Josh Feast, an immigrant entrepreneur from New Zealand, has a goal anyone could get behind: make the call center experience better for everyone. In the latest JobMakers episode, he explains how he’s using AI to make it happen and creating over 200 jobs in the process. Listen to discover his perspective on ethics in the AI sector, what inspired him to enter the field and why he thinks “diversity defines America.”
Transcript
Jo Napolitano: I’m Jo Napolitano, guest hosting for Denzil Mohammed. Welcome to JobMakers, a weekly podcast produced by Pioneer Institute and The Immigrant Learning Center. I’m excited to share with you the stories of risk taking immigrants who create new products, services, and jobs in New England and across the United States. These stories resonate with me, in part because of my own background. I was actually born in Bogota, Colombia and was abandoned at a bus stop when I was just a day old. Placed in an orphanage, I nearly died of starvation before I was adopted by a family from New York and raised by a single mother. Despite all of these obstacles, I went on to earn a degree from Medill at Northwestern University and have built a career as an award winning journalist, covering topics for the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Newsday and other outlets on topics including education, science and crime. And, of course, education was my own pathway out of poverty. I passionately believed no child’s life should be left to chance. That’s why I wrote a new book on immigrant youth called The School I Deserve: Six Young Refugees and Their Fight for Equality in America, that has just been released about a month ago and is available now everywhere, Amazon, Target, from Beacon Press the publisher directly. When we return, we’ll talk to our guest Joshua Feast from Cogito. Joshua is the CEO and co-founder of Cogito. He is a serial entrepreneur and thought leader with a passion for creating innovative technology that helps people live more productive lives. Josh has more than a decade of experience as a senior executive and is regularly quoted in Forbes, Fortune, Wall Street Journal. He holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he was the Platinum Triangle Fulbright Scholar in entrepreneurship and a Bachelor of Technology from Massey University in New Zealand. Cogito provides human aware technology to help professionals elevate their performance. Cogito’s AI, or artificial intelligence, instantly analyzes hundreds of conversational behaviors to provide live in-call guidance combined with a real time measure of customer experience. The technology is augmenting the emotional intelligence of thousands of agents in the world’s most successful enterprises. Improving sales results, delivering world class service and enhancing quality of care, Cogito is a venture backed software company located in Boston, Massachusetts and please learn more at their own website www.cogitocorp.com. Cogito Corporation employs 200 people in Boston, Massachusetts and has been in operation since 2007. So Josh, I’m wondering, can you please help explain exactly what your company does?
Josh Feast: Yes, of course. So we provide what we call an AI coaching system, which is an AI that works in tandem with a human in the workplace to help get a better result. In our case we work with large scale enterprise call centers and help enterprise call center agents are being more productive and the way we do that is the technology listens to phone calls as they’re happening, looks at behavior patterns and uses those to understand how well calls are going and then we provide guidance. You can think of them like hints and tips and nudges as our users are speaking on the phone with customers.
Jo Napolitano: Oh my goodness. So if you could explain how that might actually work if I’m operating at a call center for, let’s say a major, what if you give me an example of a business that you serve like a credit card company or a medical person or what, what’s the type of company you might serve?
Josh Feast: Yeah, so we work with large health insurers, life and disability insurers, big technology companies, banks.
Jo Napolitano: And so, as these folks are speaking to their clients or customers, they’re getting prompts based on what the customer is saying?
Josh Feast: Yeah, so yeah, sort of and basically how the two parties are speaking with each other. So the intuition is that people make a decision about whether they’re being well served, by the way they’re spoken to and the fact is, is that jobs and contacts in, as like all caring professions, very challenging jobs. There’s lots of ups and downs, not everybody is perfectly nice all the time and what we found is that if we can provide some feedback into how someone’s coming across and with the customers stressed and distressed, and also help generally understand how well conversation’s going we can get much better results.
Jo Napolitano: Wow, that’s pretty remarkable. And does Cogito have one main software tool that markets to different companies, or is it more customizable depending on the needs of the clients?
