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Invoca Raises $41 Million in Equity Financing; a Doctor’s AI Experience; Marc Benioff on Ethics in AI
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Invoca Chief Executive Gregg Johnson at a company event in Santa Barbara, Calif., in February. PHOTO: BARON SPAFFORD/INVOCA
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AI funding deal. Invoca Inc., a provider of AI-powered software that lets companies analyze customer phone calls, said it raised $41 million in new equity financing and secured a $15 million line of credit, reports WSJ Pro’s Jared Council.
The investment round was led by Upfront Ventures and H.I.G. Growth Partners, with participation from Accel, Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners, Industry Ventures and Bonfire Ventures. The credit facility is from ORIX Corp. USA.
Invoca, based in Santa Barbara, Calif., has raised $101 million in equity capital since its founding in 2008. Its customers include Dish Network Corp., U.S. Bancorp and SunTrust Banks Inc.
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What Invoca does. The software company's eponymous platform uses AI to analyze call-center conversations and determine the outcome of the call, such as a scheduled appointment or sale. Invoca then feeds its analysis to a client’s marketing managers, who can use the information to tailor future marketing campaigns or content. At the heart of Invoca is a tool dubbed Signal AI, which uses natural language processing to pick up key topics, such as pricing questions or cancellation requests, discussed during a call.
When a consumer calls a client company that uses Invoca’s platform, that person dials a unique phone number generated for him or her. That means the software can understand the online activity that preceded the customer’s call, including any product pages viewed and any ads clicked.
Gaining new insights. Corporate marketers have an array of tools for determining how their investments in digital advertisements perform online, including metrics such as click-through and conversion rates. But Invoca Chief Executive Gregg Johnson said marketers often have little insight into how those ads affect phone calls, which are often important for purchases such as a home mortgages or satellite services.
“Marketers are spending lots of money on digital advertising to reach a very wide audience of people, but at some point in that buying process those consumers want to consult with an expert,” Mr. Johnson said. “And it’s very hard to piece together the data from those two different customer experiences.”
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A doctor’s positive AI experience. WSJ Health Expert Howard Forman, a professor of radiology, economics, public health and management at Yale University, writing in The Wall Street Journal, says that about 18 months ago, his workplace, Yale-New Haven Hospital, began a pilot partnership with a small radiology AI startup. The technology company was pursuing applications in his subspecialty, emergency and trauma radiology. The company's first applications sought to detect neck fractures and bleeds in the brain. The startup has since added a system to detect blood clots in the lung. Dr. Forman, however, writes that he had some hesitancy about the technology’s initial deployment:
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"During the adoption phase of this AI, I was concerned that radiologists would be slowed, our workflow would be disrupted, or worse, patient care would be impaired. This has not been the case. Rather, the technology has been remarkably nonintrusive. The most evident use of AI in our department is in triaging cases. AI allows us to read urgent cases earlier than we might otherwise, and allows for earlier management of patients requiring critical intervention. Not surprisingly, the technology has also picked up findings that could have been missed even by our specialty radiologists."
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Salesforce's Marc Benioff. PHOTO: JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES
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Reporter's Notebook: Human guidance is essential as tech power grows, Marc Benioff warns. The Salesforce founder and co-CEO told journalists Wednesday it was time for people to apply much stronger controls to social media, AI and other technologies.
Mr. Benioff renewed his assertion that Facebook “is the new cigarettes.” He called for the abolishment of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the 1996 legislation that immunizes an “interactive computer service” from liability for information that third parties publish on its platform. He also proclaimed that “capitalism is dead,” while holding out hope for a new form of capitalism that puts stakeholders on par with shareholders.
He said he was “shocked by resistance” to Proposition C, the San Francisco business tax plan designed to raise funds to address homelessness. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, is a prominent opponent.
He made his comments at an event hosted by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he was interviewed by New York Times Deputy Managing Editor Rebecca Blumenstein, previously of The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Benioff entered the news business himself last year when he and his wife purchased Time magazine. Here are excerpts from the Q&A.
Rebecca Blumenstein: How worried are you about the upcoming election and misinformation?
