The Charleston Marketing Podcast
Welcome to The Charleston Marketing Podcast, the podcast that dives deep into the world of marketing, with a specific focus on the vibrant city of Charleston. Join us as we explore the strategies, trends, and success stories that shape the marketing landscape in this historic and captivating coastal city.
Each episode of The Charleston Marketing Podcast brings you exclusive interviews with local marketing experts, industry thought leaders and Charleston entrepreneurs who have harnessed the power of effective marketing in the Lowcountry and beyond. From strategic communication, social media, PR, digital strategy and everything in between, we uncover valuable insights and actionable tips for our listeners.
The Charleston Marketing Podcast
Drayton Wade: Unleashing AI Potential in Charleston's Thriving Tech Scene
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Discover the inspiring journey of Drayton Wade, COO of Cognitos, as he reveals how a top candidate influenced the decision to anchor this AI startup in Charleston. This vibrant city, with its youthful workforce and strategic location, became the perfect setting for Cognitos to thrive. Drayton shares his impressive background, from his academic roots at Clemson University to his involvement in tech startups. As we explore the unique opportunities and intentional planning that make Charleston an ideal hub, learn how Cognitos is redefining business processes with intuitive technology and fostering a culture of collaboration.
Under the visionary leadership of founder Benny Gill, Cognitos launched during the COVID-19 pandemic with a mission to empower users. Their platform seamlessly integrates with systems like QuickBooks, enabling companies to scale efficiently. In a fascinating success story, even seasoned employees at a manufacturer in Indiana are effortlessly adopting this user-friendly technology. As the AI industry continues to evolve, discover how Cognitos emphasizes collaboration and integration to stay ahead, allowing employees to focus on problem-solving and enhancing customer interactions.
The conversation broadens to explore the future of AI integration across several sectors, from finance and accounting to customer service and education. Delve into the transformative power of AI, offering human-like interactions and valuable data insights while preparing future generations for an AI-driven world. Drayton shares his personal initiatives with Clemson University to elevate its research status and address workforce challenges, particularly in rural health. Additionally, uncover how AI is making tasks more accessible and boosting productivity, with platforms like ChatGPT and Duolingo illustrating its potential to enhance job satisfaction.
Presenting Sponsor: Charleston Radio Group
Title Sponsor: Charleston American Marketing Association
Cohosts: Stephanie Barrow, Mike Compton, Darius Kelly, Kim Russo
Produced and edited: rūmbo Advertising
Photographer: Kelli Morse
Art Director: Taylor Ion
Outreach: Lauren Ellis
CAMA President: Margaret Stypa
Score by: The Strawberry Entrée; Jerry Feels Good, CURRYSAUCE, DBLCRWN, DJ DollaMenu
Voiceover by: Ellison Karesh
Studio Engineer: Brian Cleary
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Welcome to the Charleston Marketing Podcast, powered by the Charleston American Marketing Association and broadcasting from our home at Charleston Radio Group. Thanks to CRG, we're able to talk with the movers and shakers of Charleston, from economy to art, from hospitality to tech and everything in between. These leaders have made a home here in the Lowcountry. They live here, they work here, they make change here. Why? Let's talk about it?
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to the Charleston Marketing Podcast powered by the Charleston Marketing Association. We're recording in the Charleston Radio Group Studios. Big supporters of Canva Gotta give a big shout out to Charleston's favorite DJ. Dj Jerry Feels Good with the beats of the beginning. Thanks to all our supporters. Dot DJ Jerry feels good with the beats of the beginning. Thanks to all our supporters. Hey guys, I'm Stephanie. I'm the founder of Stephanie Barrett Consulting, a digital marketing strategy agency here in Charleston, and your CAMA past president. Thanks for joining us. I am here with my fellow co-host, darius Kelly. Darius, say hi.
Speaker 3:How you guys doing. I'm Darius Kelly, owner of DK Design, and I'm also the sponsorship director of the Charleston AMA, and we are excited to have our guest today.
Speaker 1:Drayton Wade of Cognitos.
Speaker 3:Drayton Wade is a South Carolina native who currently serves as the chief operating officer of Cognitos, a venture-backed artificial intelligence business based in San Jose, california, with other offices in Charleston Bangalore and Buenos Aires.
Speaker 1:Did I say?
Speaker 3:Bangalore, there right yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, cool, Cool cool.