Josh Feast: We have one main software tool which we call Pedido Dialogue that is what almost everybody uses. The tool can be customized according to different types of interactions. So we have the customizations available, for example for health coaching calls, general customer service calls, tech support calls, sales calls, claims calls. And each of those different types or models understands the context of the call. In order to figure out how well it’s going and then also has different types of prompting that are provided to the agent.
Jo Napolitano: Okay. Do the companies that buy Cogito’s projects tend to be telemarketers or just customer service wings of large companies? We’d like to give a sense to listeners of who your clientele might be.
Josh Feast: Typically the most common use is customer service inside large companies. We don’t tend to work on outbound calling. It’s more when you call them, this is a software product that makes the call experience better.
Jo Napolitano: Okay. And I understand artificial intelligence has a wide variety of applications from healthcare to robotics to e-commerce and advertising. Clearly it’s a very innovative and dynamic field, but are there applications of AI that are relatively untapped where there is great potential for impact and interest from investors? Perhaps not many entrepreneurs willing to take on that role?
Josh Feast: Well, I think the field that we work in is an example of an emerging field which is sometimes referred to as augmented intelligence. So here what you’re trying to do is have the AI work in tandem in the moment with a human who’s performing a task. And that’s challenging for multiple reasons. One, it has to be able to understand what’s going on in the moment. Second, it has to be able to understand humans well enough to be useful, and then third, it has to be able to give responses in the middle of potentially a high cognitive load task in order to generate a better outcome for both the AI and a human to live together. So that’s a field that there’s, you know, a lot of investment in at the moment and is, I think, a good example of a use of AI that may be somewhat surprising to people.
Jo Napolitano: Artificial intelligence has been a somewhat controversial technological innovation because of its potential for automation related job loss, algorithmic bias, privacy violations, etc. Have any of your clients raised any of these concerns?
Josh Feast: Yeah, I mean, I think that the way I sort of think about it is if you’re not thinking about those concerns and actively doing something about them, then you probably don’t run an AI company. That sort of intrinsic to the field so, you know, for one is sort of what are societally productive use cases, which is sort of the first question. I think that’s very much the responsibility of the technologist and the inventors to come up with things that are going to be, you know, broadly valuable and valuable to users, to consumers, and to enterprise buyers, or I will say has to be a win-win-win. But second is elements of, you know, we talk about bias or privacy, so we have whole teams that focus on those issues to make sure that we are doing everything we can around that. We were the one the very first to publish research and to gender bias and emotion recognition and voice. And one of the very first to publish, sort of how to deal with it. So it would be very, very important issues and when it comes to AI,
Jo Napolitano: So I’m wondering if you could tell us a little bit about how do you account for algorithmic bias, privacy violations, or gender based differences that might present themselves kind of unfairly. What are some of the things that you look for and tools you look to root that out?
Josh Feast: So if we look at bias, one of the great ways, a great way to sort of understand AI and sort of demystify, it is in a lot of ways, it’s kind of, it’s that we could be programming with data. So, you know, a lot of things you know could be done using sort of normal software techniques, but that software can be created a lot more quickly and efficiently and dynamically if you use AI techniques. But to do that you have to supply it with a lot of data so the real heart of the trek when it comes to bias is to make sure you have unbiased data. And so that means very careful collection, very careful labeling. I think, you know, for example, we have a, you know, a sort of an annotation team that spot checks, that comes from a diverse set of backgrounds. We make sure that the data we pull in is representative of, you know, our industry. So I think that those are important and there is also one other thing that I think is worth considering with AI bias that’s maybe less well discussed and that is who gets to build AI. You know, like what use cases we choose, I think, you know, this is sort of an interesting podcast in that respect, you know, because if we’re talking about immigrant entrepreneurship, that’s one particular group that, you know, may or may not get the opportunity to build AI products. And we really ideally do want to have a very diverse set of folk building these types of technologies so that we meet a variety of mates.
