and outdated. He went to work to develop a solution that would simplify and take the guesswork out of the insurance buying process.

Today, Insurmi is being used by a number of top-tier global insurance carriers, including several from the Fortune 500, to not only easily generate new business online but also streamline customer claims and deliver excellent customer service through conversational AI. In September, he secured $1M to grow his team at Insurmi's headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona.

In today's episode, Sonny shares his journey and what he believes it takes to disrupt a legacy industry. We also discuss the challenges he's faced as a 25-year-old in a relatively "grown-up" sector. Finally, we talk about why he believes AI is the future of insurance, and how other industries can leverage it for sales, customer engagement, and save costs.

Art+Logic's Bob Bajoras has noticed something interesting often happens when clients first lay out a problem they hope the software team can solve: "They'll present the problem in the form of the solution," he notes. "We then get to ask, 'Why do you want to do that? What's the problem you want to solve?' What they're suggesting will work, but with our understanding of what can be done with software, we often realize we could do more than just that. This leads us to a solution that does more than expected."

The recent news that Amazon, Apple, and Google are working together to create a new standard for smart home communication is a rare display of unity amongst the giants of our interconnected worlds. But will their work be successful? Is this the right time for this? Why now?

These are just a few topics that we discuss on today's podcast. Bob Bajoras, President of Art+Logic, an innovative software development firm for over 25 years, who have worked with Google and Apple in the past, has some thoughts on the plans.

Because none of these companies have dominated the smart home field yet, Bajoras sees this plan as a truce more than a standard. Bajoras' and Art+Logic's extensive experience in designing for all things IoT make them thought leaders on this subject.

Art+Logic is a software development firm that designs, develops, and delivers high-level tech solutions for their clients. The company specializes in mobile apps, web software, desktop software, IoT, and has recently branched into product development where they are putting their software expertise to use contributing to the evolution of new hardware.

Since 1991, Art+Logic has built a strong reputation solving tough technical problems that other firms couldn't, relying exclusively on their talented team of dispersed North American engineers, designers, and developers to get the job done. They pioneered remote work, allowing them to bring on the best talent possible regardless of their location.

Their design team is on the cutting edge of human-centered computing, focusing on building beautiful user interfaces and seamless experiences. The Art+Logic development team ensures that their clients benefit from the most effective, efficient, and reliable technologies for their projects.

Datto offers business continuity and disaster recovery, networking, business management, and file backup and sync solutions, and has created a one-of-a-kind ecosystem of partners that provide Datto solutions to businesses across the globe.

In Datto's Global State of the Channel Ransomware Report, it revealed that SMEs may be continuing to take the ransomware bait, but MSPs are now enabling two-factor authentication to double down on ransomware preparation against their list of future ransomware attack targets: IoT devices (64%) and social media accounts (63%).

The average ransom requested by hackers in 2019 has increased too, costing $5,900 (£4,800) now compared to $4,300 (£3,500) in 2018. That's a 37% increase, and despite this increase, 24% of MSPs reported clients having paid the ransom to recover their data. But outsourcing IT services reduces the ransomware threat.

Ryan Weeks, CISO, Datto join me on this daily tech podcast to talk about the findings in the report and explore the Ransomware threat landscape.

As Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Ryan is responsible for directing and managing Datto's Information Security program. Ryan spent 11 years securing enterprise applications, systems and sensitive customer financial data at FactSet Research Systems, where he orchestrated all facets of the global information security program.

Ryan holds a B.S. in Computer Information Systems from Ithaca College, a M.S. in Information Assurance from Northeastern University and has industry security certifications including the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and the Certified Information Security Manager (CISM).

Shreesha Ramdas is an entrepreneurial executive with a track record of launching and growing products in competitive markets. He also has General management experience in product development, Growth Hacking, and go-to-market strategy & execution.

Shreesha is the CEO of Strikedeck, a leader in Customer Success Automation. Strikedeck is a Customer Success Platform that helps businesses deliver outstanding customer experiences while maximizing the value of their customer relationships. Founded by industry veterans with a proven track record in marketing automation, Strikedeck has enabled innovative customer-focused companies to optimize the deployment of precious resources to reduce churn, grow revenue, and maximize customer lifetime value.

However, Strikedeck was acquired by Medallia in 2019. Medallia is the pioneer and market leader in Customer Experience Management. Medallia's award-winning SaaS platform, the Medallia Experience Cloud, leads the market in the understanding and management of experience for customers, employees and citizens.

Medallia captures experience signals created on daily journeys in person, digital and IoT interactions and applies proprietary AI technology to reveal personalized and predictive insights that can drive action with tremendous business results.

Together, Medallia and Strikedeck, uniquely, will promote seamless, 360-degree views on customer account health, including information on renewals, product adoption and usage, subscriptions, billing, and more. The combination will also provide clients intelligence on where to focus and how to improve the B2B customer journey and the ability to manage the entire lifecycle of business customers.