Speaker 3:Drayton earned his bachelor's in political science from Clemson Go Tigers, his master's degree in the history of international relations from the London School of Economics and MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. That's impressive. Drayton joined Cognitos in 2022. School of Economics and MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, trey joined Cognitos in 2022 to help founder Benny Gill build out the business and go to market functions. Cognitos, a trusted AI platform used by enterprises to drive efficiency in areas like F&A and supply chain, has raised over $30 million in venture capital funding from firms like Cosa Ventures.
Speaker 3:Cognito works with clients across industries, with Fortune 1000 customers in telecom, manufacturing, cpg, logistics and financial services. Before joining Cognito, drayton worked for several other emerging tech startups from early stage through initial public offering. Outside of work, drayton is heavily involved with Clemson University, serving on the Clemson University Alumni Association Board, the College of Behavioral, social and Health Sciences Campaign Cabinet, the Clemson Balkans Foundation Board, and was also recognized as one of Clemson's Roaring 10 in 2023. Given Clemson's top young alumni, drayton and his wife, jessica Wade, and OBGYN here in Charleston, lives in Mount Pleasant and joined their second stint in the Lowcountry.
Speaker 2:You're an impressive dude. That was an impressive resume.
Speaker 3:That is awesome. Congrats on all of that success. Oh, congrats.
Speaker 4:Oh, goodness, goodness, Thank you. I really appreciate the Go Tigers shout out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I'll have to remember too.
Speaker 3:I have no allegiance, but I'm a, you know.
Speaker 2:Nine years from now, when my kid is looking to go to college. I'll be calling you up Clemson's a great school.
Speaker 4:It. It's growing a lot and we've been real excited just to be involved here in South Carolina, because we need more schools like that in South Carolina to help with the workforce, help with the change that's going on.
Speaker 2:A hundred percent. I'm from Virginia originally and we have so many major universities, so when I think about Charleston I'm like for my kid one day. I'm like there's only a handful for her to choose from. So, Clemson's a great school, so congratulations and all that for her to choose from.
Speaker 4:So.
Speaker 2:Clemson's a great school, so congratulations on all that, thank you. Thank you for having me, of course, and congratulations. I want to hear a little bit about how you made Charleston one of your hubs for your very prominent business that's just growing, and what made you come to Charleston.
Speaker 4:Sure, yeah, you know, with all things. I think it's like the saying of you know, want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans, kind of thing right.
Speaker 4:So part of it was just pragmatic and opportunity and part of it was intentional as well. But when we started building out the business, we started in San Jose, california, where our founder, benny Gill, lives, and a lot of our core engineering team. But we knew we needed to support customers across the US. Sure, my wife and I were thinking about coming back to Charleston as well, or at least to South Carolina, but we didn't want to build an office just around you know me personally or anything else. But happenstance, we started hiring some of what we call solutions engineers. So these are people that are kind of sales, kind of engineering. The top candidate that applied was in Charleston and so she was also a Clemson grad. We hired her. She's done an excellent job. And then we kind of started thinking, okay, we want to open this East Coast hub, we need somewhere that people want to live.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 4:We need somewhere that tends to have a younger workforce in some ways, because startups tend to gravitate towards people in their 20s and 30s in the day.
Speaker 4:We knew we wanted to have people in office, which is important to us, and if you're going to be in office, you need something that's exciting, where people can walk to restaurants, walk to different activities, and we needed something that could easily fly to other locations. Charleston ended up being a great fit. We found that it's lower cost of living than other major cities on the East Coast. Yep, people love being here. They do, in fact we've hired people.
Speaker 2:Charleston is the place.
Speaker 4:Oh yes, so anyhow, it ended up being a great fit.
Speaker 2:And you're at the Charleston Digital Corridor, correct? Yes, we are my man, Ernest.
Speaker 4:Shout out to Ernest We've had him on our podcast.
Speaker 3:We're a big supporter of the Charleston. That's awesome. Before we dive deeper Because I'm going to dive deep Cognitos, while you guys are here and everything that you do could you kind of give us our audience a little background on what Cognitos is? What do you guys do in the space of AI?
Speaker 4:Sure, so there's a lot of stuff out there about AI today.
Speaker 1:Oh yes, and the thing is everyone knows they need AI.
