Founder's Story - Leading AI expert and How AI is Changing the World | Ep. 42 with Rana Gujral

Episode Date: December 20, 2020

Rana Gujral is an entrepreneur, speaker, investor, and CEO at Behavioral Signals, an emotion AI and behavioral recognition software company.  In 2014, Rana founded TiZE, a cloud software for specialty chemicals, and held the role of CEO until his exit when TiZE was acquired by Alchemy. He has been awarded the ‘Entrepreneur of the Month’ by CIO Magazine, the ‘US-China Pioneer’ Award by IEIE, and listed in "Top 10 Entrepreneurs to follow in 2017" by Huffington Post. Due to his notable thought-leadership in the voice-first community, spearheading digital transformation in the behavioral analysis space, he is recognized in Inc. Magazine as an “AI Entrepreneur to Watch”. His writing can be found in publications such as Inc., TechCrunch, and Forbes. Please rate, review, subscribe, and share with a friend who will be inspired. Visit KateHancock.com for insights into guests and future episodes. Today's episode is sponsored by Anchor. Make sure to check out Anchor.fm and see why we love to use them as our podcast hosting. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ibhshow/supportOur Sponsors:* Check out PrizePicks and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: www.prizepicks.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: www.rosettastone.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to Inspired by Her, the podcast that will give you the inspiration, motivation, and tips for success from some of the top executives, CEOs, and influencers from around the globe. With your host, serial entrepreneur, and named one of the most influential Filipina in the world, Kate Hancock. And we are live. Hi, everyone. This is Kate Hancockcock and today I have Rana Guzral. Hi Rana. Hi Kate, how's it going? Doing well, it's great seeing you everyone. Rana is an entrepreneur, speaker, investor and CEO at Behavioral Signals, an emotion AI and behavioral recognition software company. Now, in 2014, Rana founded TICE.

Did I say it correctly? TICE. That's correct. Yes. I'm not sure. A cloud software for specialty chemicals and held the role of CEO until his exit when TICE was acquired by Alchemy. Now, Rana has been awarded the Entrepreneur of the Month by CIO Magazine,

AI Entrepreneur to Watch by Inc. Magazine, and Top 10 Entrepreneurs to Follow in 2017 by Half Post. Rana, welcome. Thank you, Kate. Thank you. Appreciate it. Good to be here here and good to see you after a while i know it's been can you believe it's been a year i saw you yeah and was it it's

yes has it has it been a year it's been a year we were in palo alto was that in palo alto yes i think uh it was in a bar to palo alto maybe redwood city pal, Palo Alto, that neighborhood. Yes. Right. Yes. So Rana, I'm so fascinated by your work. But before we're going to talk about it, what was your journey like to get where you are? That's a great question. What's the journey like? So, you know, I think in terms of choices being made, and that's really what's driven the journey today. For me, I need to constantly learn and do things that pushes me towards learning new skills that I currently don't have. And so for me, I have this internal gauge that

goes off, which sort of, you know, when I feel like I've hit the ceiling of where I'm at right now in terms of my core skills and the value creation that I'm actually affecting. And when that happens, I'm out. And it doesn't matter what it is and where I'm at. And, you know, if it's a career track of X or Z, or, you know, there's a financial quotient has never really been important to me. And so for me, it's always been, you know, what's the, what's the goal at hand and where I'm at with, you know, with that, with that sort of, with that goal and self-fulfillment towards that. And, and that's led me to make some really bold choices, right? So I, I have sort of done that both in corporate and also outside of that, you know, when given the opportunity, I left a very cushy, you know, upward C-level trajectory in corporate to go do a very uncertain private equity back turnaround, which the challenge of sort of taking it on and, you know, getting it from dead to thriving was, was tremendous. So that in itself was the payback, right? Which is like,

okay, let's get to learn tremendously through that process. So that's what I did. And then once that happened again, sort of at that point, it was, you know, am I really interested in scaling this or going off to a next challenge? And at that point, it was, well, let's do a startup, which is a whole new challenge, right? I mean, it's a different ballgame of moving a needle for a business unit from, say, you know, you're doing a couple hundred million dollars and now you've got to improve it to 10%, 20%. It's really hard to do that. But building the first 10 mil in a startup is much harder. You know, the ones who have done it would know,

and the ones who haven't have no clue what I'm talking about, right? So just taking an idea and getting it out there and bringing the first million and then taking from one to 10. It's so hard. It's probably the hardest thing in the entire world, which we entrepreneurs deal with. And so, you know, so for me, it's like, okay, now I've done that, let's go do that.