Jo Napolitano: Okay and from what I understand of machine learning, it’s kind of like a computer’s ability to recognize different things, kind of inputted by human being. Or can you differentiate the two and explain how both play a role in the company?
Josh Feast: So machine learning can be thought of as a set of techniques that give rise to artificial intelligence.
Jo Napolitano: Oh, okay.
Josh Feast: Yeah, and really what it is, is that these techniques are, think of it like computational statistical techniques that read data and turn or recognize patterns and then from that provide instructions to computer programs about what to do.
Jo Napolitano: Excellent, okay. And wanted to, do Cogito’s products replace the role that a call center supervisor would have or does it merely take away discretion that the call center agent would otherwise have had?
Josh Feast: I would say it doesn’t do either of those things, so the software from a supervisor side makes the job of coaching a lot easier. So one of the challenges in a large scale context is everybody is incredibly busy, so the opportunity to recognize what’s going on and provide coaching for supervisors is very limited. Maybe they can coach on a call a month. They might be good. Or a couple of calls a month, whereas with official intelligence, you can coach on every call and you can identify which calls are the most interesting. So that would be on the supervisor side. And then on the agent side it’s not a matter of removing discretion, the application is designed to provide awareness. So a good metaphor is like lane departure warnings on a car, so it’s not taking away your discretion of the driver, but it’s giving you awareness of something that’s going on that, you know, that you can find helpful. So for example, things that we might do is help somebody recognize this fear and are talking to us distressed and so that somebody can acquire, they can react with empathy. And because call center work is so intense, when you get tired you can often fail to recognize social signals like that. So the AI is basically adding or augmenting the sort of social sensors of the call center agent.
Jo Napolitano: Okay. And I’m wondering, of course why did you start this particular company?
Josh Feast: Yeah, so that’s a good question. When I was, before I came to the U.S. I spent a number of years working for the New Zealand Department of Charity for families which is the organization that manages a lot of, you know, mental health issues and justice issues that are there in New Zealand society. One of the things I saw was that it was an incredibly high burnout rate among social workers, so they would, you know, frontline social workers, you know, wouldn’t be atypical for them to survive three to five years only before burnout. And I just felt that larger organizations through no fault of management and everybody wants the best, but they can become bureaucratic and it’s particularly hard on the curing process because there isn’t data that’s what I think of as “human aware.” So what we’ve tried to do at Cogito is bring technology that can help support the caring profession and provide emotional intelligence to large organizations so that they can manage their people more effectively.
Jo Napolitano: Wow, okay. Tell me a little bit about your experience working for that incredibly important agency in New Zealand. What exactly were you doing there?
Josh Feast: I was a technologist, I was helping them build a case management system, so there’s a software that records all the cases of, you know, mental health issues in the country.
Jo Napolitano: Wow, that’s a pretty incredible position. So I wanted to ask you now to go back to kind of your personal experience and in terms of if you would so kindly tell me about your background exactly where you’re from in New Zealand, how old were you when you arrived in the United States, what prompted the move? So feel free to pick any of those questions.
Josh Feast: Of course, yeah, so I grew up in the suburbs of New Zealand and I guess in a lot of ways a relatively traditional nuclear family. I had a younger sister, older brother and my father was an engineer and he went into business and my mother still as a registered nurse. So I was always sort of interested in the intersection of technology and care in a lot of ways. After my initial work experience and I was lucky enough to get some international experience, but in Australia, a little bit in Europe. I was given an opportunity to come and study at MIT and learn technology entrepreneurship through the Fulbright program which is an incredible program set up by the U.S. to create the bilateral exchanges of students between the U.S. and a variety of other countries, of which New Zealand one. So I came and I was in my late 20’s and studied at MIT, eventually met my wife at that time. And then when I was at MIT, I encountered a stream of research that was developed by my co-founder, who’s a professor at MIT and he had done about 10 years of basic science and how you can teach a computer to read human behavior in the first psychological state. And I thought that streamer research could be used to help organizations essentially do better securing professions and that was how we got started with Cogito.