Speaker 4:If you talk to any C-suite person right now, it's I gotta bring AI into my organization. Same thing's true at colleges. Same thing's true even at local governments. Everyone knows they need it, but they don't know how, how to actually get this into my organization in a way that's going to be fruitful. So with Cognito the way we would say it is we're a trusted AI platform that helps drive efficiency for organizations and a lot of their core functions. The way we do this is a little bit unique is we map kind of like the two sides of the brain. So if you think about your brain, you have a logical side and then you have a pattern recognition side, or in the South, we call it our gut. Right, right, right Right.
Speaker 4:Yeah side, or in the south, we call it our gut, right? Yeah, the logical side requires a lot of work. So if you're ever doing algebra growing up or anything, right, it's logical. You have to think through each step. The benefit of that is that you get to the exact answer every time. Right, you can also trace back. How did I get to that particular answer?
Speaker 1:the hard part is it's just a lot of work.
Speaker 4:it's very work intensive, right right. On the flip side, things like ChatGPT are pattern recognition software. They're not logical by nature. The benefit there is, it's instantaneous and you don't have to do a lot of work.
Speaker 2:It's factual Right Pulling up facts yeah, Exactly.
Speaker 4:The challenge there, though, is sometimes it can do what's called a hallucination which you've probably heard about.
Speaker 2:Oh yes, and sometimes the analytics and the data is years old that they're pulling from. Yep for sure, and the referencing sources are no longer relevant.
Speaker 4:The same seems like our gut right. So if our gut, if I have a intuition, I can get to the answer very quick. Sometimes it may be right, sometimes it may be wrong. So what we do is we combine those two different types of AI into one system which enables businesses to have confidence that they can actually trust what's going to happen, but still gives the benefits of that pattern recognition where you don't have to have a lot of people working on it day in and day out Now.
Speaker 2:do you specialize in certain types of businesses, or what's your bread and butter when it comes to that?
Speaker 4:Yeah, so we specialize more today in functions than different industries. Okay, functions being like finance and accounting Love it Supply chain A little bit in HR. But if you think about what are the parts of a business where you have people manually typing a lot of information from one application to another, so maybe people are reading a form that you filled out for an insurance claim and then they're typing that into a portal that then manages that. Those are the type of functions that we tend to work with A lot of accounting, invoices, reconciliations.
Speaker 2:All the things that I'm bad at.
Speaker 4:Yeah, we as people aren't very good at that. We make mistakes, right. So computers are very good at that because they're going to do it the same way every time.
Speaker 3:So is that efficiency like the biggest bonus of having your type of software integrated into a business? The efficiency, yeah, it's a good question.
Speaker 4:Honestly, that's what we thought when we started off. So we started the. A company was founded in 2020. We really launched the product in the market in 2022. And we assumed that that cost efficiency would be the main thing. But our system works a little bit different than other AIs. So let's say it's working through a problem, it's processing a bill or something, and then it hits something that it doesn't expect. Instead of just making a decision and going for it, which is what ChatGPT does, our system pauses. It asks that person that's been working in billing for 30 years how do I solve this?
Speaker 4:Yeah, they're notified. It says, hey, I can't find the order number, can you help me? And that person can then converse with Cognitos. They just chat back with it and say for this account, the order number is always below the date. Something simple of how you would find that very intuitive very intuitive, very common place we find that it actually creates capacity in organizations most of the time.
Speaker 4:But back to your question on the cost efficiency. Every time that employee teaches it something, it's learning that and actually over time we can show businesses this is how your business is operating today. All that information that was stored in someone's head because they've been doing it for 20 years now gets codified into a system where they can look at that and look for other ways to be efficient so they have the historical data for the rest of their business.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and longer than that. That's impressive.
Speaker 3:So, basically, your software, once you're working with a particular company, is almost self-updating as it is gaining more information.
Speaker 4:That's right. People teach it how to handle all those weird situations that we may encounter.
Speaker 2:So now, hearing all of this backstory, I understand the whole. Creating an AI-first world? Yeah, that you have on your website.
Speaker 4:Our goal. That's exactly right. Our goal is that AI should do the mundane and boring things. People should do the higher-level problem-solving and the things that require EQ right, like working with other people.
Speaker 2:I like your take on the world. That means we all have jobs but we'll be using his system to make our lives easier, but we'll still be employed that's right, that's.
Speaker 4:It's up leveling and capacity creation nice so is
Speaker 3:that? What kind of attracted you to?
Speaker 4:yeah, I've been in the automation space for a while, so the company I was, that prior to this company, called you I path. When we go back to that logical plus and pattern recognition, uipath is just purely the logical part. So I've been in this idea or this space of automation for a while. But what I liked about Cognitos is UiPath didn't really work with the people. It was more just back office. It either worked or it didn't, whereas Cognitos, again, it's working with people to solve those problems.