Both companies use deep artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive analytics to understand the risks and opportunities for every customer and to uncover issues and obstacles in the overall customer journey. But I wanted to learn more about how the Strikedeck and Medallia partnership is designed to round out B2B and B2C offerings in CS and CX. But also what it means for businesses.

Shreesha joins me on Tech Talks Daily to share his story, the future of CS and CX, and his predictions for 2020.

Coveo uses AI and intelligent search and recommendation technologies to personalize millions of digital experiences for customers, partners, dealers, and employees.

However, Coveo for Commerce is transforming the way businesses sell online and its AI-powered solution is helping to deliver relevant buying experiences that is driving business growth. But I wanted to find out more about this experience intelligence platform.

Coveo for Commerce is enhancing product and content discoverability, detects buyer intent, and automatically merchandizes personalized product recommendations that make business sense.

“The experience economy is built on data and AI. Tech-first companies have trained people to expect personalized, relevant, and unified experiences. With Coveo, every business can be an intelligent experience leader.” Coveo Chairman and CEO Louis Tetu.

However, personalization alone is not enough; businesses also want to increase the profitability of their customer lifetime journeys. In today's episode, I explore how this experience intelligence platform stitches together content and data, learning from every interaction, to tailor every experience using AI. I learn how Coveo for Commerce connects and unifies product catalogs and product-related content to provide shoppers with comprehensive, relevant information in their shopping experience. We also discuss how structured product catalog data can blend with unstructured content.

Mark Floisand is Chief Marketing Officer at Coveo joins me on Tech Talks Daily to talk about all this and more. He has over 20 years of marketing, sales and general management experience in the technology industry, spanning blue chip and start-up companies across three continents, including Apple, Adobe, BusinessObjects, SAP, Total Defense, Untangle and WeVideo.

Mark was most recently with Sitecore, a Coveo technology partner, where he led product marketing. Mark holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa; and an MBA from the University of Durham in the UK.

Last week 175,000 people from165 countries make their annual trip to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Over 4,500 global companies and tech startups showcased new and innovative tech. The media desperately searched for the best ideas hidden inside 2.9 million net square feet of exhibition space.

After following the news online, I was a little disheartened around new tech that didn't seem to solve any real problems. Samsung's Ballie is a tennis ball-like robot that beeps and rolls around following its owner and captures special moments. But this seemed at odds with our new privacy-aware state,

With the increasing awareness around climate change, I found myself wondering if Charmin's Bluetooth-controlled robot bear that brings its owner a spare toilet roll is the best use of our resources? But rather than turn into just another bitter tech columnist, I went in search of a more positive and optimistic view.

Over at Finn Partners, they have a talented mix of researchers, strategists, designers, technologists, content specialists, and campaigners. With over 800 people across three continents, I knew they would have someone that attends CES every year that could talk about the trends they have seen over the years and what stood out at this year's event.

Barry Reicherter is a senior partner at Finn Partners and has a passion for Digital Insights and Ideas. The Digital transformation and innovation leader joins me on Tech Talks Daily to discuss what he saw at CES. We also discuss the conversations he was monitoring online and those he heard on the show floor.

With more than 20 years of experience in digital marketing, Barry leads Finn Partners' Insights team focusing on online and social media research, analytics, planning, and measurement for clients operating in consumer, healthcare, education, government, public affairs, travel, and technology sectors.

Holding positions at AOL, Porter Novelli, Active.com, Sage Software, Widmeyer Communications and Finn Partners, Barry's body of work has been focused in the digital strategy and measurement for clients such as Hyundai, CapitalOne, American Express, Amalgamated Bank of Chicago, American Express, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Steelcase, Rosetta Stone, HP, Nestlé, Pfizer, Chase, Pearson, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, and Reed-Elsevier.

Barry is also a frequent speaker-panelist at industry conferences. Recently Barry joined the faculty of the Kogod School of Business at American University as an adjunct professor of digital branding for the M.B.A. program.

Software Design Solutions provides embedded system software development, desktop application development, and software process improvement consulting. The company prides itself on decades of expertise to learn new best practices in agile embedded software development.

Ed Kuzemchak is an expert on the Internet of Things and the founder of Software Design Solutions. As an embedded software thought leader, I invited Ed back onto this tech podcast to shares his experience around the challenges and pitfalls of designing intelligence into objects.

As an embedded software thought leader, Ed Kuzemchak is well-versed in the challenges and pitfalls of designing intelligence into objects. His experience across multiple industries has afforded him unique insights that he can share with companies looking to create, update, or improve their own IoT technologies.

While CES focuses on the shiny new tech solutions and buzzwords, I wanted to look under the hood of these emerging technologies. Ed explores the real challenges and opportunities that surround the internet of things (IoT)

In today's conversation, we talk about the convergence of low-cost networking (NBIoT/Cat-M1) and how power-efficient highly capable edge nodes are changing the IoT landscape. We also explore the unique challenges of IoT in industrial control settings (harsh environments, legacy equipment, IT vs. OT, security).