Now that's happening, let's go do something else. And so that's been my journey. I mean, it's been, you know, sort of looking at that internal gauge and then going off to the next challenge. And that's, that's life. Amazing. Now, Rana, have you always been fascinated with technology? Tell me when you were growing up. Yeah, I was, but there's actually a really interesting story of my childhood. So I grew up in a family of doctors. And I mean, the history is that, you know, my parents grew up in the pre partition India, which, as you know, when the partition happened, there was this mega genocide, you know, between the two countries

where, you know, a portion of population, which was now not India anymore, it was Pakistan, were moving to India and India from Pakistan. And so millions were killed, right? Several millions happened. And so I grew up through that, you know, that sort of, I guess, that, you know, heritage of sort of losing everything, right? So my grandparents who were successful doctors lost everything, were in a refugee camp and grew up from that, raised three sons with a tremendous work ethic and all three sons were successful doctors. So I grew up in a very patriarchal, Asian-minded household where, you know, carrying your family tradition to the next level was everything. So I grew up always wanting to be a doctor. I mean, that's the only thing I knew,

and that's the only thing I learned. And then I got my first PC, I believe, in high school. And at that point, something changed. And I was like, you know, I'm going to not be a doctor. I'm going to go do computer science. And so that is when the switch happened. And, you know, I made that choice. And I, you know, I went against the grain and everybody was incredibly unhappy. There was a lot of drama and chaos. I can imagine. There's a whole backstory to it, which we'll get into at some other point in terms of

sort of what I had to do to prove myself. I had to actually sit through two entrance exams, both on engineering on the medical side, which was incredibly difficult. And just to prove that I could, and I actually got into a medical school just to show that I can and with no desire to get in. And so I sat into both medical and engineering entrance exams. And the whole purpose was to prove a point to the family that it's possible, but I have no desire to go there. Yeah, so, but from that point on, I've always been fascinated by technology

and I feel I've made the right choice. I think I've been a horrible doctor. I don't think that would have been worked out good for me or the society. That's an amazing story, how you like wanted them to be happy. Like, look, I could get in, but I'm going to this path. Yeah. I mean, it's, I mean, it's different. I kind of, sometimes I think about it, right. So that mindset of doing something just to make your parents happy, or not just happy, I guess, you know, to sort of prove a point of achievement was so important. And now at this point of time, I mean, we look around it, I mean,

you would find that incredibly silly it's like you wasted that much time and effort to go prove a point really yeah and uh it was a different world it was a different world it was a different set of beliefs uh you know growing up in that part of the world i think you know you relate you understand to it i think we've sort of let those values slide uh i don't think any of those things are important anymore. It's a very inward, selfish, individualistic-minded society of what's good for me is what I should live for. And first and foremost, that's important.

And then it shouldn't matter to you what others think about you. And to some extent, I agree with that. But I also feel that, you know, there were different cultural values, which are still very important for us to hold on tight towards. Yeah. Absolutely. Now, Rana, could you define AI in the simplest terms possible? Yeah. So I think the simple definition of AI is really a capability that we are building onto machines and inanimate systems that currently we as humans are just happen to be better at. It could be speech, it could're looking at and, you know, sort of codifying those abilities inside a machine or inside a software system

and bringing their ability to match humans, that's an aspect of AI, which we call intelligence or artificial intelligence that, you know, that we are creating as humans into a machine. Wow. Now, can you tell me i was looking at your website i'm so fascinated by your work rana it's amazing and i think you shared some stories when we were we're hanging out in san francisco a year ago and i could not forget about it about like you know people calling a customer service and the ai could