Speaker 4:At the end of the day, which has a much wider range of things that people can do with it so as a marketer.
Speaker 2:You started this business in COVID, which is incredible, so you launched your business in 2020 and you've been this successful so our, our founder.
Speaker 4:You know we have a lot of startup DNA in our company. Most of the people in our company engineers, salespeople all of us have pretty much worked for other startups before, so we know, you know the nature of the beast.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and a lot of us have worked for both successful and failed startups before. To be clear, my first startup we worked for failed ultimately. So even while I was in COVID, our founder, benny gill. He had built a business from um, you know scratch, up to a several multi-billion dollar public company. He found, actually, that he was really curious about this problem, that, um, the way his son was learning to work with computers as a developer was the exact same way that benny 30 years ago. He said that's a problem, and so for him it was not just about starting a business and making money at something that he, you know, very personally believes in and we do too. We want people to be empowered and people to be able to thrive, and so, they say, the best businesses are founded during downturns. We'll see if that's true with us?
Speaker 2:Well, it sounds like, hopefully, so I love that you have not a niche, but you've honed in on the people that you're trying to help, which is amazing. It's hard.
Speaker 4:I mean, I'm sure you've faced this as a marketer. You know both of you. You know getting to that ICP or narrowing down to you know the target personas is really challenging and we've had hiccups along the way. We've tried a lot of different things, especially for horizontal technologies like ours that can be challenging. But we're finding that repeatability now, kind of these core finance and accounting processes.
Speaker 3:I mean just the approach that you guys have to business when you talk about the left brain, right brain. That is unique in and of itself, I think from my experience dealing with AI companies or just learning about them.
Speaker 2:that's not something that is really common we haven't talked much about this on the podcast, so I think that's why I was so excited to have you on, because most of our AI experts were dealing with graphic design and imagery and the casualties of using that versus using a real artist and then of course, chat, dbt and then the validation of that. So it is really cool that you have a very intuitive platform that is going to respond. And as you grow, how do you update this platform and how do you keep it continual?
Speaker 4:Yeah, so there's several aspects to that One we want to always look at how do we make it more and more user-friendly One of the things that's been like one of my greatest joys I guess in working with the company is we work with a manufacturer in rural Indiana.
Speaker 4:They manufacture RV parts effectively in like the RV capital of the world, which is in Elkhart, indiana, and they had people that you know are mid-60s. They've been working with the company. It's a family-owned company, third generation. They've been working with the company for 30's a family-owned company, third generation. They've been working with the company for 30, 40 years. And so I was curious. I was like, okay, tech, you know, tech adoption is hard. We're going to have something special if that person who's in their 60s, if she can actually work with our software, then it's truly intuitive.
Speaker 2:And you've got something that's very, very powerful and she is.
Speaker 4:She's working with it, she's building her own processes, she's teaching the system how to handle those edge cases.
Speaker 2:Is this replaced like QuickBooks and that type of thing, depending on the scenario?
Speaker 4:Good question. No, we actually would work with the QuickBooks.
Speaker 2:So your platform works in tandem with it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so we'll have to continue to build those integrations to all the different applications. And then we want to do a lot more in the future with the data that's being collected. So all that data of how those businesses are functioning, we want to be able to provide that back to the C-suite so C-suite can ask what was my accounts receivable in days last quarter and be able to ask our system that logged all that data to give those insights back.
Speaker 3:but that's kind of in the future. So this is not a, this is not a replacement type of thing, this is a business enhancement.
Speaker 4:Yes, yeah, that's right. That's right. We find that people work with our system um. Primarily, there's some disruption over time in the sense of maybe it took you 10 people to do something before, now it's two, but we're not finding companies are getting rid of those people. Instead, we find most companies have capacity constraints.
Speaker 2:It's really hard to hire. Yeah, because you're able to scale now at a completely different level.
Speaker 4:Right and they can enable those people to work on problem solving or to spend more time with customers, more time time in the human things that work outside of QuickBooks, what other platforms do you integrate with? Yeah, good question. So we work with most ERP systems, which are your big finance and accounting so SAP, oracle, those as well as IT systems like ServiceNow, okay, and then we're working with a lot of HR systems as well. Basically, we like to work with the applications that businesses use to run day in and day out, okay.
