109: Using AI Meeting Notes to Turn Conversations Into Business Outcomes with Artem Koren

**Artem Koren** (0:00)
We actually had to build our own transcription engine because there were no engine of quality available in the market at the time.

**Chris Daigle** (0:07)
Generative supporting the coding and stuff like that. You didn't have that advantage. What was the development of this product like? Challenging, quick, easy, dirty.

**Artem Koren** (0:16)
We had to do it the hard way. Imagine that. Imagine people used to code on keyboards with it. Crazy. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, they were way behind in terms of transcription accuracy, especially for multilingual domains, but even for English.

**Chris Daigle** (0:32)
So was this a hard sell when you went to market with this?

**Artem Koren** (0:36)
Yeah, it was definitely an uphill battle. No one really knew what the hell we were talking about. They're like, what does it do? Why is it in my meeting? How does this help me?

**Chris Daigle** (0:45)
For 2019 to 2022 for you guys, just like you realized. We're early.

**Artem Koren** (0:49)
We knew we were early. We had an idea that no one else was thinking about. Being early was a strategy. We wanted to be the innovators. We wanted to be the cutting edge developers. Our goal was never to build a product that does notes well. That was sort of the first bus stop on the journey. Our goal was to build a product that's...

**Chris Daigle** (1:07)
Artem Koren is a technology founder, product leader, and co-founder of Sembly AI, helping businesses turn everyday meetings into smarter decisions, stronger execution, and real outcomes. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Daigle. Each week, we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs, and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech.
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We'll also guide company-wide transformation, so AI becomes part of your operating system, not just another shiny object. The companies that act now will increase productivity, cut costs, and grow faster than their competitors. Those that wait will get left behind. So if you want to make AI work in your business, visit chiefaiofficer.com and see how we're helping companies of all sizes finally get results from AI. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Using AI at Work. My name is Chris Daigle. I'm the host of the episode. Today, we're going to be covering something that I'm particularly interested in, and that's meeting intelligence, leveraging AI to just help us capture a lot more context from the conversations that are happening in our business. And we've got the best person to talk about that, and that's Artem Koren. He's the Chief Product Officer, but also co-founder of sembly.ai. They were early in on this space. And I think we're going to have a fascinating conversation on maybe how we should be using it different, maybe some applications that we're not thinking of, how they're using Generative AI, what they're seeing in the Marketplace, and all those good things. So Artem, before we step in to the conversation, anything you want to share with the audience about who you are, what you're up to, and what Sembly is doing?

**Artem Koren** (3:06)
So, hi, glad to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

**Chris Daigle** (3:09)
Thank you.

**Artem Koren** (3:10)
We are Sembly AI, as Chris mentioned. We are one of the founding companies in this space, and I think that makes us a little bit different because we've gone through all of the evolutions from the early AI machine learning type work, all the way out through modern large language models, generative and agentic, and we've survived all of those pivots along the way.
So, I'm happy to talk about how things have transitioned, what things are looking like now, maybe some things about the future.

**Chris Daigle** (3:38)
So, and thank you for that, Artem. So, I noticed that you and your co-founder, there's a lot of professional consulting background and experience. So, you've been in a lot of boardrooms, you've been on a lot of conference calls and Zooms and all that kind of stuff. So, you're better suited to talk about what a user would need for this tool than somebody that just was a Y Combinator kid that had an idea, right?
I mean, is that what you say that was accurate?