could read the voice just the voice and you were able to collect more debt can you share me that story again yeah so well like first off what we do is we we focus on a piece of technology it's deep tech that is unraveling insights from tone of voice, right? So when we're having conversations, we as humans have a natural ability to understand language, which when we put into a software system is natural language processing, you know, and a part of that is taking that audio, which I'm hearing and converting using the language processing in my head into meaning, into words, which then I understand what is Kate saying and how am I responding back to you and

you're sort of relating to that. But a conversation is much more than that, right? We're also trying to relate to each other, right? So my part of my brain is processing how you're saying something, right? How do you feel when you say X or Y? And what is your emotion or behavior at a given moment of time around the words you're choosing to use and your cognitive state of mind? And I'm trying to relate to that. And you're trying to relate to mine. And that's what makes a conversation a conversation.

And so what we do is we focus on that part. We focus on the unsaid. We go behind the actual words into how the words are spoken. And we unravel a variety of insights from that. So we unravel emotions such as anger, happiness, sadness, behaviors such as engagement, empathy, politeness. And we go as far as also predicting intent. So, for example, predicting how you're going to act in the near future. So, for example, if you apply this technology into, say, a call center or a sales call with a client, we can predict if a client will buy or not buy or if a debt holder will pay their debt or not pay their debt within the first 30 seconds of the conversation. And that prediction is made on the analysis of state of mind and signal detection,

which is actually beyond language, which means we actually don't care about what you're saying. And if we don't even take the audio and convert that into words, and it doesn't matter to us, nor does it matter what language you're speaking in. Just listening to where you're talking, we can get inside your state of mind and make those predictions and also unravel a variety of other insights. So it's an incredibly powerful set of capabilities that can be applied to augment and enhance conversations between two humans in a business context, maximizing that engagement, improving customer satisfaction and also you know whatever business outcome that you're shooting for that's amazing we were just having this conversation yesterday when we were in the hotel right we're in hotel and we tried to we tried to order breakfast and the front desk like oh it's already you're seven minutes late the emotional intelligence is not there so i was

complaining like you have such a nice hotel and your customer service doesn't match with the architecture like this is when ai could play out so nice right yeah exactly yeah no i think so i I think relating to the state of mind is the next, I'd say, the barrier the conversational AI and MLP systems have to cross. We've done a lot of good things in this space, but I think we're definitely reaching a plateau. And I think that's the next goal for us. Yeah. Now, can you tell me about the behavioral profile pairing? Yes, absolutely. So behavioral profile pairing is an incredible solution that we have bought to market. At the core, what we're doing is we are doing AI-mediated conversations and using our specialized technology to understand the state of mind

based on the tone of voice. We do personality or behavioral profiling of the participants. And based on that, we match the right agent with the right customer at hand. And so the goal there is that if you are going to talk to a client towards a business outcome and, you know, you're going to have these conversations, first serve. The first agent available takes that call, you know, and has a conversation with the client. And even when you are doing outbound calls, you're randomly given a set of clients that say, hey, here's your clients, go deal with them. But what we do is we bring a completely new set of intelligence in it. We decide based on a variety of personality attributes, who's the best person for the job here. And it's not based on whether you're a good agent or a bad agent or a good salesperson or an average salesperson. It's really who you are

and how you speak, how you can weigh something and how your emotional attributes sort of exist in a mix. And what's the best set of skills needed for this particular conversation? And so that's what the behavioral profile pairing solution is about. It's really at the core, a matching engine between agents and clients, which we have very, you know, customized it for banks and for financial institutions and we're applying it very heavily into the collections and collections call centers. Oh, that's amazing. Now, can you think me, what is the retails feature with AI in this global pandemic?

Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, there's, there's a lot of, you know, I'd say, changes happening on the retail side, tremendous. I mean, you're certainly sort of seen the whole retail going, you know, off kiln, you know, off the charts, just because people simply can't really physically be in stores. But I think in general, whether you're shopping online or you're, you know, you're, you're actually, you know, in a physical store, one of the big things you're trying to understand as a business or as a retailer is how a customer feels about a certain brand or a certain product. But how do you do that, right?

