#386 AI Transformation Fails Without Context: What Enterprise Leaders Need to Know

Dr. Darren Pulsipher (0:00)

Welcome to Embracing Digital Transformation. Before we dive in, I wanted to personally thank you for listening. Many of the ideas we discuss on this show inspired my new book, AI Augmented Teams. If you're looking for practical ways to combine human expertise and AI to achieve better outcomes, I think you'll find it valuable. Learn more at paydar.ai.books. That is paidar.ai.

Now, let's get started with the show.

Artem Koren (0:30)

And that part is really hasn't changed, which is... How do you get people to understand? What's coming, what's changing, how that impacts them, what they have to do differently. How to transition them from legacy to future.

How to educate them, how to support them through It's a great. way to get through the process. All of that really remains the same as it was before.

Dr. Darren Pulsipher (0:57)

Why this matters to you. AI is moving from experimentation into operational decisions, and that changes the standard for success. It is no longer enough to buy a platform and call it transformation. Leaders now have to define the business problem, the acceptable quality bar, and the context the system needs to produce work people can actually use. That is where most organizations will either create real leverage or create expensive noise. Let's get into the conversation.

Welcome to Embracing Digital Transformation. This is Dr. Darren. On this episode, AI Transformation Fails Without Context with Artem Koren, Chief Product Technology Officer from Sembly.

Artem, welcome to the show.

Artem Koren (1:52)

Thank you for having me.

Dr. Darren Pulsipher (1:55)

Hey, when we first talked, I thought, hey, this is a really hot topic today. Large organizations trying to do digital transformation.

AI, Agenetic Flow, everyone's talking about this today. So we might as well talk about it. But before we get started, everyone that listens to my show knows that I only have superheroes on the show, and every superhero has a background story. So Artem, what's your superhero background story?

Artem Koren (2:20)

Yeah, I left my cape in my other room.

Dr. Darren Pulsipher (2:24)

We can't show the superhero on the show, right?

Artem Koren (2:28)

Exactly.

So Cape was going to be for another time. My background is I started out in technology. Actually, I grew up in the transformational period of the late 90s, early 2000s. And that was a very exciting time. That was a very revolutionary time in tech. The Internet in its proper form was just being born. Social networks were something brand brand new.

And so I got my technical street creds in that environment of early Linux, early Red Hat, Google was new. I was actually one of those tech geeks using Google search in the mid 90s before anyone else knew what Google was. If you can imagine that, I think that I've actually never said this out loud, but now that I'm saying this, there was a time when no one knew what Google was.

Dr. Darren Pulsipher (3:26)

Oh, I know. Yeah. Yeah.

Artem Koren (3:28)

Right?

Dr. Darren Pulsipher (3:28)

Yeah.

Artem Koren (3:29)

It was Yahoo search. Yahoo search was the thing. And then you had like Excite and then you had...

Dr. Darren Pulsipher (3:33)

And then you had Ask Gs. Do you remember Ask Gs?

Artem Koren (3:36)

Ask Gs. That's right. Oh my God. You're taking me all the way back.

Dr. Darren Pulsipher (3:39)

Oh yeah.

Artem Koren (3:41)

So there's... That was a nostalgic period. So I grew up in technology in that period. And in my early days, I was the CTO of a Forex trading firm where we built the first product that allowed you to trade on the charts. And I think, you know, a couple of decades forward that graduated into the Bitcoin thing. But before there was Bitcoin, there was a fax trading. There's still a fax trading, just maybe slightly less popular.

And then I shifted into management consulting. And I was in management consulting for the better part of a decade after that.

In my role in management consulting, I did both client work and product work. And on my client work, I led large scale engagements for Fortune 500 clients, taking them through various kinds of digital transformations and people, process and tools.

Along the way, I had a startup called Nusana. And in that startup, we were aiming to build a technology that would use AI, if you can imagine that, in 2010, to recognize cancer in digital biopsies. So I was actually working with a post-doc from, or a PhD student, one of those, from Jan Lakoon's team at NYU. Before Jan Lakoon was the Jan Lakoon.

Before he was known as one of the fathers of modern AI, he was the, his lab was the groundbreaking lab in visual handwritten recognition. And he was one of the first to have a really great implementation of convolutional neural nets, which was the great grandfather technology of modern transformers. The convolutional neural nets was the first tag that allowed you to fairly reliably detect if there's a cat in an image. Before that, I remember, I remember when those first came out, yeah. Exactly. That was the first test. I'm taking it back for the audience. But before it was the rate of recognition through traditional algorithms, where somewhere 15, 20-ish percent success rate to figure out if there's a cat in an image. And then convolutional neural nets allow that to be not 100, but upwards of 80 percent or more. Completely revolutionary. So, Yann LeCun was one of the leaders in that environment and one of his students was working with me on this company that we tried to do it. It would try to figure out if there's cancer and biopsies. We were a little bit early, a little bit early for our time in 2010 So that venture did not succeed. But I continued my career in management consulting. And then I was senior vice president in a firm called UMT Consulting. And then we were required by EY and I was a senior manager at EY, what's known as a year five senior manager. And basically I came up to a point where it was up or out, meaning that it was either for me to become a partner, to essentially fully commit to that consulting life or to do something else, and I chose to do something else. So I left EY and I got together with my co-founder, Gil McCleff in 2019, actually late 2018 And we had this idea that if it was possible for technology to understand what was going on in a team meeting, then a lot of really great value can be unlocked from that. At the time, there's really nothing doing that. You had technology to facilitate meetings like Zoom and things like that. Even Microsoft Teams was very, very early at that point, not really that popular.