Speaker 2:Now, with, like, the AI industry just blowing up and changing and the technology constantly evolving, how often do you have, do you come together as a collective team and rework the system, or how does that all work? I love, I love hearing about the collaboration of businesses, because I just think that's such an important piece of it. You get this expert piece of communication and you're like it just works so seamlessly. But it takes a lot of work to make that happen.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so this reminds me of a story. I went to Hamburg, germany, last October.
Speaker 2:PS. This man is always on a flight. I've been trying to get in touch with him. He is always on a flight.
Speaker 4:Yeah, we run and gun quite a lot.
Speaker 4:I guess I was over in Germany and we were meeting with Siemens, Siemens being one of the obviously large manufacturers there, and so they asked us to come in and do this presentation on not just cognitive, but AI. What should they be thinking about? What are the risks? And I remember I did this presentation and a friend of mine works in their ai group over there and then the next day I had to text them and I said I hate to tell you this, but one of the slides I presented is completely obsolete, based on something that happened today yesterday, so it's it's that frequently, kind of updating to where we have to really spend a lot of time watching the market seeing what technologies we can incorporate to stay relevant.
Speaker 4:Otherwise it's challenging.
Speaker 3:Well, what goes into, just to piggyback, what goes into your forecasting, like our product perspective? Yes, like, even in that type of situation.
Speaker 4:So we work with a lot of the large language models like GPT, which is behind ChatGPT. Facebook just came out with Lama, which is an open source one. So we always have to be kind of anticipating of what's coming on those, because then we can leverage them within our framework with kind of updates there. Another thing that we have to kind of forecast is actually how do we use AI not just our own AI, but other AI to make our developers and our salespeople more productive. So that, and marketing too. Our marketing team is using it quite a lot in the content we generate. So it's a lot. I mean, we could hire someone full-time, frankly, just to be watching the market and kind of seeing what's going on.
Speaker 2:That's absolutely terrifying to me.
Speaker 1:And you have a whole team of people constantly studying the changes in AI.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I dabble in. You know I don't dabble in Every single day. I'm in chat GPT, I dabble in using some programs for graphics and that kind of thing. But that is sincerely the extent of my ai normal day-to-day functions do you use it for search? I'm curious yes, I do it for search and then I look back at the sources and and especially because I do a lot of like content writing content- creation so for instance, I was working today with a non-profit who's based out of boston shout out to the finesse t market foundation.
Speaker 2:I love them and we were doing some statistics on women's safety because it's an organization around women running, based off a girl who got passed away because she got murdered while running outside of Princeton. So I was trying to get up-to-date statistics on certain areas and that kind of thing, and also for the LGBT community.
Speaker 1:It was years old it was years.
Speaker 2:I collect the sources and I was like, use any of this. This is not relevant to me at all. What a waste of time. So it's. It's interesting, like what do you do you think the AI world is gonna like, when is it going to change? What's gonna be more up-to-date in real time? You think that's ever gonna be?
Speaker 4:yeah, I think it will. So when ChatGPT first came out it was one to two years behind. The most recent models, I think, are relatively up-to-date. You do have to fact-check, like you were mentioning, and you can try to prompt it a little bit of saying, hey, bring me only articles that are within the last year. Perplexity is pretty good. Try that one, it's more like search-oriented, so it actually shows you the articles, right below I haven't heard of that one before.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's good they're competing with ChetWT, but you can give it any prompt and then it will give you an answer, and then it'll have little like not footnotes, but little notes in there that you can click on. That takes you to the article, so I think it's it's becoming more and more real time. Um, the thing we always talk about, though, is, if you're going to use a system that's purely a large language model, you have to decide when are you okay if it's wrong? And that's what that's kind of our niche is, because we've combined the two. We can be used in finance and accounting, whereas enterprises are using chat, gpt in marketing or in other areas, because, okay, if you write a piece of content that's wrong, you can go back and quickly fix that.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 4:So you may have comfort with the data being a year old or whatever it may be. If you do that in finance or accounting, you could have a loan approved for millions of dollars that you can't get back right.
Speaker 2:I bet your paperwork is significant where you're talking about the fact that you use AI for some of your work, because I can't imagine the legal implications of something being wrong.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's pretty. We're going through that with a few onboarding customers right now. It's pretty intense on the legal and the info security side.
Speaker 2:Man, I'm married to an engineer, I'd be like sweetheart, take this over. I can't. This is more than I can handle, because I was talking to a client this week and we were implementing potentially AI as a customer service call Instead of calling Red, plumbing, heating and Air and getting someone in the call center. You're talking about having someone and it's interesting how realistic these people are. Now the AI chat.