I mean, how do you do that? I mean, you can ask the client or, you know, you could gauge their actions, and that's typically how we do it. But if you hear a client interacting with a device and speak in certain ways. And then you can understand the state of mind just by simply listening to the, you know, the client's description of the product. You have a much better sense of sort of how they relate to that brand, how do they relate to that product. And so those applications are, I mean, as a business, we're not focused there. We're not really building the solutions, but that can certainly something which can add tremendous value in a retail experience.

Because emotion AI and behavioral AI is very applicable in multitude of industries, in multiple different verticals and variety of different use cases. Yeah. I could just imagine like, especially if you're shopping online, I was thinking, do you think it's going to be a voice where you can just talk? There's going to be a microphone while you're shopping and then your customer journey will be better rather than you clicking. Cause that's hard to achieve the going through the customer journey of shopping online. There's so many steps. So like, I would think like ai is

like your sales funnel right yeah i mean it it is uh ai is definitely a big part of your sales funnel uh it is uh it is really going i mean look i mean for a sales funnel we're uh we're always looking at insights we're looking at understanding the journeys and the behaviors. And the role that AI tends to play typically, and I think for the most part when people think of AI, they think about a supernatural ability in a machine. But at the core, for the most part, AI is really solving for automation and it's removing errors and it's removing randomness and it's removing the manual, you know, sort of

piece in that equation to minimize errors. So in some ways, yes, it's replacing what a human can do to allow for it to be more repeatable and less error-prone. But for the most part, it's replacing randomness. It's not replacing a human. It's replacing something that is done in a very crude fashion or in a very, I'd say, unsophisticated fashion. And now you have an ability to do it in a more systemized manner. So that's probably a bigger implementation of AI versus replacing a human. And the other bigger important thing that AI can help with is automate mundane tasks, which is, you know, hey, you know, you have a system that's listening to a conversation and summarizing it in notes and presenting it to the agent and saying,

hey, do you want to edit something or not? But I've sort of taken the core pieces of the conversation and I pieced it together for you to look at. That's stuff that agent can do, but an agent would rather not do because it takes a lot of time and takes a lot of effort. So the goal really, for the most part, whether you're talking about retail or you're talking about call centers or talk about really any other implementation is not to replace a human.

It's really augment a human by automating, by replacing a manual task or replacing a more randomized occurrence. Yeah, I love I actually utilize chatbots in my site or on Facebook Messenger because I will get 500 messages at one time. Excuse me. So I use the chatbots and it helps me and it's accurate of like instead of you. Imagine how many people do you need like responding that same question over and over again. Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's also, you know, a preference based on, you know, the sort of the age brackets, right? So the younger population really prefers not to pick the phone up and talk. I mean, they want to control their engagements through text and through email, and they feel they're more in control that way. It's natural for them. But that doesn't replace voice conversations. I mean, voice conversations are still going to be incredibly important,

but there's multiple, I mean, there's multiple different avenues of interaction. And when you're looking at AI, it's sort of looking at and say, well, how do I optimize this? And how do I optimize that? How do I take this level of experience and take it to the next level? And so there's different ways to add value. And certainly we play, our focus is mostly on voice interactions, which is typically more high valued, high stakes interaction, where you have to talk to a client. And now even with this digital push into more text and chat, the conversations that you are having through voice are becoming more high stakes because you have less opportunity

to speak with this client ever again. You want to resolve whatever you're trying to and achieve whatever outcomes you're trying to in this particular instance because you may never get to speak with this client again. And so all of those other tools that were sort of like, you know, gathering analytics and sort of post-call analysis are less relevant because how are they going to help you if you're never going to talk to that client ever again. So while you're on that call, how can AI help you? How can you salvage that bad situation? Or if it's a good situation, really capitalize on that and make that next sale. And those are some of the specialized tools that they're focused on to maximize those interactions. That's awesome. Now, can you tell me about your Oliver API and how did you come up

with that name? Yeah. So Oliver API is essentially our core technology stack that we make available to, you know, certain select institutions, mostly academic and also certain nonprofits. So we do have this, you know, focus on research that is very close to our DNA. It's very close to the genesis of our company. The company was founded by three amazing scientists who, you know, have done tremendous work in the arena of voice and voice interaction and linguistics. And so with that, we want to continue as we are, you know, pushing our commercial focus and, you know, and building these products for the market. We also want to make sure that the technology that we have developed can be applied in other use cases that we currently are not focused on business perspective.

