Companies today are increasingly interested in finding out more about who their customers are, and what those customers want. AI offers the possibility to answer these questions for them. They want to use AI in their business but are often intimidated by its perceived complexity. Ople addresses this demand for understandable AI, bringing all the benefits of the technology in a form that everyone can comprehend. The Founder and CEO of Ople, Pedro Alves, doesn't see any other company out there that is automating the entire data pipeline like his team. Many companies offer portions of what Ople provides, but not the true beginning-to-end automation.  Ople's technology benefits both companies and data scientists alike. Companies are able to relieve their data scientists' of some of their responsibilities and tasks using Ople's technology, allowing the data scientists to spend more time on strategic problem formulation and take on more projects that impact the business.

At Ople.ai, the team enables companies to leverage AI, a tool that is often misunderstood as difficult and unwieldy, to create insights and business value. Companies run into two major hurdles when trying to incorporate AI into their business plan. First, it's very difficult to find and hire experienced data scientists due to the amount of information they must learn in order to become a great data scientist. Second, if the company is lucky enough to find and hire this unicorn data scientist, he or she often spends so much time doing the technical work, like hyperparameter tuning and optimization, that monitoring the actual impact on the business is neglected.

Both of these hurdles can be solved with the same idea: when you automate many, or close to all of the technical aspects required to do AI, then you reduce the knowledge and experience your data scientist requires to do the job. You also speed up the process, because the data scientists are not spending time doing all the technical aspects of the job, and can instead focus on how these projects impact the business to ensure that they are successful.

The innovation at Ople is the automation of several data scientist tasks, such as data prep, feature engineering, algorithm selection, and fine-tuning of the model. It also spreads to the area of data cleaning as it helps users test, and solves business challenges more quickly.  No one else is doing this. Ople doesn't stop there. Its software creates a system that gets better with time and learns the same way that scientists would, ensuring businesses stay ahead of their competitors and are perpetually improving.

Companies that aspired to do AI and were not able to, are now able to not only incorporate AI into their business, but also do it faster, and at a lower risk when they're using Ople. They will experience all the benefits of AI and more, such as increased efficiency, improved top and bottom line, and decreased costs of operation. True to its name, Ople, which is short for "Optimized Learning," enables businesses to find optimized ways to streamline different functions faster and with more confidence. Their innovation is significant enough that it continues to impress and gain support in a field that is becoming increasingly crowded.  Speaking on the AI sector, Pedro says there are doubts surrounding investors in the AI space, and companies really struggle to raise money unless they show real innovation. The applicability and usefulness of Ople's innovation have shown companies and investors that Ople is an expert in the field of AI and allowed the company to successfully raise the latest funding.

Challenges Along the Way

Hurdles are inevitable when attempting to innovate and develop something meaningful and unique. Pedro believes that when it comes to software that enables an advanced technology to be so easily implemented and broadly used, such as Ople, there will always be instances where people use the technology to innovate faster than they can foresee. For example, the fast growth in automation and increasing efficiency that AI create will inevitably create shifts in workforce-type distributions within companies. These shifts usually go hand-in-hand with big advances in technology. Making sure that companies and the workforce are prepared for, and adapt to this quickly and seamlessly is important to avoid such drawbacks.

Innovation Driven by Partnerships

Speaking on the key involvement in the innovation architecture, Pedro says, "Internally, I would say being able to secure some of the top talents in the world and the field was crucial in developing our product. From an external perspective, partnering with companies eager to use, implement and deliver feedback on Ople is necessary to provide the best experience possible."

An Experienced Innovator

Pedro Alves spent many years as a Data Scientist in multiple fields, including the medical field, healthcare, major league sports, signal processing, insurance, social network, and fashion, with a lot of emphasis on computer vision. He has also spent some time in the industry, advising and consulting projects. Throughout his career, Pedro gained insight into the state of affairs in the space of AI and data science by interviewing hundreds of data scientists. These experiences exposed him to the failures and hurdles of getting business value out of AI. Pedro found that many companies make the mistake of throwing money into AI projects that often do not pan out. With all this in mind, he envisioned a path towards easy and valuable AI and became the founder and CEO of Ople.ai.