Speaker 1:And I was throwing some random.
Speaker 2:I was really going at them hard. I pretended to be a really disgruntled customer and talking about my cat and the empathy and I would not have known that that was not a real person.
Speaker 4:But see, that's an interesting use case. You bring up right. So compare that with the chatbots before Right. Like when you call, you know I fly Delta all the time, I love Delta, but if I call them and I get their chatbot, I'm immediately talk with representative, Like I do not because it's only like it's come a long way though.
Speaker 4:Yeah, but now. So it used to be just if then, like it only had a few responses. Now it can create a response on the fly, so it can be empathetic, it can try to turn you.
Speaker 2:I had a full-on conversation with a robot and if someone had not told me that that was, I would have thought she had inflection in her voice Like she'm so sorry, man, hearing that you're having a bad day.
Speaker 3:Y'all had a good conversation. Huh, I threw everything at this woman. I was like ruining my day.
Speaker 2:I can't get dressed because my HVAC is not working. I was going at her.
Speaker 4:I'll tell you another funny one, real quick for marketing purposes Good. I love it. So on our website, one of our team members, she we had, like you know, a photo of her, a headshot of her. Okay, for over a year I've thought that headshot was real and then she just told me yesterday she's like oh no, I uploaded a bunch of photos into an AI engine and it created that. She's like I would never wear that what.
Speaker 4:Very professional headshot For a year I mean I'm in the office with her all the time. I'm like I completely thought that was a real photo and when you zoom in you can kind of see there's some differences. But it's pretty convincing. A little bit scary.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of catfishing in the world happening. A little bit scary. A little bit scary Just to say that we're such in the early stages of AI.
Speaker 1:It's wild.
Speaker 3:I mean five years from now. You won't be able to tell the difference at all.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it'll be a big change. But I think I mean that's why I've been doing a lot of work with Clemson too is we have to change how we educate people. We have to really emphasize the things that we're good at as people problem solving, being empathetic, interacting with each other because that's where the jobs are going to be primarily in the future is those qualities, not just us, just us. You know manually typing in things. So what are you doing specifically with Clemson? We do quite a lot with Clemson.
Speaker 4:I'm on the Alumni Association board now. We're really pushing to take Clemson to the next level. We want Clemson to be a top research university in the country because South Carolina needs it. We need it for our workforce here. It's still hard to hire here, frankly, even for us and others. So doing a lot of work there, doing a lot of work with one of the colleges that I was in that does a lot of work with rural health Because of the big nursing shortage in South Carolina too. So trying to especially in rural areas. And then doing work with students on study abroad programs to the Balkans. That's something I went through at Clemson. That was very valuable, but it teaches students how to see things from someone else's point of view In those countries that may not have the same views as us, especially politically, which those problem-solving skills are again what you need in the future to be able to ask the question is this AI or is this a human right?
Speaker 2:You need to be able to ask. You could have fooled me honestly, so that's interesting. Now, does your business have a partnership with Clemson too, or is this more just like on a personal level for you?
Speaker 4:Yeah, a more personal level. We don't have any sort of like formal partnership, though we have several Clemson alum, we've hired interns and we did do an AI symposium in March with Clemson where we had it was a really fun event with their entrepreneurship center. We had legislators come, we had business people, we had venture capitalists, we had engineers and researchers from Clemson. The goal was simply to create or to increase AI literacy in the state and just kind of get people talking and having conversations like this one a little more frequently.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. Education is powerful. It's constantly changing, though, because you immediately just think of chat, gpt when you think of AI, like most people do. So I think it's awesome for people like you to come and talk to our listeners, because for our podcast, we obviously have a lot of marketers that listen we also have a lot of businesses in the Charleston area that listen, and we have actually a great following in the Charlotte North Carolina area.
Speaker 2:So it's cool to talk about some other aspects of AI, and the fact that you know they might not have necessarily thought about this for their business, but now they might contact you and be like this could make my life easier, which is the whole point of AI.
Speaker 4:That's the goal.
Speaker 2:And I love it. Yeah, that's. I just keep thinking about having, like I have a friend who has an HR company here, Shift HR and having something like this to help her would be huge.
Speaker 4:One of the things you know we often tell customers. Customers ask okay, where do I use AI right? Where do I begin? How do I find use cases?
