Introduction To Guest

Steve Myer is the Co-founder at Kungfu.AI, a consultant firm that helps companies start and accelerate AI programs. Steve is a teacher turned creative technologist, and an expert in finding solutions to big problems. Not only is Steve an expert in AI, but in Human Design as well. As an Artificial Intelligence consultant, Steve has worked with over a dozen clients in over 12+ industries, and that is just in the last three years. He holds certificates from MIT Sloan School of Management in Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Businesses Strategy and Luma Institute for Human Centered Design.

The Name Behind The Company

The name of Steve’s company, Kung-Fu.AI, has an interesting backstory.
Kung-Fu means process, the process that one has to go through to acquire a great skill. A great skill that requires hard work and discipline. Steve reiterates that the meaning behind the word Kung-Fu is in alignment with his company. AI requires hard work and discipline, and at Kung-Fu. AI, Steve and his team assist their clients through this meticulous process. Like a Kung-Fu master, Steve will guide, train, and educate his clients about Artificial Intelligence.

The Call To Action/Coming Up With The Idea

With keen experience and a growing interest in working with AI, Steve created a team of experienced consultants and builders. Their aim is to provide transformation services to companies, while educating their clients about Artificial Intelligence. With their guidance, companies will learn the skills to build AI internally and at scale, without the future need of a consultant.

Steve breaks down Kung-Fu.AI into three parts:

1. Consultants. Consultants who help companies identify which cases make sense to their business when adding AI.
2. Builders. The Kung-Fu team can build products that their clients own.
3. Transformers. Steve and his colleagues teach clients about Artificial Intelligence so they can use their own AI program at scale. This education alone transforms the company as a whole.

Founding A Team

Kung-Fu.AI was founded by serial entrepreneurs with a background in AI. Their idea was to bring more good into the world by helping customers integrate Artificial Intelligence into their companies. Kung-Fu.AI is an Artificial Intelligence services company by design.

Testing The Product & Validating The Market

Kung-Fu.AI is starting to see a lot more interest from technology companies. Oftentimes they are working with clients to automate a process more efficiently, usually one that is labor intensive.
Through testing their products and services, Steve is seeing more success working with C-level. This is mainly because in order to get powerful AI programs off the ground, there must be a collaboration between many departments. Their common customer is a CEO, CTO, or CIO. Kungful.AI requires executive sponsorship and oversight because there are a lot of barriers that need to be broken down. More importantly, when working with clients, Steve requires a strong business goal and even stronger strategy behind it. Projects fail when you’re not tightly aligned to the corporate strategy. You must be marching in a measurable direction with a high business impact.

Steve also mentions how he likes to roll out technology in a drip fashion, taking small bites. First they start off with the experimental phase, building a proof of concept while observing results – making sure these results meet the business objective. Steve forecasts results with greater data, training, and engineering. He iterates by starting off with phase one, you di-risk a lot of the development and can continue investing time, money and resources into the project.

Steve and his team also test their products through piloting. There’s a lot of new research being published about how companies are three times as likely to be successful if they can move quickly into piloting. And piloting not just through using dummies or training data, but through testing the product in a controlled environment with real users and real conditions. Once you start seeing success from this type of piloting, it’s safe to start getting excited, as you now have learning algorithms.

Steve provides a great analogy about how Artificial Intelligence is like a plant, rather than an application or website. For AI gets better and grows with attention, and is filled with living, evolving, capabilities. Without nurturing, it can wither and decay. This theory provides a whole new opportunity for maintenance and monitoring, and in turn progressing models, which is the final leg or phase of the marathon to achieving a particular AI business goal.

Challenges Encountered

One of the main challenges experienced at Kungfu.AI is push back from potential clients who are skeptical. They are unsure if integrating Artificial Intelligence will work for their respective organizations. Companies are hesitant to spend money if there is not a 100% guarantee that Artificial Intelligence will be beneficial. Even though Steve and his team work hard to di-risk and fail fast, it still becomes more problematic if a company does not have a culture of R&D. Or, they do not understand AI being more closely related to science in a laboratory than it’s traditional front and software development. To reiterate, if a client does not have any knowledge, background, or mindset when it comes to AI, they require more education of what Artificial Intelligence really is.

However, with that being said, if the problem is worthy enough to solve and the impact is measurable, Steve’s clients realize they can put an insurance policy on the solution by investing into a POC, when normally they would be uncomfortable if failure is an option. It depends on finding the right problem, providing the right education, and coming up with the right solution.

At the moment, there is a major skill set gap in the market between people who can get to POC and those who can get to deployments. People on the engineering side do not understand the data side. And data scientists do not understand how to get ready for deployment. Using their product background while providing education, Kungfu.AI works on bridging this gap.

Another challenge is culture. As mentioned above, one must have an R&D mindset or be able to embrace R&D. That is a precursor. If a company has a culture that is fearful of change, fearful of technology, has low data literacy, or maybe is not proficient in basic analytics or making key decisions, trying to roll out a solution to be the best solution in the world is difficult. Education is also key. People still do not quite understand AI and its capabilities. Steve takes the initiative of demystifying Artificial Intelligence before taking the first step forward.

Future Endeavors

Right now, Kungfu.AI is focused on working with companies in Austin, Texas. However, Steve and his team are building community by community, with plans to grow, scale, and assist more businesses. Three years from now, they hope to have Kungfu’s services implemented in Dallas, New York, and San Francisco. And in five years, perhaps leverage more AI technology, which will help make their services more impactful and more agile for clients. They will not just be creating Artificial Intelligence, but act as an enabler for Artificial Intelligence as well.

Advice for Industry Leaders and Embarking On a Similar Journey

The first piece of advice from Steve is to change your mindset to see data as a corporate asset. Find your data asset and identify what data set gives the business a differentiated position in the marketplace. Ask yourself: “what intelligence have you collected that may or may not be informing your decision-making today?” This question not only differentiates yourself from different competitors, but helps bring insights of how you want to grow and evolve. Once you’ve identified this concept, work on figuring out where and how that data asset falls into your business goals, and focus on capabilities. Spot a good, solvable problem and find a rich dataset. From there, talk to people who know how Artificial Intelligence works. For Steve, this is where the conversation begins.

www.kungfu.ai