We have completed our sixth anniversary at Cognistx. I continue to be blessed to work with our team, especially my co-founder Dr. Eric Nyberg. This post shares what has worked for our Company and how we are helping our customers with AI.

It’s the people!

There’s no doubt in my mind that a true path to success lies in surrounding yourself with the best, most passionate and collaborative people. That’s when great things happen! Great people are also important as customers, their passion, drive and trust ensure success. At Cognistx, we’ve been fortunate to have a talented staff and customers whose mission and vision match ours. During our recent customer panel discussion they unanimously agreed that taking advantage of what AI has to offer requires a long-term commitment to learning about technology as well as the challenges for successful use of AI in each business domain. On the other hand, customers or employees who are cynical, condescending and have an ulterior agenda will never contribute to a successful project or product.

For a company to be successful it’s equally important to have investors who also share your vision, passion and have the patience to see it come through. People who believe in you and the business and are people you can count on for good advice and guidance. These private investors who share our vision have allowed Cognistx to thrive without a venture round thus far. Sometimes lots of money too quickly gives you bad habits and forces you to accelerate ideas and products that may not work. There is no crystal ball, very rarely do people know that an idea will turn into a unicorn. Our approach has been to collaborate with the right customers, learn from their market and build great products jointly while building reusable AI components. This strategy has resulted in enhanced profitability for all parties.  

Customers are looking for painkillers not vitamins!

To be successful a product must solve pain points and have a clear ROI. Our Data Quality Engine (DQE) addresses the ubiquitous pain point of having bad data. Companies have disparate systems that have grown and evolved over time. Companies acquire other companies and merge data. Over time data gets old/stale and needs to be updated or it is incorrect in the first place. DQE helps you find data errors using statistics and AI/ML (machine learning) models. It helps you keep the data clean and fresh. Now you can trust your data to help you make good business decisions. If your data lake or data mart has bad data, DQE can help! DQE helps you start your AI journey, which we is outlined below:

Another product we’re proud of is OnQue™ with SAE. This product solves the pain point for aerospace and automotive engineers who need to review thousands of standards to analyze what standards are impacted if a part or material changes. We have utilized NLP (natural language processing) to parse standard documents for requirements, parts, materials and specifications and made this search easy. We’re building a similar product with Schneider Downs to help parse information security (SIG) documents to reduce the manual effort to verify and validate the information submitted.

Another great product we’re developing is in partnership with MagicMed Industries for pharmaceutical companies. PsyAI utilizes an ensemble of AI approaches, including some novel ones, to reduce the search space for molecules that need to be tested for toxicity and efficacy.  

We’ve applied AI/ML at PPG to help improve manufacturing processes. We’ve worked with retailers to help analyze sales and customer data and build various optimization tools. We’re helping Evoqua figure out which alerts need servicing for water filtration systems and which can be ignored. A few more pain points we are addressing are reducing employee and customer churn and other similar AI/ML applications.

The success of a product is dictated by the market. If you get good market adoption you can be successful. Of course marketing helps, but good products and solutions sell themselves. Our goal is to have products for all AI stages enabling companies to implement their digital strategy faster with high impact AI solutions and products. This is outlined in the diagram below:

It’s the revenue!

Revenue or sales cure a lot of problems. It's equally important to be profitable. At Cognistx, we’ve partnered with some of our clients to jointly build products for their specific industries with revenue sharing agreements. At the same time we’ve been building reusable AI components and background AI technology that helps us bring newer products and solutions to market faster. This strategy is outlined below:

Our goal is to have a reusable AI adoption framework that helps us and our clients implement solutions faster across the entire spectrum as shown below. You should think of us as an AI tailor; some things are ready and can be worn right away, some will need customization and some we can tailor to your exact needs.

At Cognistx, we feel it’s not possible to have an AI platform that solves all your problems. We believe that building reusable components and core AI technologies is the right approach to solve customer problems resulting in high ROI and value.

Our goal is to do good for our customers, employees, partners, investors and the community at large. As we continue on this exciting AI journey, we hope our paths cross and we welcome the opportunity to help you with your AI needs.