Speaker 4:One of the things I used to tell, especially managers, is you know look at the things that your people either don't do, they won't do it or they hate to do it, Because those are typically things that people aren't good at and if you can use AI on those things, then, all of a sudden one, your employees are going to be happier. If your employees are happier, customers are probably going to be happier, You're going to have better retention and you're going to get all those details done that an employee because, they didn't want to do it, maybe forgot about it, and then you have an impact.
Speaker 4:So that's the same thing, I think, for marketing or whatever it is. What are the things that people just don't like doing? There's probably an AI solution for that that you can leverage and then focus on the things you do like to do, which is that creativity or human interaction?
Speaker 2:Well, the mere fact that you said anyone can use it, what you've set up like any like my mother, who's 70, who's in the real estate field, who does not like accounting, but she's a very successful real estate agent could use something like AI to do more than just her brochures but to help with her accounting, help with her contacts, helping her CRM that's huge.
Speaker 2:I think the usability is the thing that terrifies people, and the fact that the advancements in AI are just. How do you keep up with this? And then, once you have it in front of you, how do you even operate it? So the fact that you simplified it, but also behind the scenes, like structurability, is very intuitive. That's huge. You simplified it, but also behind the scenes, like structurability is very intuitive.
Speaker 4:That's huge. Yeah, there's a big shift right. So AI has been around for, frankly, since the 1950s. It's not a relatively new technology, but the shift that happened recently was that now? It's primarily in English or natural language. So before, if your mother wanted to learn how to use AI, she was going to have to learn how to use some totally new system or some programming language, Some code or something.
Speaker 4:Yeah which I mean who has time for that? Right, you're trying to get your day-to-day work done, whereas now you just converse with it. You just write steps in English, line by line of what you wanted to do, and it will change. That's why ChatGPT is so popular. If you look at the, you know talking again marketing and sales. If you look at the interface, it's an extremely simple interface.
Speaker 2:There's nothing to it. I feel like I'm like in Cliff Notes, like back in the day I'm like here's the Cliff.
Speaker 2:Notes of what you should write about and then you feel almost guilty, but then it save you a lot of research and that kind of thing. Yeah, as long as you're responsible and don't take things. I have tested this before where I've put and like write me a blog for something in chat gpt, and I've taken the blog and I posted it in google and you would be surprised how many huge corporations have taken that verbatim and posted it on their websites really it's scary, yes, they have ai uh, checkers, don't they? They should.
Speaker 4:Yeah, there are some. I know it's a challenge. I had one of my teachers so I'm from Rock Hill originally. One of my the AP English teacher from up there. She now teaches down here at Phillips Simmons and she messaged me not recently. She's like how do we tell if students are using this? It's tough, it's pretty tough. Yeah, the one thing is you'll notice like models kind of sound the same after a while if you read enough of it. Yeah, you can count.
Speaker 2:Hmm certain adjectives over and over, and over.
Speaker 4:Yeah finish structure is yeah, yeah it'll change over time, but sometimes it's like that's almost too perfect. A human doesn't write that way.
Speaker 3:Oh, the punctuation is right.
Speaker 2:How many commas can you fit in this?
Speaker 3:one sentence.
Speaker 2:No, it's crazy. Outside of ChatGPT, what other AI platforms do you think people like, regular people like this girl who does not use your current software? What would you suggest?
Speaker 4:From a consumer perspective, I think Chat2PG is good. I think Perplexity is very good as well. I think from a business perspective, more at a personal productivity level, you'll see more and more embedded into things like Excel. Salesforce has some native capabilities, which I think is good. Hubspot, I'm sure will come out with some stuff there. So I think those are the places probably to start that they'll have some additional functionality, but it's going to be embedded into everything. Every company right now, every product, is trying to think about how do we somehow embed this into our core product, even support, so like we use um intercom embedded into our product for, like, customer support.
Speaker 3:it's all ai right, it's complete ai only we only intervene if they can't get the answer. For some reason I need to check out for perplexity, perplexity like two or three times yeah um. One that I've used recently is called Grammarly. I've been using Grammarly for a year, but I didn't know it was integrated AI.
Speaker 2:I didn't know, because I could like you can download it and every text message and everything.
Speaker 4:Even fun things like. My wife grew up in France and so her extended family doesn't speak much English. I do my best with the southern accent, which is not great, but I've been using Duolingo for a long time and now Duolingo has generative AI capabilities, so everything is gonna have it embedded in some way, shape or form.