And so that's what Oliver API is. It's really our technology stack that's available to students or researchers or scientists or companies that are working on nonprofit initiatives to leverage what we have built and experiment with it and build exciting, interesting use cases on it. Wow. Wow. Wow. Now, what recommendations would you give to CEO who haven't started looking into AI yet? Yeah.

I mean, look, I think this is probably the best time ever to go build a business around a specialized AI capability. It's come a long way. I mean, we've been talking about AI for the last 20 years or so in a variety of different forms. I mean, it feels like it's brand new, but it's not. There's been work which spans over two decades. But there's been a point of inflection that's happened in the last five to seven years. And that's because the ecosystem around us has matured to a point where we can actually now benefit from some of these capabilities, right? So just connectivity in general, like, you know, and that's really stable or, you know, 5G and other aspects that now allow us to really build experiences around connected devices. Computers have become really, really powerful. Our's a perfect, we're living now in a point of time where these building blocks are all available for us to put together, piece together and come up with more intelligent

solutions. And so if you're an AI entrepreneur and you're looking to solve a specific problem, you know, you've never had this easy. I mean, you have this now, this opportunity to take specialized capabilities, piece it together and go solve a bigger or more specialized problem. And so, I mean, it's a terrific time. You know, there's a tremendous potential. And I'll tell you this right now i mean not because we're running an ai company but um i don't think there's any business out there any enterprise uh you know level company out there that is not focused on ai it is a extremely high

priority for all businesses at all aspects and it's's no longer that exotic, you know, sort of specialized capability. It's a must have. And so that's a perfect time for an entrepreneur to go, you know, capitalize on that, on that trend and, and build a solution that can be, you know, that, that can be tremendously successful, both in value creation and also from a business building standpoint. Yeah, you have an emotionally intelligent virtual assistant. I would love to have 10 of those in my hotel business. Yeah, you know. It's hard to train someone and not everyone has the same empathy and the voice. I was like, can I have that right now? Yeah, I think, you know, as soon as we get these voice assistants that live around us to get to the next level of intelligence, and that's possible today.

Like, you know, so for example, like, so if I, if you just take Alexa as an example, or Google Assistant or any of these voice assistants, they've become really smart in processing data, right? Because they have this powerful search engine in the back. And they're also really accurate in terms of understanding your language, even multiple accents. And what you're saying part, they got it down. They can convert that into audio to, and search interesting things for you.

But they have no clue about how you're feeling and how you're saying something and what's your state of mind. And that is the barrier of us really having an intelligent conversation with these entities or having them be a real assistant right so if they have to be a assistant they have to be as close to a human as possible and without that ability they're never going to be it doesn't matter how fast they can search or you know how fast they can do math or the you know uh you know how how good they are in language processing or accent processing unless they understand the state of mind they'll never be equivalent to or delivering on the promise of being a real assistant and I think that's now possible yeah I love how excuse me AI can really get into that customer experience like I like to order using AI like when I call to order my

breakfast because it's accurate and they have you know order history and they ask me would you like to have an extra pancakes and I love that because sometimes like the human person that would take your order they're grumpy and they just don't pay attention or asking for the right questions. Yeah. I mean, we'll see as humans, we have a lot of variants, right? Depending on what's going on around us and how we're feeling. And also, you know, even if you look at like, say a call center, the agents are very well trained. They're trained to talk to people in a certain way. And they're also actually trained to key into the state of mind of the client and really understand when the client's, you know, being disengaged or is angry, etc. But the thing is that, you know, when you're doing the same thing day in, day and you're now on the hundredth call of the day your brain tunes it out right so the clients suddenly disengaged

