Kotecki On Tech

Ada CEO Mike Murchison chats about chatbots, AI, and the emerging (human) field of ACX: Automated Customer Experience. Murchison and his co-founder know what it’s like to be customer service agents. “[W]e knew our technology was working when they continued to pay us and didn’t realize that it wasn’t we ourselves who were responding,” he says. “It was the early incarnation of Ada.”

Ethos co-founder and CEO Peter Colis wants to make buying life insurance feel less like “getting medically and financially strip searched”. He says the industry is so old fashioned that just being on the Internet is a major innovation.

LD Mangin, the CEO of the advertising security company Confiant, says it’d be best for his clients if his company was a public utility.   You know - the good kind of monopoly.

When it’s all written in advance, video game content is static. But Neha Sampat, CEO of Contentstack, says game developers can now create content on the fly and, in a way, play along with you.  

IoTium CEO Ron Victor says the Industrial Internet of Things will be worth “somewhere in the trillions” - and also “could be the next form of war.”

“The Second Machine Age” coauthor, MIT research scientist, and TED speaker is back. Andrew McAfee explores a powerful, counterintuitive concept in his new book, “More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources—and What Happens Next.” Prepare to question your beliefs about the future of our planet.

Rubikloud co-founder & CEO Kerry Liu talks technology to help grocers waste less. “If you previously threw away, let’s say, 10 percent of your fresh produce, you could theoretically now throw away only 5 or 6 percent of it.”

A human conversation on conversational AI with Bryan Stokes, VP, Product Management at Vonage. “I don’t think they will care, in the younger generations, whether they’re talking to a bot or whether they’re talking to a person,” he says. “It’s just going to be them communicating.”

Don’t look now - seriously, if you’re behind the wheel, stop looking at this - but data science could help defeat distracted driving. Rob Nendorf, Director of Data Science at Arity, is driving toward a safer future. Along the way, he’s become a safer driver himself.

It’s clear that data can be used for bad. But ThoughtSpot Chief Data Strategy Officer Cindi Howson is a champion of #Data4Good. The movement tackles inequality, cancer, suicide, and more.

The documentary Chasing Perfect follows Frank Stephenson’s car design legacy for MINI, Ferrari, McLaren and more. Now, he’s making one that flies - and making science fiction come true.

Talespin CEO Kyle Jackson wants workers to study soft skills in virtual reality. Our conversation starts with Barry, the virtual human programmed to be fired, and ends with world building in the TV show Westworld.

Want to live to 150? KenSci CEO Samir Manjure sees a future of super-long lifespans, radically changing the way we work, learn, and even love.

Kyle T. Westra, author of The New Invisible Hand: Five Revolutions in the Digital Economy, will challenge your view of the modern marketplace. Turns out more transparency isn’t always better. And the much-maligned middleman is alive and well.

Digitizing physical spaces like warehouses can help the robots that work in them. But Locix CEO Vik Pavate is more focused on helping humans.

“...it is impossible to know where the threat will come from and it’s impossible to know how that threat manifests itself,” says cybersecurity CEO Ray Rothrock of RedSeal. “How do you recover from an attack and not go down?” His answer: apply a resilience mindset from the physical world to deal with digital danger. 

The phrase “smart city” could make you think of autonomous cars cruising past holographic billboards - a tantalizing techno-topia that’s just over the urban horizon. But you know what’s really smart? Solving problems with technologies that are already within our grasp. Gaby Rowe, CEO of Station Houston, is helping her city take an intelligent approach to getting smart.

“If you give me your butt a few seconds, I’ll turn it to a useful piece of information.” If that quote doesn’t entice you to listen to this episode, nothing will. Martin Zizi is the CEO and founder of the biometrics company Aerendir. The big idea: micro-vibrations from a person’s body can authenticate a person’s brain.

An interview with Chris Cabrera, CEO and Founder of of Xactly. The company uses data to help businesses build better compensation plans - and AI to predict when star salespeople are in danger of quitting.

What do students taking tests have in common with soldiers tying tourniquets? They both need to recall specific information - but they may have been taught it in a way that wasn’t best for their brains. Cerego, co-founded by Andrew Smith Lewis, is using AI to help change that.