Making AI accessible to every enterprise
DATAFLOW-AS-A-SERVICE PROVIDES BUSINESSES WITH THE TECHNOLOGY THEY NEED TO LEAD IN THEIR FIELD
In the 1990s, the business world underwent a seismic shift with the advent of the internet. It changed the way companies did everything from creating their products to selling them to consumers. These days, companies are poised on the edge of another massive transition toward artificial intelligence and machine learning. “AI is going to touch every company, in every industry, in a material way,” says Rodrigo Liang, cofounder and CEO of AI solutions provider Sambanova. “It’s going to be such a competitive advantage.”
Yet, AI and machine learning isn’t accessible to every company. In-house AI systems typically require large staffs and heavy investments in infrastructure, putting the technology out of reach for many organizations. Liang and Sambanova co-founders Kunle Olukotun and Christopher Ré rejected that resource-intensive approach, aiming instead to democratize AI with an extensible subscription-based machine-learning service platform that doesn’t require an army of experts to make it work. “Some of the top companies have the ability to establish AI labs with hundreds and hundreds of AI scientists and data scientists,” Liang says. “But the large majority of companies in the world aren’t doing that.”
The platform is designed to help organizations efficiently— and cost effectively—tap into the power of AI and machine learning to enable natural language processing, high-resolution imaging, and powerful recommendation. Sambanova’s Dataflow-as-a-service helped earn Sambanova a spot on Fast Company’s 2021 list of the Next Big Things in Tech.
A FRESH APPROACH
Sambanova began as a research project at Stanford University. Liang and his Sambanova cofounders were looking for ways that companies without in-house AI specialists could gain insights from the increasingly vast amounts of data available to them. The company took a software-first approach, initially designing a system optimized for managing data. They then created the hardware needed to optimally run that application, going so far as building their own specialized microprocessors.
Sambanova’s from-the-ground-up mindset was instrumental in helping it devise a novel solution to the challenge of efficiently delivering AI and machine learning capabilities. “We don’t have legacy architectures, legacy interfaces, or legacy constraints that keep us from solving problems the right way,” Liang says.
ACCESS DRIVES INNOVATION
Ai-as-a-service helps provide organizations with the tools they need to make important innovations of their own. For example, cancer researchers have partnered with Sambanova to train AI to detect cancer cells in ultra-high-resolution images. The AI technology is far more sensitive than the human eye and, in some cases, is able to draw a boundary around individual areas of cancer cells.
Technology like this has broad applications. Once this system is up and running, healthcare workers can deploy it in other parts of the world, bringing cancer-detection services to communities that would otherwise have no access.
Researchers are using the technology to help discover COVID-19 treatments, to perform defect analysis for manufacturing, and to identify areas of dark matter in the universe. “It’s amazing to work with expert partners who have done this type of work for many years,” Liang says. “We’re able to come in, and in a very short amount of time, give them a big boost in their capabilities.”
The COVID-19 pandemic presented both a challenge and an opportunity for many businesses. Many companies had to rethink not only how they did business but also how they interacted with customers, employees, and partners. At the recent Fast Company Innovation Festival, software and cloud solutions company Altair hosted a discussion that brought together three executives from companies that succeeded in refreshing and maintaining their brands, all while staying authentic to their core values and responsive to the changing world. Here are four key takeaways from the event:
1. Take your time. A branding (or rebranding) process re– quires deep listening and learning. For Amy Messano, chief marketing officer at Altair, immersive workshops can foster deep conversations among employees and executives. “We were much more secure and confident in our path forward when we had this research done and completed,” Messano says. “It took about a year, but it’s critical.”
In short, the effort to truly understand the values a brand must convey about the company takes time. “You don’t want to rush the process,” says Tahnee Perry, vice president of marketing at Deem, a corporate travel technology platform.
2. Have the courage to articulate your values. A company’s core values need to be on display throughout everything it does—particularly when the world is upended by a global pandemic. In the case of Whole
Foods, that meant providing masks for their customers and employees, and rolling out pickup and delivery systems to create easy and safe access to groceries.
“We went through each of our different stakeholder groups and asked, ‘What could we do to help support you? And how can it help reflect our brand in the eyes of those stakeholders?’” says Jason Buechel, chief operating officer at Whole Foods Market.
Companies also need to hold space for conversations around those core values, including on social media. However, Deem’s
Perry notes the importance of discretion. “Don’t say something just for the sake of saying it,” she says. “If you are going to participate in these conversations online, then there should be a really good reason.”
3. Respect your history. Messano says brands are “an articulation of culture, vision, history, and the future.” For a brand to authentically represent its culture and history while also embracing the future, it needs to respect where it’s been. “Realize that people have been putting their blood, sweat, and tears into it for a very long time,” she adds. “It’s important to remind people that brands are emotional for the people who create them, and hopefully they evoke emotions in stakeholders as well.”
4. Be ready for change. While it takes time and plenty of research to truly identify one’s brand, companies need to recognize that managing a brand requires agility and flexibility. “As we think about our brand, we have to figure out how we can meet the customer where they are now and be more agile in addressing things in the future,” Buechel says.
What’s more, branding needs to be a continuous and ongoing process—if something isn’t working, companies need to be able to stop and readjust. “Businesses change so fast,” Messano says. “It’s really important to always listen, always gather feedback.”