As we look beyond the smoke and mirrors of the tech hype, we look beyond the impacts of 5G and talk about the role of Fog computing in a world where edge nodes are becoming more and more capable. We also dare to ask, do you need Machine Learning for your IoT application? Or is good old fashioned heuristics what you really need?

According to Statista, live music industry revenue in the United States is on track to reach 11.99 billion USD in 2021 (up from 9.28 billion USD in 2015). But what setbacks could stall this foreseen growth? One of the greatest challenges plaguing the live music industry is a lack of robust data, a problem that live music data company Viberate is perfectly positioned to solve.

On the Viberate platform, entities are organized by event, festival, artist, venue, genre, subgenre, city, and country. Entities are crowdsourced with the help of over 20 thousand contributors, and each and every entry is then curated by a team of 70 full-time database curators.

Viberate also taps into the API's of major ticket vendors, which provide tens of thousands of events daily (contributors can add events manually as well). Artist profiles are also rich with content and always up-to-date, since Viberate sources the content from entities' official sources and enrich the content with metadata.

To date, the Viberate database includes 1/2 million artists, 1/2 million events, 150,000 venues, 5,000 festivals. But it's the success that it is delivering to artists that is the most impressive part of this startup story. But it's the success that it is delivering to artists that is the most impressive part of this startup story. Viberate Co-Founder and COO Vasja Veber joins me on the podcast to discuss how Viberate is solving a major pain point in the live music industry. Vasja tells me how "You can't develop anything using the current data in the live music business. It's just too unstructured. It's also hard to keep the information updated. Standardization is our only way forward."

Viberate aims to standardize and map the entire global ecosystem for live music, becoming something akin to IMDb, a single, verified, and artist-approved source for music information. To accomplish this, the Ljubljana-based startup uses a carefully calibrated mix of crowdsourcing and curation, and blockchain, incentivizing contributors and supporting artist control of assets and information.

"Blockchain has become the long-overdue catalyst for the music industry to update its policy and business models toward music-makers and to provide quick and seamless experiences for anyone involved in creating or interacting with music," notes Viberate advisor, blockchain advocate, and musical innovator Imogen Heap.

"Anything that involves music-makers being independent and having space where they can reach out to anybody who wants to make business directly with them is a really positive thing."

Vasja Veber explains how he and his team are doing for music what IMDb does for the movies.

It seems that almost every website now has a chatbot. Some are quite good, but many create more frustrations than they solve. Meanwhile it has been reported that we all spend 43 days of our lives waiting on hold.

I wanted to get a company that stands out from the crowd in this area, and it didn't take long for me to find the perfect guest.

Ada, the market leader for Automated Customer Experience (ACX), is disrupting the customer service sector with a fundamentally new approach that brings an automation first strategy to drive cost savings and improved CSAT.

Ada replicates manual behavior with machine learning freeing up expensive agents to pursue more meaningful, urgent tasks on behalf of customers. With Ada's transformative approach to customer service, businesses are evolving their customer service departments from cost centers into profit centers.

Air Asia is an excellent example of the power of Ada's automation first strategy. They fly 100 million passengers per year and used to struggle with customer support wait times of more than one hour. Within 30 days of launching Ada, the wait time for customers is now less than one minute. AirAsia is now generating millions in annual revenues because they've automated meal plan purchases, ticket changes, and more.

In 2019, Ada was also included in Gartner's Competitive Landscape: Virtual Assistant Platforms, Worldwide and recognized as one of the leading vendors leveraging linguistics, machine learning, and knowledge programming to create conversational user experiences.

I invited Ruth Zive, Ada's head of Marketing, on to this daily tech podcast to learn more about how Ada is transforming how people work and how businesses design their customer service organizations.

Eric Navarrette, Chief Marketing Officer ARwall, joins me on the podcast to reveals how their augmented reality technology is fixing issues for entertainment studios that utilize a Hollywood staple: the green screen.

ARwall is an AR technology company that has created the first AR display that requires no headset, no goggles, no smart device. Its spatial imaging technology is four times faster than anything equivalent on the market.

The green screen replacement has already been used for projects by studios like Netflix, Syfy, and HBO, and made an appearance on the HBO series Watchmen red carpet. But problems does this tech really solve? Post-production can be time-consuming and expensive, often pushing film and television projects past deadlines and budgets. After spending over two decades founding startups and leading in the advertising space, ARwall Founder and CEO Rene Amador developed a breakthrough solution: digital backdrops that display realistic, VFX-heavy sets in real-time, with no "fix it in post" required. The invention spectacularly replaces the green screen.

The 'ARwall' significantly reduces editing costs and cuts down on filming time for production teams. With VFX that studios would have needed to add in post-production already present on-set, ARwall shortens project pipelines and budgets, helping film and TV projects stay on-pace with today's heightened viewing cycle.

ARwall is also helping solve problems for businesses in post-production with real-time technology, staying innovative in a fast-paced industry. Eric returns from CES after winning an award for 'Best AR Experience for ARwall' and reveals how they are using AR to transform an entire industry.