Artificial intelligence facilitates better control of global development aid

A team of AI experts led by Stefan Feuerriegel, Head of LMU’s Institute of Artificial Intelligence in Management, is injecting transparency into global development aid. The researchers have developed an artificial intelligence system that categorizes aid projects more comprehensively than it was possible up to now and facilitates better monitoring of these projects. The findings are published in the journal Nature Sustainability.A team of AI experts led by Stefan Feuerriegel, Head of LMU’s Institute of Artificial Intelligence in Management, is injecting transparency into global development aid. The researchers have developed an artificial intelligence system that categorizes aid projects more comprehensively than it was possible up to now and facilitates better monitoring of these projects. The findings are published in the journal Nature Sustainability.Computer Sciences

Robots are creating images and telling jokes: Five things to know about foundation models and the next generation of AI

If you’ve seen photos of a teapot shaped like an avocado or read a well-written article that veers off on slightly weird tangents, you may have been exposed to a new trend in artificial intelligence (AI).If you’ve seen photos of a teapot shaped like an avocado or read a well-written article that veers off on slightly weird tangents, you may have been exposed to a new trend in artificial intelligence (AI).Robotics

Data collected from acquaintances and even strangers can predict your locationon April 13, 2022 at 9:17 am

Data about our habits and movements are constantly collected via mobile phone apps, fitness trackers, credit card logs, websites visited, and other means.Data about our habits and movements are constantly collected via mobile phone apps, fitness trackers, credit card logs, websites visited, and other means.

New AI algorithms for cost-effective medical image diagnostics

Medical imaging is an important part of modern healthcare, enhancing both the precision, reliability and development of treatment for various diseases. Artificial intelligence has also been widely used to further enhance the process.Medical imaging is an important part of modern healthcare, enhancing both the precision, reliability and development of treatment for various diseases. Artificial intelligence has also been widely used to further enhance the process.Computer Sciences

Zoom launches AI-powered features aimed at sales teams

Today during its second Work Transformation Summit this week, Zoom announced Zoom IQ for Sales, a product that uses AI to analyze sales meetings and deals to provide insights. It’s the company’s first explicit foray into sales automation software, a market that — according to Verified Market Research — could grow to $7.3 billion in size by 2028.

Sales changed dramatically during the pandemic, when lockdowns forced companies — and their sales teams — to adopt digital tools to get work done. According to a 2020 McKinsey report, almost 90% of sales moved to a videoconference/phone/web sales model in 2020, as business-to-business companies in particular began to see digital interactions as highly important. An unaffiliated study from Harvard Business Review found 82% of companies believe that, out of all technologies, AI has the potential to “significantly” improve alignment between sales and marketing by introducing accountability.

“Zoom is always searching for ways to help our customers elevate their end customers’ experience and Zoom IQ for Sales is the latest development in that journey,” Josh Dulberger, Zoom’s head of product, data and AI, told TechCrunch via email. “Zoom IQ for Sales … [can] identify opportunities, assess risks, and ultimately enable and improve sales team performance. It uses natural language processing models to process post-meeting transcripts and deal progress data, generating insights for sales reps and managers.”

In many ways, Zoom IQ for Sales is an outgrowth of Zoom’s increasing investments in AI. Zoom last May introduced an AI-powered feature that shows highlights from recorded meetings, automatically selecting the “best” parts of meetings based on keywords from audio transcriptions. The company more recently acquired Kites, a startup specializing in real-time translation and transcription.

Zoom IQ for Sales also marks the expansion of Zoom’s omnichannel contact center strategy, which arguably began with the launch of Zoom Contact Center in February. At the time, Zoom said it saw Zoom Contact Center as “supporting customer service use cases,” including upselling, by “combining unified communications and contact center capabilities [with Zoom].”

“Zoom has made strategic investments in homegrown speech recognition technologies and recruited a world-class team to produce high-fidelity transcription services that are a backbone for products like Zoom IQ …We’re developing domain-specific NLU (natural language understanding) using few-shot models to build features that will be more reliable and valuable to our users,” Dulberger continued. “Sales teams … want to focus on the customer, and managing the engagement rather than taking notes, but also so they can review their calls to pick up nuances, easily identify next steps, or solicit some guidance from a colleague. Managers and sales leaders can’t sit in on every call, but want to understand the selling climate, when to coach, and which reps are finding the right message.”

