Podcast Notes: Appen's CTO discusses the latest State of AI report.
Every Thursday, we summarize an AI podcast to save you time and keep you up-to-date. This week features Wilson Pang, who is the CTO at Appen, which collects and labels images, text, and other data used to build AI systems.
Wilson speaks with Kathleen Walch and Ron Schmelzer, hosts of Cognilytica's AI Today podcast, about the findings from Appen's “2020 State of AI" report and how COVID-19 has impacted organizations' adoption of AI. You can download the full report here.
[Note: Questions and answers were edited for brevity and clarity.]
Kathleen: Wilson, tell us about yourself.
Wilson says he runs all the tech teams at Appen, which sells a data-collection and labeling platform that helps its customer deploy their AI applications. Through the platform, AI deployment success rates are typically three times higher than the industry standard.
Wilson has been in the tech industry for about 20 years. The last 10 years have been focused entirely on AI. Prior to Appen, he was chief data officer of Ctrip.com and senior director of data service and solutions at eBay. he started his career as a developer at IBM.
Ron: AI and ML are primarily about good data. Appen recently published its State of AI Report, which found that 3 out of 4 organizations said AI is critical to their business. Nearly half feel that they're behind on their AI projects. Can you talk a bit more about the findings?
It's fascinating to see AI is becoming more critical to businesses, Wilson says. AI is now becoming core to businesses' survival.
The C-Suite team is an important finding. 71% of businesses reported that their C-suite executives are involved in AI projects, a 30% increase year-over-year.
A lot of businesses have mentioned the impact of COVID-19. In the report, two-thirds of companies didn't expect any negative impact on their AI strategy because of the pandemic. Nearly half have accelerated their AI strategy, with 20% doing so “significantly"...
