Episode 12: Getting AI through the Final Mile

The SphereCast team speaks with Michael Kohen, Co-Founder and CEO at SparkAI. Kohen’s impressive resume includes senior-level experience at Zoox —an AI-powered autonomous vehicle company that was eventually acquired by Amazon. In his career, Kohen has learned that, though an automation product may have loads of momentum, it always slows down before market deployment as the team perfects the machine learning algorithms. SparkAI partners with companies to push their automation products past the finish line and get to market faster.

Having been on the front lines of automation product development, Kohen is intimately familiar with these development pains. However, as with every good entrepreneur, Kohen has created an innovative solution to meet a real market need. On the podcast, Michael dives into SparkAI and the benefit his company brings its clients and also discusses the freedom of spending your life in a job that you truly love.

“With automation products, it’s seemingly easy to make early progress that lets you get in front of your first customers. Show some demos; show some progress. But it’s really that back part —the back 10 percent of that automation challenge —that’s very difficult.”

“In our careers, at the end of the day, all of us are figuring this stuff out for the first time. And we’re learning things along the way —in many cases, the hard way. But over time, each of things we learn —those experiences we have —make us better people and make us better professionals.”