Speaker 2:I was at a conference recently and it was for another reason, but I happened to be around a lot of deaf people. And you could see them walking around with the apps. Really, yeah, was really interesting.
Speaker 3:So to kind of go back to Cognitos a little bit. We talked about how ChatGPT, like it just spits out, it just gives you the answers. But with your software, if it hits a roadblock, it asks a question for clarity Are you guys potentially integrating your AI with other AIs, to kind of add that same?
Speaker 4:So we have part of our. Our platform is proprietary. It's something we developed which is a form of English that is structured. This is getting a little bit technical, but you have to have it to where, if I write five steps of a process in English, for it to function in a business, it has to happen the exact same way every time, Otherwise you can't have confidence. Then we'll use other large language models around that to make the user experience easier.
Speaker 4:Back to that kind of pattern recognition plus logic aspect and as well we may use it to do sentiment analysis or to summarize things or to generate content, whatever it may be. So we'll use any other technology embedded into our platform to bring that benefit. The difference is we build our process in English. If our system has a doubt, the AI has a doubt. It'll actually ask the human, and we don't know of any other system that does that today.
Speaker 1:That's really cool, that is really cool.
Speaker 4:And then every step both human and AI is logged in English, so you can go back and see exactly what everyone did, which is something that's important for a business to be able to have that record.
Speaker 3:Do you have a bilingual Like could other languages? Yeah, not today.
Speaker 4:So that's one thing you were asking about earlier where do we go in the product? So today the product itself is only in English. We can handle inputs, so documents or anything, in pretty much any other language, including Arabic and Eastern Asian languages, but the interface is only in English. It'll probably be a little bit of time before we do other languages there, so we mainly work with English-speaking customers today.
Speaker 2:Now your customers. They typically use this on a desktop, on a laptop. Do you have an app?
Speaker 4:What is the easiest way for them to access it? Yeah, it's a cloud-hosted app, so they go to the address for our application there and then we integrate with their different systems that may be on-premise or other situations.
Speaker 2:So you've been doing this since 2020, and you've been growing steadily every year.
Speaker 4:Yeah, we launched the product in the market in 2022. So it's two years of spent just hardcore building the product with the engineers and then since then, yeah it's. You know, startups are kind of just hold on and hope you can hold on for long enough.
Speaker 2:Tell the people how many different offices you have have, because I've been trying to reach you. You were just in.
Speaker 4:Japan. Yeah, we've been bouncing around because we not intentionally, but we've had global customers pretty much from the beginning. We also have an investor that's out of India as well. So from our founding, we had an office in Bangalore and then in. California, and then we've opened this office here for East Coast Hub. We've opened an office in Buenos Aires. At some point we'll need to open an office in Europe because we have some European customers, but for now I just have to go on planes pretty much.
Speaker 1:Wow, I'm sure, dr Jessica misses you sometimes.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. Well, this has been a really exciting conversation now if someone wants to get in touch with you to learn more about your business or learn more how you can help support them, what's the best way for them to do that?
Speaker 4:sure, we're pretty active on LinkedIn. That's our main social channel, our website as well. I'm active on LinkedIn. That's our main social channel. Our website as well. I'm active on LinkedIn. People can reach out to me as well.
Speaker 2:We would love to have you come do a lunch or a coffee talk one day for the Charleston American Marketing Association.
Speaker 4:Of course, I would love to Thank you.
Speaker 2:That would be fun. I think this is something that a lot of people don't know about, don't you think? Kelly's shaking her head yes, the whole time I was looking at Kelly while we were having our conversation. She's like that's interesting and you know it's been great. This is fascinating yeah.
Speaker 4:Y'all are very kind, all right.
Speaker 2:Well, before we leave, we want to say thank you to our sponsors the Charleston Radio Group and, of course course, jerry Feels Good on the front of the beats and the back of the beats and the American Marketing Association. We have some great stuff coming along, including the Spark Awards, which is happening in this November, so this episode will drop before then. So the Spark Awards submissions are open now. So if you have any marketing work from last year that you want to submit, please do so on our website. And, of course, that you want to submit, please do so on our website. And, of course, if you want to be a guest on our show, reach out to us at podcast at charlestonamaorg and we will get back to you. Thank you so much for being here. We're excited to have you and more involved in the AMA. I think this is very valuable information. So thank you for being here.
Speaker 3:Thanks, man, appreciate you having me.
Speaker 2:All right, charles, until next time. We'll see you later.
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