#71 - Naomi Goldapple - On democratizing access to AI beyond the world of tech giants

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation focused on democratizing access to AI across industries that haven’t got the connections and salary budgets of the Tech Giants. My guest is Naomi Goldapple, Head of Product for transportation and logistics at Element AI.

Naomi’s career combines technology and business consultancy and entrepreneurship. Her specialties are Business & growth strategies, product commercialization and marketing plans. She has an International MBA, specializing in developing markets in Latin America, from the Schulich School of Business, as well as a Bachelor of Commerce from McGill University.

She was the Director of e-business for Royal LePage Commercial, one of Canada’s largest commercial real estate companies.

She started up and ran Maman, bébé et café inc., which won various awards, and worked at ModelCom, using her expertise to help technology entrepreneurs with strategy and financing.

She was the VP Business Development at Nexalogy, responsible for commercializing the suite of products, forging channel partnerships and growing the sales. Nexalogy developed a next-generation software for mining, cleaning and analyzing unstructured data with powerful data sculpting capabilities.

And this experience has led to her current venture as Program Director with Element AI, an innovative model that works with and creates companies that are leveraging artificial intelligence. The goal is to spin out hundreds of AI-first companies in Canada over the next 5 years.

This triggered me, hence I invited Naomi to my podcast. We explore how the momentum around AI is picking up fast, but how various industries experience significant challenges to get access to AI talent, and in line with that, solutions. We discuss how Element AI is solving this issue, and how this helps chronically understaffed industries and attack large global problems such as safety and climate change.

Here are some of her quotes:

“The big idea behind the company, if I had to sum it up in one word, is really to democratize the access to AI.

One of the issues that is happening right now is that many people are getting excited about AI; however, there really isn't enough talent out there.

They're usually courted away very quickly by the tech giants.

The manufacturing industry, insurance, other industries that are not one of the tech giants, they really don't have access to this talent.

So, our role was really to concentrate in some of those verticals, build products specifically for them and kind of allow them to leverage these technologies to really improve their businesses.”

During this interview, you will learn three things:

1. That significant value can be delivered to the quality of human work by using AI to eliminate Dull, Dangerous and Dirty work
2. Why it is key to first learn about the impact AI can deliver, rather than to regulate it upfront
3. How the sum of the parts will be far greater when every organization takes an active approach to share its data with its peers