Lucd: developing pioneering capabilities in AI, Big Data, Data Fusion and Machine Learning

Meet Lucd, the platform that develops pioneering capabilities in AI, Big Data, Data Fusion and Machine Learning. Lucd fundamentally believes that businesses can serve all of us better by responsibly getting more efficient at capturing, securing, and harnessing data and has made this a key capability for the Lucd platform.  With Lucd there isa great opportunity to provide newer and better products and services, newer and better customer interactions, and newer and better ways of doing business. Lucd is all about turning data into Enterprise AI business outcomes.

Lucd will be joining RE•WORK at the Deep Learning Summit in Boston this May 24 - 25, and we spoke with them in the run-up to the event to find out more information.

Why do you think it's important for developers & IT managers to build AI?

In order for businesses to go beyond being consumers of AI, they need to incorporate AI capability into their Enterprise.  It is more important for developers & IT managers to build a capability to leverage AI as part of their differentiated business initiatives.  Specifically, businesses need to leverage data and leverage models that enable their unique potential.  They must have an Enterprise AI capability in order to do this.

What are the main challenges in implementing AI for businesses, and why do they exist?

There are a lot of challenges but the biggest challenge is data management.  Business data (both internal and external) is not nearly as clean and orderly as pulling from ImageNet.  Also, the risk of improperly using data is much higher.  Businesses cannot afford bias to creep into models from biased data, they cannot misuse data for one model that could have been perfectly OK to use for another business purpose.  AI libraries and models are becoming more and more obtainable for businesses but they can only be leveraged within a data management environment that meets business needs.

How is AI optimizing business, and do you think businesses of all shapes and sizes should be implementing these technologies?

All businesses need to continuously optimize and, therefore, yes, implement AI technologies that deliver that improvement.  Importantly though, Businesses need to think of AI when envisioning new opportunities and to support top line growth.  AI offers technology to support new and better ways to serve customers with products and services, interactions, and ways of doing business.  In addition to optimization, doing new and better things enabled by AI offers all businesses great opportunities.

How are you using AI for a positive impact?

Our focus is turning data into positive business AI outcomes and we are eating our own “dog food”.   We leverage our platform to better our customer interactions by ingesting data about our own activity and what of that activity better serves our customers.  We are bettering our product through leveraging open models.

What recent advances in AI have helped you in your work?

We have engineered our product to be open.  We believe that businesses will have better AI outcomes when they can leverage any potential innovation that they have available to them.  That may be an internally developed model or something someone published on GitHub.  Our platform supports this.  Recent advances in Transfer Learning and techniques and knowledge on leveraging Transfer Learning helps businesses avail themselves to open initiatives throughout the AI community and our platform enables that.

What challenges are you currently facing in your work, and how is artificial intelligence helping you solve them?

The media hype around AI is the biggest challenge.  The potential future is distracting business executives from the very real and tangible opportunities that business has to capture, secure, and harness their data through the use of what AI has to offer now.

The growth of AI is exponential, and countless industries are applying new models to their business to optimize efficiency and productivity as well as to solv real-world problems. What do you think the key skills are for a career in AI/DL?

The two biggest skills needed are 1) an excitement and willingness to learn about what AI and machine learning is and what can be done today and 2) a willingness to get started and get your hands dirty by leveraging platforms and understanding the art of the possible of AI by actually trying things.  There are so many great initiatives going on throughout the industry that if a business leader or business team has 1) and 2) above, they can do great things.

Which other industries are you most excited to see implementing AI for a positive impact in the next 5 years?

All industries have well defined AI use cases.  We are most excited about more businesses adopting the capabilities to leverage AI that is unique to them with  data that is relevant to them, so that more businesses are able to provide us better products and services.