“Market Intelligence will Lead to AI-Based Knowledge Driven Growth” Says Raj Neervannan

Alphasense, a leading market intelligence service provider has catered to around 2000 organizations which include major S&P 500 companies, S&P 100 companies, and other top asset management firms and consultancies operating diverse fields such as energy, pharmaceuticals, IT, consumer goods, and industrials. As stated in their mission statement, they organize the world's business information and leverage technology to enable companies to make smarter, faster, and more confident decisions. Alphasnese extracts premium business insights through AI and NLP-driven content analysis scouring through a wide variety of sources which include company filing, event transcripts, news, trade journals, and equity research. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Raj Neervannan, Co-founder and CTO, AlphaSense.

1.Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

AlphaSense is a market intelligence platform that uses AI and natural language processing to extract relevant business insights from an extensive universe of public and private content. Like Google for the business person, we bring the right information to each user at the right time and we are helping them make better decisions more quickly and confidently.

Our clients include leading companies in wide-ranging industries such as energy, industrials, consumer goods, and technology, with the platform appealing to knowledge workers across a wide range of roles including strategy, competitive intelligence, investor relations, corporate development, and financial analysis.

2.What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from competitors?

Our deep learning AI technology. AlphaSense finds all relevant information and not just the literal keyword results from a traditional "Ctrl-F" type search. The engine that powers this is something we call Smart Synonyms, which uses deep learning and natural language processing to understand semantic relationships between business concepts that ordinarily evade digital detection. In other words, it's trained to understand the nuances and jargon of financial and business language, especially synonyms.

3.How is AI evolving today in the industry as a whole? What are the most important trends that you see emerging across the globe?

The AI industry is evolving at an exponential, breathtaking pace. Hardly a week or two goes by without a SOTA (State-of-the-Art) in some task being broken. On one hand, when the models are good enough on pure performance, they get leaner and better at beating SOTA, using less energy and less (but better) annotated data.

On a parallel track, the hardware is growing at an exponential pace to extend the potential of a large model.

These two massive growth paths, and the transparency offered by open-sourced models, are making model replication possible for commercial vendors—and these vendors are finding amazing new use cases and building new businesses.

4.How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?

In the next few years, the focus for us is investing and scaling. That means expanding our content sets to provide stronger coverage across geographies and industries, as well as private and public companies—all with the aim to truly serve knowledge professionals across all types of businesses. We'll continue to double down on our AI technology that is serving smarter and timelier insights to our users. We want to be the default business Search Engine.

Information has always been unstructured – it was never really properly analyzed by computers the way humans do for business purposes. We are pioneers in identifying AI-driven algorithms to understand business language. The future of market intelligence will demand a more structured way of finding information by the knowledge workers across all information media sources – driving AI driven knowledge acquisition as the primary currency for growth.

5.How is your company helping customers deliver relevant business outcomes through the adoption of the company's technology innovations?

AlphaSense cuts through the chaos of information in the business world because our platform has trustworthy and high-quality sources all aggregated in one place, helping organizations find insights faster and more efficiently across a wide range of use cases:

• In pharma, users can explore competitors' drug pipelines and improve their strategy for launching and growing their own products.
• In the investment world, users are able to distinguish strong companies from weaker ones much more efficiently and invest accordingly.
• In corporate development, users can identify promising companies to partner with or acquire.

6.What is your Leadership Mantra?

I believe in servant leadership. It's extremely important to help your colleagues succeed in order to gain their trust and develop a working environment that is progressive, fun, and enables innovation.

7.What are the skill sets that you specifically look for while hiring at an initial stage?

For me, the most important skills I look for in a candidate are the ability to problem solve creatively, think on your feet, and have the drive to innovate. We at AlphaSense value curiosity above all since it builds a culture of learning.