Los Angeles is quickly becoming a hotspot for those who want to work on the cutting-edge of artificial intelligence. Local tech companies offer top talent the opportunity to advance the applications and capabilities of AI across a wide variety of industries. Whether you’re looking to develop tech that detects cancer at its earliest stages, build B2B software that analyzes conversations of all types or work at the intersection of AI and VR, in LA, you’ve got options.
Continue reading to learn more about how LA tech companies are driving the future of AI.
Artificial intelligence is not yet at a point where it can completely replace humans in conversations. However, it is capable of analyzing conversations to help humans communicate more effectively. That’s what ringDNA’s technology does. VP of Product Jeff Shelton shared more about how the company’s technology is helping teams take their skills to the next level.
What AI trends within your industry are you watching right now?
One of the most exciting trends is the use of AI to analyze human interaction. Whether over email, SMS or voice, we are able to understand, report and decode behavior. The way people speak has always been at the core of human connection, and using AI to analyze conversations can go a long way toward improving human connections. In our case, we’re applying this technology to improve the sales experience.
AI today cannot replace human conversations. But it can be used to surface insights that help people better understand the ways in which they speak, how conversations impact their businesses and how they can improve to bring greater success to their own careers and companies.
Everything we do with AI is aimed at human augmentation — giving people the tools, content and skills needed to be more effective and efficient at their jobs.”
How is your company moving the needle on these trends?
As powerful as AI is, if you can’t ground a technology to a question you are trying to answer then it’s a pursuit without a destination. At ringDNA, we are using science to inform the lost art of conversation. Our solution, ConversationAI, has processed over 100 million calls for customers across the globe. It enables sales managers to analyze in real-time the conversations their reps are having with customers and surfaces insights that help them understand what works and what doesn’t.
We are making teams successful by decreasing the time it takes to onboard new reps, informing better outcomes at scale and increasing topline revenue for our customers. Everything we do with AI is aimed at human augmentation — giving people the tools, content and skills needed to be more effective and efficient at their jobs.
Quantgene is extremely excited about the potential artificial intelligence has to transform medicine. However, CEO and founder Jo Bhakdi said that in AI’s current state, it is not yet capable of handling the amount of data his team works with. That’s why Quantgene has taken matters into their own hands.
What AI trends within your industry are you watching right now?
Today, AI can solve simple structural challenges that can help increase accuracy, like image recognition in radiology to diagnostic chatbots. As we look to the future, we’re striving for innovation in AI technology that can solve more complex challenges, like early cancer detection through genomic data in the blood.
Conventional, neural net-based AI is still limited when it comes to its application in genomics. The number of data points can become overwhelming — there are 3.3 billion nucleotides in the human genome — and therefore the cost to run one blood sample test is prohibitive. That meant we had to reinvent AI pattern recognition to spot meaningful patterns against fewer data points.
We are improving pattern recognition with a fundamentally different approach that goes beyond conventional AI to include signal and feature engineering on a deeper level.”
How is your company moving the needle on these trends?
We are creating our own proprietary approach and pushing the frontier of early cancer detection. We are improving pattern recognition with a fundamentally different approach that goes beyond conventional AI to include signal and feature engineering on a deeper level. We are pulling the desired capabilities out of all these disciplines to customize a new strategy, then validating our approach through a systematic testing framework.
It’s not easy, which is why we have a culture of innovation in quantitative engineering. Our team is extremely diverse and includes economists, supply chain specialists, biologists, e-commerce and securities analysts. Because of this, we have been very successful in making progress toward our mission of detecting cancer earlier than has ever been possible.
HIA Technologies believes AI will have an impact across a wide variety of industries. The company is also all in on XR, or extended reality, an umbrella term for AR and VR. Its upcoming offering merges the two technologies to create a lifelike, AI-powered avatar capable of having complex conversations at scale. Chief Creative Officer and VP of Strategy Richard Cardran talked a bit about what the company — which is currently in stealth mode — is working on.
What AI trends within your industry are you watching right now?
Markets are continuously searching for the next new thing. Remember “nanotechnology?” There was a time when a company needed a nano offering to be fundable. Current market trends are now focused on the applied commercialization of R&D in artificial intelligence, XR — augmented reality, virtual reality and more — and conversational agents. The application of these technologies is what HIA is all about. Additionally, the “attention economy” is rapidly outpacing the oil economy to become the new gold standard. Trends can be fleeting, or they change the world. It’s very clear that AI and XR are going to change the world of healthcare, training, digital marketing and more.
We’ve spent the last 18 months commercializing the over $100 million in AI and VR research from USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies.”
How is your company moving the needle on these trends?
HIA’s technology lives at the intersection of conversational AI and XR to create delightful “attention-driven” conversational user experiences. Our end-to-end solution provides voice-driven XR interfaces designed to be both informative and fun. We’ve spent the last 18 months commercializing the over $100 million in AI and VR research from USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies.
Our products are platform-agnostic and range from mobile to fully immersive VR that builds on conversational AI while being very much informed by the lessons learned in the entertainment industry. Our offering is still a secret, but expect to hear more about us in the first quarter of 2020 when we officially go to market.