Jo Napolitano: Oh wow. And so you met your wife out of MIT. Was she an American or is she an American?
Josh Feast: Yeah, another immigrant story. She’s originally from France.
Jo Napolitano: Oh okay, great. And so tell us, tell me about your journey to the United States or coming, you know, living here. What are some of the struggles or kind of perhaps strange little picadilloes about America were maybe a little bit difficult for someone coming from across the world.
Josh Feast: Yeah, you know, it’s so interesting coming to America because it’s the culture of it, sort of in some ways so well known because the cultural exports are so strong that, you know, you come thinking you know America when you really don’t at all. So that’s one of the things that are so funny. I think, you know, as well, when you are coming to the U.S. from an English speaking country can be a bit, you can come in a little bit overconfident, I would say because everybody speaks the same language as me, so they must have a similar culture or some other cultural basis, but not isn’t necessarily true at all. So I think that’s always always interesting.
Jo Napolitano: And I think too there’s one other thing, I think that people who come from abroad are mistaken and when they talk about kind of one America, one American ideology, one American value, one American feeling on anything, and this is a country of well over 300 million people. You have lots of different ways of living here, and did you kind of, did you have an idea about what America was and did you find people that kind of challenge that notion for you?
Josh Feast: I think, I mean, I think it’s extremely well observed that there’s lots of different Americans and lots of different, I mean the diversity almost defines the country.
Jo Napolitano: That’s true.
Josh Feast: It challenged me and I think there’s some very sort of most like fundamental differences and values between, for example, New Zealand and the U.S. that sort of strike to the core of some basic assumptions. You know, some of these are sort of maybe, you know, like for example, New Zealanders, you know one of the core values of New Zealanders, equality. Right? It’s very very focused on equality, which is one of the core values of the U.S. is freedom, is another good example, right? They’re both very strong and very, very important and, you know, but the differences in those sort of fundamental things, so that means you start from a different, it’s completely different starting point and then how you think about things.
Jo Napolitano: That’s so true here, individual freedom, the right of the individual, the motivation of the individual is woven into how the nation was created or so we kind of tell ourselves, right? So now we see that kind of working for and against us. Wonderful attributes of that and then certain things where it creates something that we all are aspiring to change for the better. And so I have, I always ask this of people who come here from another country. What’s the strangest food you encountered here and what’s from home?
Josh Feast: Strangest food. Oh gosh.
Jo Napolitano: Well let me give you a little help I had, I just wrote a book about children who are, well the main child is from Sudan and she said where she grew up in dark war, you do not eat the skin of a chicken. And so when she came to the United States, everything is a fried chicken, it was repulsive to her. Like you just do not do that there. So I thought that was really kind of funny.
Josh Feast: Yeah that is funny. Yeah I think possibly the New Zealand food situation is maybe maybe reasonably similar to the U.S. and, you know.
Jo Napolitano: Anything you missed but can’t get here?
Josh Feast: Well it’s funny in this. I’ve been here, you know, obviously over a decade and a lot of the things I’ve missed back home are now sort of almost have come here now. A good example, yeah, like a good example is coffee. So Starbucks has a flat white now. As far as I know, that was started in Australia and New Zealand and I missed them for such a long time and now I can just order them on the menu no problem.
Jo Napolitano: That is really really neat. Okay, well I think that probably concludes most of our interview. Joshua, thank you so so much for sharing your incredible story with our listeners. We really appreciate your time, we wish you continue success in your business.
Josh Feast: Thank you very, very much. I appreciated this, thank you.
Jo Napolitano: Thank you for joining us this week for another episode of JobMakers. If you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe to JobMakers on your favorite podcast app and share this episode on Facebook and Twitter. Join us again next Thursday at noon. I’m Jo Napolitano and thank you so much for listening to JobMakers.