An interview with Founder and CEO of Oovvuu, Ricky Sutton
Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to interview Ricky Sutton, Founder and CEO of Oovvuu, whose mission is to implement an artificial intelligence solution that’s able to navigate every video in the world from a view to a profit.
More than 50 broadcasters and publishers already trust Oovvuu’s solutions to distribute video to millions of people in 113 countries every day, and they are already funded and supported by global tech giants IBM and Amazon. They’ve taught IBM’s Watson to ‘read’ 300,000 articles and ‘watch’ videos every day to work out what they’re about.
Ricky is working with organisations to implement their AI solutions so we asked the big questions; what are the biggest misconceptions around AI, what are the biggest hurdles to mass industry adoption as well as – if he could explain the benefits of AI in one sentence, what would it be.
1. What do you think is the biggest misconception around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in business?
As awareness of AI rises, more people ask me about it. Half come to me with belief that AI is evil, and will put them out of a job. And in many cases it will. Many more believe it is a cure-all, that will enable all of us to move to the beach for the rest of our days.
I tell them it is neither. Remind them it's not alive. It's just a tool, and that in 2017, remains pretty dumb without human help.
Yet, as it learns, it will become revolutionary. A game changer on the scale of electricity, digital connectivity or antibiotics. At Oovvuu, we use it to do things we can't do as humans. In the process, machine learning is giving us superhuman abilities.
Our AI reads 300,000 articles by 100,000 publishers every day, and watches more than 20 years of video, and extracts sense from all of it. An army of square eyed people with limitless patience could not do that. Yet one of us, with the right AI, can.
So, when I am asked what is the biggest misconception swirling around AI, it is that it is a ready-to-go solution. It's not. Today, it is an infant, still needing to be taught, meaning that in 2017, people are still more important than the machine.
2. What's the biggest hurdle to mass adoption by enterprise businesses?
Peter Thiel says enterprise businesses are focused on getting from one to 10. Their goal is on growing from where they are now, to be 10 times as big.
But AI is about something else. It's about getting from zero to one. That's profoundly different. It's about creating something from thin air, something not contemplated before, but now possible because of a fundamentally enabling technology.
The barrier to mass adoption by enterprise businesses is the inability to dream big enough. They are locked into the one to 10 mentality and incapable of the scale of leap Ai represents in getting from zero to one.
3. If you could explain the benefits of AI & ML in business in one sentence, what would it be?
AI gives us humans the ability to make superhuman leaps of logic.
Ricky Sutton is an expert in the AI industry, who has used his knowledge and expertise to help shape the AI & Machine Learning Summit agenda.
For more details on the agenda download the brochure.