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Artificial Intelligence /AI revolution - The next Revolution


Lala81
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  1. 1. Which camp are you in?

    • Mark Zuckerberg
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    • Elon Musk
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I decided to create a separate thread for AI.

 

Things are really rapidly changing.

 

AI to replace sales staff that are in a revolving door situation. Seems like this company has hit upon a niche that larger companies are very interested in.

 

Not all of these ideas will work out. But you can bet a significant portion of desk/admin jobs will slowly be redundant over the next 10-15 years. Maybe by then, some of us would be working alongside AIs to do some of the routine tasks.

 

https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/09/saleswhale-seed-funding/

 

 

Saleswhale, a Singapore-based startup that uses artificial intelligence to let companies automate their sales emails, has raised a $1.2 million seed round.

The capital was provided by VC firms Monk’s Hill Ventures, Gree Ventures and Wavemaker Partners with a number of angel investors. Those include early Dropbox hire Albert Ni, Pieter Walraven (who founded now Google-owned Pie), Juha Paananen (who sold Nonstop Games to King.com), Royston Tay (who sold Zopim to Zendesk) and Bowei Lee, CEO of LCY Chemical Corp.

We first wrote about Saleswhale last August while it was in the Y Combinator program in the U.S., and since then the team has returned to Singapore and developed the business. Its product, called Engage, allows companies to set up virtual email accounts which send communicate with sales prospects the same way a human employee would.

It isn’t a full on sales team replacement at this point, rather it is focused on handling inbound leads or reigniting stale prospects. The AIs can use charts, figures and PDFs and when a lead becomes warm again they can hand it over to a designated employee to take things further.

saleswhale_2.png?w=680&h=450

 

Engage is available for a base rate fee, after which additional cost comes per usuage. There’s a free 14-day trial to allow new users to test the product without that initial commitment, but Saleswhale has removed the free usage option it had in place last year, co-founder Gabriel Lim confirmed. The company isn’t saying how much revenue it pulls in, but Lim said that base fees account for around 40 percent of income with activity-based fees representing the rest.

Lim founded the company last year with fellow Singaporeans Venus Wong and Ethan Le in response to the frustration of the repetitive nature of training new sales staff, many of whom move on to new jobs. The team has since added two engineers to its ranks, and Lim said it plans to hire another three people who will cover sales and also more engineers. The current team are all engineers, so adding a dedicated sales team makes plenty of sense for the business now that it is maturing.

Most of the customer leads that Saleswhale itself gets are inbound, and mainly from tech startups, but Lim said the company has begun to hold initial discussions with firms in verticals such as real estate and automotive loans to diversify. But, right now, he told TechCrunch, the company has a “huge backlog” of interested customers that it is onboarding to its platform, which already counts “dozens” of paying customers. While he didn’t give specific names, Lim said that, since February 2017, Saleswhale has helped its customers close $130,000 in deals with a further $1.5 million-worth of leads in the pipeline.

This seed money will go towards those expansion and hiring efforts. Lim said the company will look to close a Series A round in around 12 months. Interestingly, this investment is a first seed deal for Monks’ Hill Ventures, the $80 million fund that is primarily focused on Series A companies, so Saleswhale may already have a major contributor to its next round depending on how things go.

 

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I have a fair bit to say about this, but lack the time. Suffice it to say that I believe the technological singularity (as per Ray Kurzweil) is not far off.

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I would be happy if they have a reverse service.. someone looking for quotes for me... takes a lot of time to look for right items.

most products are not identical when replacing.

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I have a fair bit to say about this, but lack the time. Suffice it to say that I believe the technological singularity (as per Ray Kurzweil) is not far off.

 

i watched some of his videos and also those by michio kaku.

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Isn't Amazon and others are using some sort of AI yo customize recomendations base on your browsing habits, and spamming your mailbox. Somehow these AI has a lot to improve.

 

Google Card also another one that still need alot of tuning..

 

Google Ads, also another one that still hasn't got it yet..

Edited by Ender
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70% of mundane and repetitive jobs and tasks will be replaced by bots ...

even tasks that required thinking and condition analysis will be replaced by AI

because no decision is better made than robot and AI

Edited by Wt_know
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Soon...doctors will be replaced. :p

Not really. U see the problem with AI is that they will accept data at face value.

To them, data is data.

 

Whatever a patient tells me. I will take into account the person, the personality, the consistency of the history.

If you just go down the symptoms list and just take everything at face value, u will end up with webmd where every condition gives u cancer.

 

Of course sometimes in something exceedingly rare or esoteric, AI like Watson maybe an avenue

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I read that there are a few web sites that uses AI to offer real time chat and advising.  However, all these like fail to take off or become a hit.  To me the biggest AI implementation and impact is Google.  Btw there is the Amazon Echo and Google Home that mimics AI speaking to you.  I am considering buying it to play.

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Global HR experts already been talking about AI replacing jobs in near future.

 

Bankers, security guards, tellers, insurance agents, RE agents, taxi cabbies bus drivers, receptionists. These jobs will be gone in 10 years time.

 

Already in SG, we see driverless buses going on trials, robots replacing security guards to do patrolling, driverless cars ( this will replace taxi drivers), Uber launching driverless cars and helicopters.

 

In 10 years, while most of us in MCF are still alive to see, AI will become reality.

 

Basically if your job is a routine based, with repeated work processes day in and day out, AI can replace YOU.

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How many times did you watch terminator?  [laugh]

 

In terminator human still win leh...

I can't predict when AI robot will take over but...

 

I will be back [:p]

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