When executives and politicians make high-level decisions, are they doing so with the most accurate and trustworthy data to aid them?
Or are they going to Google and scanning headlines or consulting their favorite publication to see reactions?
If it's the latter, they may be missing the larger point.
Leigh Fatzinger and his startup Turbine Labs are looking to close the information gap in executive decision making, helping make better decisions, faster.
The company launched about five years ago in Denver, as Fatzinger searched for a better way to present relevant information to senior-level executives to aid in decision making. What started as a manual process, has shifted to a software solution and the company has moved to the Denver Tech Center.
“We started building software two years ago and realized after the 2016 election that the nature of information had really shifted. It wasn’t that there was just a lot more information out there, it’s that people were calling into question what the intent of that information was in a way they had never done before,” Fatzinger said.
Turbine Labs is an AI-powered executive intelligence platform that answers important questions in the decision-making process.
Want to know what the media perception is of your earnings announcement this morning?
Turbine Labs AI will generate a report, sourcing unbiased and unmanipulated data from across the media landscape, that can be digested in 10 minutes or less.
The program sources broadcast TV, radio transcripts, public media, social media, forms, blogs and other entities across multiple languages and multiple countries to generate a comprehensive report.
While AI does much of the heavy lifting, Fatzinger said humans will never truly be cut out of the equation.
“The reason that we’re relying on AI but will never let humans completely out of the process, is because AI is not good at context yet,” he said.
When executives submit questions to Turbine Labs, a human is always there to receive the question, ensuring context is not lost on the AI.
Turbine Labs is used primarily by senior level executives at Fortune 500 companies, support teams for politicians, lobbying organizations and nonprofits.
“We only sell to politicians and senior executives, so it can never be wrong and never be late,” Fatzinger said.
The company operates on a token-based model, charging per question, not per user. Tokens are used based on the depth and complexity of the question.
If you run out, you can purchase more. If you don’t use them all in a month, they roll over.
“I love it because I get to use a Dave and Buster’s analogy in big conference rooms in front of important people and they get it,” Fatzinger said with a laugh.
The company has been bootstrapped to this point and Fatzinger said they’ll consider fundraising in the future. In 2018, they’ve earned nearly $2 million in revenue and will look to build on that going forward after hiring a sales team in the fall.
To this point, Fatzinger said they’ve operated entirely on word of mouth to spread the service.
As information becomes more plentiful and increasingly hard to manage, Turbine Labs hopes to provide valuable insights to drive informed decisions.
“Gaffes continue to happen at the executive level. It’s not that there aren’t competent people running big companies and government organizations. It’s that there is truly a crisis 2.0 on how I process all this information, what do I find out within all that info and how am I confident that I made the right decision? That’s our mission,” Fatzinger said.
