While funding for artificial intelligence startups is booming, many business executives outside of the tech sector are still far away from adopting AI as a core part of their business, according to a recent report published by McKinsey.
For Tom Wilde, that's both a challenge and an opportunity for indico, the Boston-based machine learning startup that recently hired him as its new CEO. Companies like indico may show promise with their transformative technologies, he told BostInno in a recent interview, but what they ultimately need to do is turn that tech into easy-to-deploy, practical products that show a clear return on investment.
"I think they have to move from experiment to practical value and I think customers are hoping to see that," Wilde said.
Wilde, a longtime executive and entrepreneur in Boston, was named as indico's new CEO on Thursday, taking over the role from co-founder Slater Victoroff, who will now act as CTO and focus on further developing indico's platform and product vision. Wilde was most recently chief product officer for Norwegian tech company Cxense, which closed its Boston office in August two years after acquiring the media business of Wilde's previous startup Ramp.
The new CEO said his main charge is to work on the go-to-market strategy and commercial side of indico, whose platform is aimed at large enterprises and uses machine learning algorithms to sort through large sets of unstructured data and clean emerging trends from them. To help Wilde in his new role, the company has raised a $1.5 million convertible debt note led by Boston venture capital firm .406 Ventures to serve as bridge financing for the company's next funding round. Total funding for the Techstars Boston alum is now $5.7 million.
Wilde said he first started talking to indico this past spring after a recruiter reached. The idea of hiring a new CEO came from Victoroff, who realized he needed help with the messaging and positioning of the company while he worked on the tech side. Wilde said there were two main factors that led him to take the job: he wanted to work for an early-stage startup again, and the common thread in his career has been content technology, for which he believes AI and machine learning will play a big role in the future.
"I just viewed it as a terrific space and starting point for what will be a huge explosion in innovation and transformation in content technology in the next decade," Wilde said.
Wilde said indico has a handful of customers in the financial services, insurance and legal industries — showing that the company is still very early in terms of traction. But Wilde said there are a lot of compelling use cases that have the potential to show a good return on investment for companies that deal with large volumes of unstructured data.
"Our job right now is to understand for customers where we can move the needle for them."
For instance, Wilde said, indico has seen early success with companies that use its platform for contract analytics. With the ability to process contracts and provide a detailed analysis of which documents need updating, indico can save lawyers and companies significant time from reading hundreds of pages by hand, Wilde said.
"We can ingest thousands of contracts, deconstruct them, compare clauses to score which ones are most similar and which are problematic, and build it into a reporting dashboard," he said.
Indico has also developed tools that can provide financial analysts with summaries of important details from hundreds of filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
"What has been built to date is a terrific technology," Wilde said, but now it's time to figure out how to "productize" it so more companies can easily understand its value. "Our job right now is to understand for customers where we can move the needle for them," he added.
