June 19, 2023
5 min read
A good conversation
"A conversation is a dialogue not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet" Truman Capote
It started when David met Adam in 2018 at Coppa Club, Henley. Introduced by a mutual friend, they were both looking forward to a good conversation. Sharing interests and seeing if there might be any mutuality. David already had a kernel of an idea, but with Adam's entrepreneurial spirit the idea got bigger, turned left and started to form shape. They connected and realised they could work together. Conversation AI was going to focus on healthcare.
The frustration of traditional sales and marketing
"frustration is fuel that can lead to the development of an innovative and useful idea" Marley Dias
They shared a bunch of frustrations that day. So many conversations going on between organisations and their customers/patients and yet the insight was trapped between the two participants. How much value could be unlocked if we could make that an organisational asset? Identifying what the best really do? Moving from anecdote to insight?
Adam was involved in a remote training business in healthcare. Traditional Quality assurance/audits for front line staff leading to expensive, sub-optimal training and development. Analogue, human, limited sample sizes causing bias. Slow improvement cycles the norm. How fast could we improve if went from analogue to digital? What would be the marginal gains if we could prompt people precisely in the moment?
AI should be the answer
"Software is eating the world, but AI is going to eat software" Jensen Huang
In parallel David was also having interesting conversations with Dr David (the AI phd).
Dr David had run a speech analytics practice and developed some AI products. AI should be the answer, but the actionability of the current solutions really left a lot to be desired. Too many clever squiggly lines, not enough precision. Too many word spotting activities, not enough meaning. Surely we could do a better job? Deliver actionable insights automatically in an individual conversation?
For the many not the few.
"The future is here it just isn't evenly distributed." William Gibson
A further frustration was that so much of the world's AI capability is concentrated in so few hands. The FAANGS (facebook, Apple, amazon, Netflix, Google).
The future of the world is AI. We want to democratise this. Making these powerful tools available to everyone so they can be used for good purposes. You shouldn't need to work for a global tech leader to benefit. And if organisations could replace those legacy processes the benefits could be enormous. To make that shift takes visionary leaders. We'd need to seek them out. Change is going to happen gradually then suddenly.
Good Conversations lead to human connection
"People forget what you say, forget what you do, but they'll never forget how you make them feel" Maya Engeliou
Good conversations are core to what makes us human. They are how we establish trust and collaborate to meet shared objectives. It’s the heart of our functioning society.
It’s not just what you say or how you say it, it’s how the other person reacts. Get it right and it makes a huge difference to ourselves, others, teams and overall performance. We establish good and bad habits through our early life experience. And yet how do we learn to improve them? Imagine if you could know how you were making other people feel?
Visual AI - The third dimension
"Watch how you communicate. Because your always communicating, even when you’re not talking, with your body language, your facial expressions, your eyes" Orlando Bloom
Speech analytics uses acoustic and text AI to derive insights. We hypothesised that if we could overlay emotion AI (how people feel) it would help us to determine these points of connection or disconnection. In particular visual AI. Our faces and body language are designed to subliminally communicate. It's why communication face to face or on Zoom is more effective than telephone. Facial emotion detection is used extensively in research studies, medical treatment and in assessing people's emotional reaction to games and adverts. Why couldn't we use it as an additional layer to provide deeper conversation insight?
The Covid accelerator
"Never let a good crisis go to waste" William Churchill
A healthcare pilot was put together with plasters and sticky tape to prove the concept in late 2018. We were already in the process of forming the business when Covid hit. Overnight everyone moved onto Teams and Zoom to communicate. From Pharma field teams to clinicians consulting with patients, it went remote. What's clear is that it is a highly effective medium that here to stay. The availability of high value video conversations in pharma and clinical settings suddenly gave us access to vast amounts of data that kick-started the build of these new models.
KAI was formally formed in May 2019 with a vision to analyse video conversations and reveal hidden human insights that improve health outcomes. With a drive to upgrade legacy practices and drag them into the 21st Century. AI for the many not the few and for good.
The KAI Mission Analysing conversations to reveal hidden human insight and improve health outcomes
Experimenting our way to Emotional Intelligence
"Some of the greatest moments in human history were fuelled by emotional intelligence" Adam Grant
As we experimented and analysed real conversations with all three AI dimensions. We started to realise that what we were trying to measure was people's emotional intelligence. Making people aware of their own ways of engaging with others. Showing them others' behaviours and reactions. Finding moments that matter. We engaged with clinical psychologists to go deeper. Unpacking the patterns of conversation that lead to distress and disconnection as well as success. John Parr, author of Emotional Assertiveness has been inspirational.
Conversations in the healthcare value chain
We're fortunate to have found many of those visionary leaders. Through our partners Neo Optima, we've worked with 8 of the top 20 Global pharma businesses. Covering native language interactions in Europe, North and South America. Two companies are already rolling out globally.
People are blown away with the depth of insight and are using it in many ways.
Our market insights product analyses many conversations and delivers the overall insight for brand managers. Conversation insight is becoming that organisational asset.
Individual conversation analysis is helping individuals to engage better with health care professionals so the right messages land and the clinician understands the best treatment for each patient.
We are piloting in the NHS, analysing patient experience and engagement in remote settings. We thank Dr Masood Nazir for being such a visionary leader and seeing its application in quality assurance and coaching of junior doctors. Better Conversations - better health outcomes.
Two years in and still so much to do. If you are interested in getting involved in the journey whether academic, customer, healthcare professional, data scientist, AI developer or you think you can help us take this to the world, we'd love to chat. We can't do it all on our own and we want better human conversations that lead to better health outcomes for everyone.