Zoom IQ for Sales generates an engagement score that aims to capture how attentive a given customer is based on “talk-time” ratio, the lag time between responses, and the number times that the customer speaks during the call. A separate metric, the sentiment score, measures “positive” and “negative” words and phrases used in meetings. Yet another score monitors the use of filler words like “oh,” “like,” “uh,” and “um,” which some studies show can have a negative impact on sales close rates.

Beyond this, Zoom IQ for Sales attempts to identify “good” questions by treating the length of customers’ responses as a corollary for engagement. Sales teams can also feed a list of product features to Zoom IQ so that the software can count the number of times each feature is mentioned in the call.

“Zoom IQ for Sales’ analysis covers customers’ reactions, conversational and selling skills, customer pain points, competitors, deal risk metrics, and more,” Dulberger said. “[Sales teams can even] view [the] Salesforce deal status associated with recorded meetings.”

The jury’s out on the accuracy of Zoom’s algorithms, particularly given the company’s history of deploying flawed AI. Sentiment analysis algorithms are especially prone to gender and race bias, and not every salesperson will necessarily agree with how Zoom measures engagement.

That aside, several platforms, including Gong and VoiceOps, already offer features similar to Zoom IQ for Sales — adding pressure on Zoom to demonstrate differentiation. Dulberger made a case for the strength of Zoom’s customer and product ecosystem, painting Zoom IQ for Sales as an opportunity for the company to bolster its broader platform.

Zoom is almost certainly feeling the pressure from investors to establish new lines of revenue. While the company’s earnings soared during the pandemic, guidance is down as customers begin to shift to hybrid and in-office work arrangements less reliant on videoconferencing.

“Half a million businesses choose Zoom and rely on it for internal and external conversations,” Dulberger continued. “The Zoom platform already has a strong foundation in this area with features such as transcription, recordings, and highlights. This also gives us an opportunity to expand this type of functionality across the Zoom platform such as Zoom Contact Center and within our meetings and events solutions to help presenters pace their speech, take notes, capture action items, or employ specific tactics.”

An external beta for Zoom IQ for Sales is currently ongoing. Alongside it, Whiteboard, Zoom’s virtual whiteboarding product, will be generally available beginning April 19. Two related features, Webinar Reactions (which lets webinar attendees use reactions) and Session Branding (which lets hosts customize webinar wallpapers), are available now, while the recently announced Zoom Events Backstage — a behind-the-scenes waiting space for webinar participants — is scheduled to launch in late April.

Today during its second Work Transformation Summit this week, Zoom announced Zoom IQ for Sales, a product that uses AI to analyze sales meetings and deals to provide insights. It’s the company’s first explicit foray into sales automation software, a market that — according to Verified Market Research — could grow to $7.3 billion in

Dear Sophie: I didn’t win the H-1B lottery. What are my next steps?

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

TechCrunch+ members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie,

I earned my master’s degree in business analytics last year, and have been working for a company while on OPT since then.

My employer entered me in the H-1B lottery last month, but I haven’t been selected. I heard that my degree now qualifies as a STEM field, making me eligible to continue working under OPT.

How can I stay in the States?

— Astute Analyst

Dear Astute,

Appreciate you reaching out; your questions are all too familiar this time of the year. The U.S. is losing out on the world’s best and brightest talent because of the way the H-1B lottery system is currently set up, but please rest assured — you’ve got options! I shared my insights into available options for people in your situation in my recent podcast, Not Selected in the H-1B, now what?

Most of your visa options will require your employer to sponsor you, so please include your employer and the company’s immigration attorney when brainstorming and planning your next steps.

The way ahead

Keep in mind that you still can be selected to apply for an H-1B. In 2020 and 2021, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) did not receive enough qualified applications to meet the annual quota of 85,000 after the March lottery, even though employers registered a record number of H-1B candidates.

So, the USCIS conducted subsequent draws to meet the annual quota — and that will likely happen again this year.