Marc Benioff: Well, I think we all should we be worried, based on what we have seen. You know, unless we are living in a capsule and not reading anything, which some days, I would prefer to do, actually. But we should be worried. We should be worried because there are still a lot of things we don’t understand about how the technology is shaping us, and how the technology is much smarter than it was even just a couple of years ago. Let me give you an example, something that is amazing to me … We have a drone that is flying over the ocean right now … It is run by the University of California-Santa Barbara. The drone is using advanced artificial intelligence … some that we developed. And it spots a great white shark …. and then the classification engine also says 'Oh, look, it is a kids’ surfing camp right here.' And they were able to call the beach and have the kids get
out of the water.
Now that’s the use of AI for good. But technology is never good or bad. It’s what we do with the technology that matters … We are in this fourth industrial revolution. We all know that. And not just the information technologies. But the biotechnologies as well. It is incredible what is going on. But we have to guide the technology. We have to point it in the right direction. Otherwise we are going to end up somewhere that we don’t want to do.”
Ms. Blumenstein: Don’t you enable this to a certain extent?
Mr. Benioff: Well, I hope not … Companies can’t wash their hands of what people do with their products. That is a key point of ethical use. And that is where I think I have had to double down inside Salesforce over the last year and a half, two years. As our technology is getting more advanced, how is it being used ethically? We set up inside our company an office of ethical and humane use. We hired a top ethicist. We built a network of the top NGOs and nonprofits in the world … to help guide us. And we have made a number of decisions around ethical use, including, by the way, we no longer sell military weapons or assault weapons through our commerce platform. Our team came to us and said this is no longer something we can do. And we turned that off. That is a tough decision, by the way. But those are the hard decisions CEOs are going to have to make. And that is
something that we are willing to do … This is evangelical work.
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64%
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The percentage of 8,370 workers, managers and human-resource execs responding to an Oracle and Future Workplace survey who say they would trust a robot more than their manager, according to ZDNet.
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Outback test machine learning to improve customer service. Bloomin’ Brands’ Outback Steakhouse is testing machine learning technology from Presto at a franchisee’s restaurants to improve its customers' experience, reports CNBC. Cameras in the lobby capture the interactions between hosts, servers and customers and can track wait times and the number of people who walk out before being greeted or seated, says CNBC. The system sends alerts to managers and staff before angry customers leave. The data Presto captures is trashed after 30 days and no personally identifiable data is tracked or recorded, according to the report.
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A general view apartments and office buildings of the Yeouido district and Seoul city skyline in June 2019. PHOTO: ED JONES/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
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South Korea invests in transportation. South Korea is looking to speed the adoption of self-driving, electric and flying cars in a move to stimulate its economy, reports Bloomberg. The country’s president, Moon Jae-in, said Korean businesses will invest 60 trillion South Korean won ($50 billion) into transportation in the next decade while the government will put up KRW2.2 trillion to help create related technology and infrastructure, according to the report.
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One-handed robot solves Rubik’s cube. OpenAI, the artificial-intelligence research organization, said a humanoid robotic hand it created has learned to solve a Rubik’s cube, reports the Verge. The AI group sees the development as a significant leap forward in robot-appendage dexterity.
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Healx, which uses AI to discover new drug treatments for rare diseases, raised $56 million in a Series B funding round. The financing was led by Atomico with participation from Intel Capital, Balderton Capital, Global Brain, Btov Partners, Amadeus Capital Partners, and Cambridge Innovation Capital’s Jonathan Milner. (VentureBeat)
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What: WSJ Tech Live Conference
Where: Laguna Beach, Calif.
When: Oct. 21-23, 2019
The Wall Street Journal’s global technology conference, WSJ Tech Live, returns to Laguna Beach, Calif. for its fifth year from Oct. 21 to Oct. 23 at the Montage hotel. Join top leaders in technology, media and business for newsmaking onstage interviews with Robert Iger, CEO of Walt Disney Co., Jeff Wilke, CEO of world-wide consumer, Amazon, Shari Redstone, vice chair of CBS and Viacom, Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Michael Schroepfer, chief technology officer of Facebook, and many more.
Some of the themes we’ll be exploring this year:
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Big tech and regulation
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The streaming wars
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The race to 5G
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The landscape of threat and security
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The U.S.-China trade war and its impact on technology
The full speaker list for 2019 and the agenda can be found here.
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