In today’s competitive world entrepreneurs are leveraging their expertise with Artificial Intelligence (AI) where cognitive automation extends and improves the range of actions that offers advantages for industries including cost savings and customer satisfaction.
Rupert Steffner is the CEO at WUNDER and an enthusiast about Cognitive AI. He strongly believes in “Building mind machines that think and act like a human.” Rupert carries 20 years of work experience in application engineering, data science, business intelligence and real-time stream processing. Apart from his adequate knowledge in machine learning, he gathers inspiration from bright minds like Minsky and Kurzweil and the great advances in neurobiology. He strongly believes that AI is about two things, trust, and learning. Building white-box AI will lead to transparency and accountability in automated, intelligent decision-making that generates trust among the users.
Over the years, Rupert has developed two essential steps to make new things happen in the field of AI. He shares his first step as acknowledging a grass-root sensor and become a part of worldwide communities to get known where cutting-edge technology is going to be built. The second step was to make far better and more creative use of technologies. So, he made cognitive AI with an engineering approach to demystify AI technology and bring it into real-world applications.
Meanwhile, Rupert also states that “There is a fast-growing demand for explainable AI and the engineering approach that turned out to be a great choice. But making strategic decisions against conventional wisdom requires a considerable amount of perseverance and conviction. And perhaps it is those characteristics that make an entrepreneur.”
Offering New Era of Cognitive AI
WUNDER is offering its brand new technology that introduces completely new business cases. It has developed cognitive AI technology that imitates consumer decision-making with more conscious and faster in speed than a human brain. Rupert also mentions that WUNDER helps other brands to provide their online customers with new AI-fueled shopping experiences including Product Discovery, Matching Stories, Social Match, and Shopping Party that allows several shoppers to make a joint decision.
At present, WUNDER is living on the edge of a new transformative society. Its skilled team builds a new generation of trustful AI technology maximizing the impact of data. It is also empowering its customers to make good decisions and helping other companies to unleash its greatest potential.
Approaching Voyage through Learning’s
Rupert has shared his journey with unified learning stages where he mentions, “A curiosity is the lifeblood of everything new, and visions to shape the future. Perseverance is the survival technique when you are the only one left who believes in your mission.”
He has also learned many examples, where he found easy and highly tempting ways of adapting the product to the current market demands. He believes that the hardest way is to keep the product aligned with future market needs and to find the right customers. Rupert has also accepted the market trends followed by new things, and there are only few companies that fully understand the disruptive force of AI technologies.
“We also learned that Roger’s adoption cycle with few innovators and early adopters is true, and not the marketing buzz of all the companies that claim they are innovative. So we had to achieve to find these forward-thinking companies and to get them on board as our first customers,” adds Rupert.
Building a Moat of Cognitive AI Solutions
There are many prerequisites to engineer in AI before it can bring the application into the real world. It also consists of better data with special data preparation routines along with new AI runtimes operating in milliseconds, and new user experience (UX). Rupert has already initiated the sustainable competitive advantage by engineering explainable and manageable AI technologies. This all process pays in trust, accountability, hybrid learning, decision uncertainty management etc. At last, he has a clever market strategy that takes the first mover advantage to quickly land across various industries.
Approaching Future Goals
Rupert has a vision towards company’s goal and advancement of AI in the growing market where he states that, “With cognitive AI we have only scratched the surface so far. AI is in the childhood maturity stage and my personal goal is to help raise artificial intelligence to an adolescent maturity stage.”
This will be a long way with building blocks like better reasoning, causality, biologically inspired learning methods and so on. Rupert‘s ultimate goal is to integrate cognitive psychology and neuroscience to make cognitive systems more empathic and relevant. Being an entrepreneur he also shares his views on emerging entrepreneurs where he mentions, “There is a justified criticism that founders produce innovations that are too small and incremental. Think big. Dream. Explore. Discover. And then build something massive.”
Source: The 30 Most Influential Entrepreneurs to Watch 2018