Still, I suggest carefully monitoring your OPT expiration date and pursuing backup options.

The two-year STEM OPT extension

Yes, you are correct that business analytics is one of the 22 STEM fields of study added in January to the STEM OPT (Optional Practical Training) program, which extends Regular OPT for an additional 24 months. If you haven’t already, I suggest you meet as soon as possible with the designated school official (DSO) at your university to find out if you are eligible for reclassification to STEM.

BlueOcean raises $30M for its AI-based brand intelligence platform

The medium is the message more than ever these days, and brands are faced with a challenge — but also opportunity — to capture what consumers think about them and their products if they can harness and better understand those messages, via whichever medium is being used to deliver them. Today, a company called BlueOcean that has built an artificial intelligence-powered platform that it says can produce those insights is announcing $30 million in funding, money that it will be using to continue expanding its technology on the heels of rapid growth.

Insight Partners led the round, with FJ Labs also participating. Valuation is not being disclosed.

Digital life as it plays out these days has created a perfect storm (heh) for BlueOcean. We spend more time online than ever before, and the number of places where we might encounter a product or service has grown along with that: social media feeds are noisy with ads, content that feels like ads, lots of opinions; we do most of our news, information and entertainment sourcing online; we shop there, too; and many of us also spend our days working in cyberspace as well.

That’s a lot of real estate where a brand (or a brand’s competitors) might potentially appear, either intentionally or inadvertently, and more likely than not in a form that is outside of that brand’s control.

“Fragmentation is a huge driver,” Grant McDougall, the CEO who co-founded the company with president Liza Nebel, said in an interview. “There are silos all over the business and what we do sits over the top of that, to provide a common language to understand and talk to, for example, both to the CFO about revenue team as well as loyalty teams about messaging.”

At the same time, the tech industry that has built all of those online experiences has also built an enormous amount of tools to better parse what is going on in that universe. AI is playing a huge role in that navigation game: it’s too much for a single human, or even a large team of humans, to parse; and so a company like BlueOcean building tech to do some of that work for marketing professionals and others to have better data to work with becomes very valuable.

That has played out as a very significant evolution for the startup.

We last covered BlueOcean in 2020 when it was focused on a more narrow concept of digital brand identity: a company provided its website and a list of competitors, and one week later, for a price of $17,000, BlueOcean provided customers with brand audits that included lists of actionable items to improve or completely change. (As a point of contrast, typically brand audits for large brands can cost millions of dollars and typically do not come with specific pointers for improvement.)

Fast forward to today, and the company has expanded the scope of what it does for customers, and its overall engagement: its AI algorithms and big-data ingestion engine are now focused on providing continuous feedback to its customers, which subscribe to the service at fees starting at $100,000 per year. They use BlueOcean not just to measure their overall brand recognition in the market, but to track how specific products are performing; which launch strategies are working, and which are not; and the impact of different campaigns in different markets in real time so that they can change and respond more quickly.

“Lots has changed,” said McDougall. “We’re an AI powered brand intelligence platform. Access to insights and what competitors are doing are more relevant today than it’s ever been. What we do is collect information about brands out in public and help them understand performance relative to competitors, to help them take action to improve their brands to get market share.”

Interestingly, just as the Covid-19 pandemic has been a huge fillip to e-commerce and more generally online consumption of everything, so too has it played a strong role in the growth of BlueOcean and the approach that it takes. In the world of fast-paced and constantly changing and refreshed information, big-picture insights can be more meaningful than no picture at all, or one delayed for the sake of more detail.

“Covid has surfaced that speed is more important than accuracy,” noted Nebel. “We have data [to shape better] inclinations right now. It’s about making changes to capture opportunity.”

That concept has also clicked with its investors.

“Having invested in hundreds of the world’s most well-known brands, we know that having accurate and fast data is vital to brand health. We have extreme faith in BlueOcean and we’re excited to bring them into our investment portfolio,” said Fabrice Grinda, founding partner of FJ Labs, in a statement.

