#76 - Zehra Cataltepe, CEO of Tazi.AI - To thrive in our constantly changing world we need a different type of AI

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation around AI that has the power to adjust at the pace of business. My guest is Zehra Cataltepe, Co-founder and CEO of Tazi.AI

Zehra co-founded tazi.ai together with her husband Tanju, and their focus was to develop continuously learning machine learning solutions for the banking, insurance and telco industries. Besides her role as CEO, she’s also a professor at Istanbul Technical University, Faculty of Computer and Informatics.

Zehra received her Master of Science and Ph.D. degrees from the California Institute of Technology in Computer Science. She has more than 20 years of both industry and academia experience in Machine Learning, and in that period, she delivered 21 patents and over 80 publications on the theory of machine learning and its applications in finance, health, energy and transportation.

Tazi was recently selected by Garner as May 2019 ‘Cool Vendor in AI Core Technologies’. Tazi’s products are changing the way AI is used in business – keeping business in the driver’s seat with an automated Machine Learning platform that continuously learns and adapts to new circumstances.

This triggered me, hence I invited Zehra to my podcast. We explore the challenges with today’s AI and machine learning technologies in rapidly changing business circumstances. We then discuss what’s required to get AI right – both at the side of the vendor and readiness level and mindset at the customer side.

Here are some of her quotes:

‘What drives me personally is a dream of making AI usable by everyone. Democratizing it so that it becomes a useful technology like automobiles or electricity.

When you consider business processes, life always changes. So, you know, as an insurance company, for example, your products that you offer to your customers, your customers ability, or incentive to buy from you, your competitors’ behavior, the regulations, all of these change in time.

So, you have to keep adapting whatever you were doing to new changing conditions.

You cannot just have one machine learning model or one rule set, which just learned what to do, and keep doing that forever.

You need AI which can continuously learn, which can continuously adapt.’

During this interview, you will learn three things:

1. Why it’s key to micro-segment your customers if you aim to deliver remarkable value
2. How designing for scale helps both your own organization as well as your customers
3. That taking a platform approach can turn customers into fans by allowing them to solve unusual problems