Modena is home to a thirty-year-old company that is
now scaling half the world’s markets thanks to artificial intelligence. A team
of professionals divided between Italy, Europe and North America with a
turnover of €30 million. Giampaolo Colletti interviews Stefano Spaggiari,
founder and executive chairman of expert.ai for FARE INSIEME
of Giampaolo Colletti
@gpcolletti
Photocredit: Giacomo Maestri e Francesca Aufiero
It was born more than 30 years ago in a garage that
would eventually become hypertech, long before its best-known American
counterparts arrived on the scene. So, in that space of first-generation cables
and computers, as early as the 1990s, three classmates at the University for
Computer Science in Modena—one of the first courses in the field—tried to do
things big and make strides in artificial intelligence before it became known
in Italy and around the world. This is the story of expert.ai, a Modena company
that is now one of the largest in Europe committed to artificial intelligence.
It is a team of people with strong technical and business skills and a
significant international presence across countries in Europe and North America
with a turnover of around €31 million. A round-trip from Italy to America.
Since 2020, amid a pandemic crisis, a major new internationalization project
has been launched. There are now two headquarters: one in Modena, specializing
in research and development, and one in Boston, specializing in sales and
marketing. "But we also have research groups in Trento, Naples, Siena,
Rome, Milan and sales offices abroad in France, Spain, the United Kingdom and
Germany. We have always been pioneers on the world stage. We were competing
with giants like IBM and Olivetti. Because at the time, there were big groups,
not startups. In the beginning, we were not concerned with Artificial
Intelligence (AI), but with software-applied linguistics. At the time, we had
developed the first automatic corrector of the Italian language incorporated in
the Office package, then sold to Microsoft. We were startups but did not know
it. There was no enlarged ecosystem and thus no relative support from business
angels as funders”, says Stefano Spaggiari, founder and executive chairman of
expert.ai.
Think big. Such a long path
traveled. And without even imagining how it would be beforehand. So the early
years were used to grow, but also to experiment. The grammar checker, for
example, was a stroke of genius by one of the three partners. Step by step, bit
by bit, without any rush because at first there was very little money. "We
could not easily attract investment because in the past it was more difficult,
so during the day we were making software for work and at night we were
programming for pleasure", Spaggiari explains. The satisfaction in the
young unconscious of trying to change the world. So, the dream grew at night,
and in the second round. Because the first round was just a question of
surviving. "We are talking about a pre-Internet world. But we figured the
world would change. It was at the beginning of the 2000s that we received the
first big investments to make a real piece of AI to simulate cognitive skills.
That is where our long story starts. Today, we cover twelve languages including
Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic. But the thing that sets us apart is that
we always think big. Even in the beginning, we wanted to show that software of
worldwide value could be built in Italy and not just in Silicon Valley",
adds Spaggiari. But what do you do with this platform? All human activity is
based on knowledge. And Spaggiari explains this well. "There is a huge
amount of unstructured knowledge within companies, but the more you know the
better. So, there are two groups of applications for companies: on the one
hand, ‘robotic processing automation’ and the new industrial revolution for
tasks that are done manually but could be done automatically. For example,
service management. Then there is the world of ‘information intelligence’ that uses available knowledge to make
decisions".
The power of expertise. It is all about
expertise. In this case, the expertise of programmers and developers. But the
rest of the team does not necessarily have technical knowledge. There is room
for people with a classical education, such as philosophers, linguists and
graduates in languages or literature. "They have been proven to have the
right mentality to rationalize knowledge by deconstructing and restoring it in
a manner intelligible for machines. They are the real mediators of the rules of
analysis. So, the human sciences come into play with the data", says
Spaggiari. Understand and extract.
That is the double mission. Today, the company works with some of the world's
leading private and government agencies: A hybrid approach turns language into
data, providing the vision needed to improve organizational decision-making. So
with AI, you can power and scale your business. Expert.ai has developed
cutting-edge natural language understanding technology that leverages semantic
analysis (the ability to understand the meaning of words and phrases) to help
machines understand texts, solving language ambiguities. The solutions are
designed for insurance, banking, publishing and media, defense and
intelligence, healthcare and the pharmaceutical industry, energy, government
and telecommunications. In this manner, technology embraces man to design the
new pages of the future.
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