The life of a founder means being the “chief, cook and the bottle washer” for a startup, according to London-based entrepreneur Jim Liddle. He should know: Over much of the past decade, he's been focused on running his company, Storage Made Easy.
But in his new role, Liddle will have a much more focused directive.
In 2022, Boston-based file data services startup Nasuni Corp. acquired Storage Made Easy to bolster its data management and remote work capabilities. Liddle joined Nasuni as vice president of product and managing the incorporation of Storage Made Easy’s products into Nasuni.
Now, Liddle has been promoted to a newly created role at Nasuni: chief innovation officer. He has a very specific mission: leading the development and implementation of the company's data intelligence and AI strategies.
Liddle spoke to BostInno about what it means to be a chief innovation officer in 2023, the prevalence of AI in data services and taking Nasuni’s data intelligence work up a notch.
This interview has been edited lightly for length and clarity.
Storage Made Easy’s use of data intelligence and AI was one of the reason’s Nasuni had an interest in acquiring your company. How important is it for companies to invest in these areas?
I think anybody in technology these days probably would have to have their head in the sand to not realize the impact that AI is having on the industry. And it’s not often you get a really disruptive technology come through in your lifetime. I think in my lifetime, I can probably think of two. This one that we’re going through now, the AI disruption, and probably the iPhone and the iPad.
What exactly does a chief innovation officer do? How will you spend your days?
Working from product, right the way through to engineering and everything in between. Product is what brings the product offerings to market, and engineering is the people that do the work to facilitate that. I’m working across that. In many ways, I’m evaluating technologies and speaking to different vendors. I’m doing some incubation work and I’m seeing and working with product teams and engineering to see how some of those initiatives I’m working on fit within that general product direction.
How is Nasuni using AI, and how do you plan to take that work up a notch?
Right now, my early evaluation is to look at the products that we use. Just like other companies we use products that themselves are starting to introduce AI elements. And part of the evaluation is to evaluate those products.
The other thing is to look at our internal data sets. Let’s see what we do with those data sets. Let’s see whether by doing some machine learning on some of those data sets, is there anything we can do to automate them? Make things better for either us or our customers by analyzing those data sets.
How are Nasuni’s customers feeling about the introduction of AI?
Enterprise companies have a very different bar in terms of their requirements to adopt technologies and products than what consumers do. And obviously that’s related to things like privacy, access controls … all of the things you would expect inside of an enterprise. So although AI is exciting, one of the challenges is to make sure that the way that we adopt those technologies is done in the right way to satisfy some of those precepts that the enterprise expects.
You say that companies are just beginning to shift from being storage-centric to data-centric. What does that mean, and how does AI play a role?
What can we do with our data to get better value from it? And that value could be internal value. It’s just that you can interact with your data in a way that you never could before. So rather than searching for content, you’re asking the question and expecting an answer from your data set. That’s a huge shift away from what is traditional today. And not only that, you can start to analyze that data at speed in a way that allows you to make better business decisions. AI obviously is very good at that type of thing.