BlueOcean still also provides all-important competitive analysis but builds those lists of other companies and the data produced about them in conjunction with its customers, based in part on where the customer sees itself and would like to see itself; and also where it is as a brand in the real world.

It has also expanded its customer list: it now works with 84 brands, which may not sound like much except that these are some of the biggest companies in the world — they include Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Diageo, Cisco, Bloomingdales and Juniper Networks (and others that it cannot name) — and collectively represent what BlueOcean describes as $18 trillion in value and more than 6,000 brands — a list investors believe is poised to grow in line with how the internet itself is growing.

“After leading BlueOcean’s Series A round, we are proud to also lead their Series B to help them scale and serve even more brands,” said Whitney Bouck, MD at Insight Partners, in a statement. “As a former CMO myself, I know that marketing is constantly challenged to provide true ROI on brand marketing. BlueOcean gives marketing leaders quantifiable and actionable insights on brand performance for the first time, which we know is game-changing.”

Nurse-assisting robotics firm Diligent raises $30M

Moot channels $18M for a platform and toolkit to power e-commerce strategies for brands

E-commerce today is played out wherever a consumer sees something and wants it — be it on a company’s site or app, a social media feed, a marketplace, a search, or an advert. Today a startup called Moot that’s helping businesses and brands sell through all those channels in a unified way is announcing $18 million in a round led by Espresso Capital to expand its business both organically and via M&A.

On the first point, Moot is planning on doubling down on building more tech, including enhanced AI capabilities to help automate and analyze more of its customers’ activities. On the second point, Moot said it already has two deals underway.

With the boost that e-commerce has had in the last couple of years, the company — based out of Staffordshire in the Midlands of England — has been on a growth tear. It’s on track to make £100 million ($130 million) in ARR by the end of this year, after growing 300% year-on-year in 2021, with customers including fashion retailers like Timberland and Asos, media brands like House Beautiful, and dozens of others.

Moot got its start out of first-hand experience about the shortcomings of e-commerce solutions out in the market today. Nick Moutter, the founder and CEO, was building out an online housewares brand called Olivia’s, initially using Shopify to run it.

As the business grew, however, he found that the tech it was using to sell across different channels were too siloed, and thus made certain functions like inventory management and more unified logistics very clumsy. He and his team couldn’t find anything in the market that fit their needs — a platform that let the company manage selling across different channels in a unified way — and so they built it.

Over time, they were finding others approaching them to pay to use the tools, and eventually they decided to spin that business out. And thus Moot was born.

“We realized there was a huge demand in industry,” said Moutter, expecially among companies in “the second stage of growth, where they are hitting the ceiling of Shopify, and looking for more advanced solutions to scale.”

The company today lets a brand set up and sell through a variety of channels, including their own sites and apps, as well as third-party marketplaces, wholesales and more.

The key feature of the service is that there is a central database within the platform that can be updated to reflect activity across all of the different channels. Although e-commerce itself is a very fragmented experience — and so it should be, giving consumers lots of choice in the process — the idea with Moot is that it doesn’t need to be similarly fragmented at the back end.

This is not completely unchartered territory: companies like Shopify and WooCommerce are also building solutions to handle this for companies as they scale and expand; and arguably a wide variety of headless and semi-headless solutions in the market like Commercetools are also addressing this same pain point. But given the size of the e-commerce industry — eMarketer estimates it will be worth $5.5 trillion in 2022 — the e-commerce as a service industry will have room for all of these, and judging by Moot’s growth is likely in need of more.

That will see it bringing on more brands, but also a new wave of other companies that work with brands, such as the roll-up players, which themselves are growing by acquisition but in many cases are bringing in third-party technology to run those acquired brands more efficiently. That is where Moot would fit in.

“Moot is a leader in the fast-growing EaaS space. Their unique platform combining operational capabilities, advanced user experience, and customer acquisition technology is attracting a growing list of tier-1 global clients,” said Will Hutchins, MD of Espresso Capital, in a statement. “The rapid growth in e-commerce presents a terrific opportunity for Moot and we believe the company has the right team and technology platform to become a global EaaS leader, helping their clients provide highly differentiated e-commerce experiences. We’re excited to be partnering with them on this next exciting phase of their growth.”