but you're not catching that because you know you're not focused on that and also more importantly and I think that personally I feel is a lesser of a problem the other the bigger problem is when we're having conversations, naturally for us as humans, our focus is on the person we're having a conversation with, right? So if you're an agent, you're focused on the client. You're focused on, hey, how's the client feeling and how's the client reacting to this? You're not focused on yourself. So if you're speaking too fast, you're not realizing it. If you're speaking too slow, you're not realizing it. Or if you're sounding rude or disengaged, you're not catching that because your focus is on the other person. And so some of these technologies that are inward focus. So we're helping the agent to watch out for certain problem behaviors, which they're missing, not because they don't have the ability to, it's just because they're focused on the client. And you can't be focused on what yourself and the client, right? I mean, the best amongst us will fail. So I think that's really

where I mean, you know, the things can small things can add tremendous value. That's amazing. Now, Rana, how do you want to be remembered? Oh, I don't know if I have a good answer to that. I'd say curious, potentially, you know, a good friend, you know, you know, hopefully live up to the family expectations I think I think those are important things for me I mean they all sort of define who I am everything else is fleeting I mean it changes but I mean I think that's that would be important for me now Wow. Now, Rana, you know, I have two boys and I would tell my boys, like, I need you guys to look for a job that can't be automate, right? Like do maybe a plumber or something. What advice would you give to your kids? What kind of work?

Yeah. I mean, I mean, I'll say, I mean, I get this question asked a lot, by the way. So I'm going to give you a cliched answer, which I usually give in my talks. But there is always that part of do what you're passionate about, which is important, right? I mean, you have to eventually, but the thing is that it's hard to really know what you're passionate about you have to experiment to a lot of different things you have to go through a lot of different uh tests to really understand what you're passionate about your passion changes um and uh so it's important to keep an open mind around that which is like you know keep an open mind you might think you're passionate about this today but because you've not done this, this, and this, or you haven't been exposed

to these other things. So you don't know what, what your passion levels might be for these other tasks out here. So keeping an open mind is important for us as parents. We can expose them to that and we can give them a view or insights into some of those things. And kids are typically resistant to that because they're like, I got this. I know this is what I want to do. And so, but hold on a second. Let's, you know, let me show you this as well. And then you make that choice. So that is all great. Right. But the biggest thing I'd say, biggest lesson I would give to kids is to make sure that they're not playing it too safe and they're taking the risks that they need to take. If you really look at the entire spectrum of life and sort of who's achieved X and Y and who's more fulfilled and sort of the different life journeys, the ones who have not played it safe really have the most

interesting, the most fulfilling, and also the most successful journeys. But, you know, typically as parents, we give the most counter advice, which is like, you know, play it safe, take the safe choice and, you know, do it this. If you had two different options ahead of you, this is a no brainer, this is full of risk and whatnot. And in general, I think that's the wrong attitude. That's the wrong mindset. So my, my advice is don't play it safe. It's not worth the risk. And so that's, you know, that's the message. And if you focus on that, I think, you know, everything else adds up.

Life has an interesting way of working out. And just don't hold back. I love it. Rana, where can they find you? What's your website? Yeah, so, you know, you can connect with me on social media, on Facebook, Twitter, or go to my webpage. It's myfirstandth the last name.com so it's r-a-n-a rana gujral it's g-u-j-r-a-l.com um you know happy to

reach out a lot of people send me some really interesting and exciting ideas sometimes for the contact us page i do get all of those uh and some exciting, interesting things have happened based on that. So feel free if you want to connect and reach out. I promise you, you will hear back. We will chat. Wow. Love it. Rana, I can't wait to see you next time.

Where is our next trip? It's been a while. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I think we need to plan it. Yeah. Let's get plan it. Yeah. Let's get on that. Yeah.

Thank you so much. And I appreciate you sharing your story. This is amazing. By the way, I love what you're doing. And have a wonderful day. Thanks, Kate. Thanks for having me. See you soon.

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