#143 - Dr. Tom Heseltine, CEO of Aurora AI - On making artificial intelligence accessible to any business

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to make artificial intelligence accessible to any business.

My guest is Dr. Tom Heseltine, CEO of Aurora AI

Tom has been with Aurora for over 15 years, becoming CEO in 2016 and guiding Aurora’s transition from a face-rec centric company to a successful AI specialist. He has a deeply technical background, he mentors and tutors Aurora’s Core Technology team of PhDs in solving the most difficult challenges

He has a Ph.D. in Biometric Face Recognition from the University of York, UK, following his first-class honors degree in Computer Science.

Tom introduced Deep Learning and AI to Aurora’s technology portfolio, establishing Aurora’s AI Framework and instigating a step-change in face recognition accuracy. This evolution is now creating a revolution in how some of the most complex and specific challenges are solved in record time.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Tom to my podcast. We explore why the accessibility to AI is still so limited and why the results are often far from what’s expected. We discuss the options to address this – and how this both a technological as well as a business problem. Finally, we discuss Tom’s point of view and experience to create a remarkable software business.

Here are some of his quotes:

Solving problems. It's coming up with an idea, testing a hypothesis, creating a system that puts that into practice, and then particularly seeing it being used and doing good. That's what really drives me,

I want to see good ideas, being used to solve really challenging problems.

It's to make artificial intelligence accessible to any business

AI needs no introduction these days. It really is fantastically powerful. But it's difficult to get right. It's expensive, and it requires real expertise.

A lot of people are trying it and failing. And what we're trying to do is provide application-specific APIs designed for a business built to specific precise requirements by a team of experts, and seeing that right through to deployment. And we're trying to do that for companies that are otherwise missing out.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How you can accelerate the adoption of your software products by going beyond the feature / function challenge
2. How by bringing different disciplines together you can crack the formula to produce something exceptional
3. That being remarkable starts with having courage, the courage to adapt and change, step into the unknown and get out of your comfort zone
4. That solving narrow and highly specific problems will be the key to create broadscale momentum

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Dr. Tom Heseltine
• Aurora AI