Exclusive Interaction with Adam Carte, Chief Executive Officer, Luminoso

Text analytics has been identified as one of the most disruptive technologies to extract insights about trends, patterns and sentiments to optimize customer experience. The insights generated from this real-time data empowers organizations to take immediate action and bridge the gap with its customers. In an exclusive interview, Adam Carte, Chief Executive Officer of Luminoso shares how text analytics provides a clear window into the minds of customers and how Luminoso’s artificial intelligence-based text analytics software helps organizations quickly and accurately understand its customers.  Below are the excerpts from the interview:  

Give a brief overview of the company background, its specialization and services.

Launched out of the MIT Media Lab 10 years ago, Luminoso has developed a suite of AI-powered text analytics applications that offer the fastest way for organizations to make sense of unstructured text data – such as open-ended survey responses, product reviews, customer tickets, and chatbot transcripts – in 15 languages. Initially, many sophisticated global brands became Luminoso customers because of the strength of our science, including Hilton, Johnson & Johnson, Liberty Global, Supercell, DENSO, athenahealth, Officeworks, and Swiss Post Solutions. However, last year we released our new Daylight product that makes this science accessible to companies of all sizes and budgets, seeding the significant customer growth that we are experiencing today. Luminoso’s suite of products includes: 1. Luminoso Daylight, which uses unsupervised AI to provide the only generalized text analytics solution on the market and typically used to analyze conversational text like support tickets, open-ended survey responses, product reviews, emails, maintenance notes, and chatbot conversations 2. Luminoso Compass, a supervised learning platform for classifying streaming text data like support tickets and call and chat transcripts 3. Search Enhancement with Luminoso, which augments existing search engines with NLU that understands synonyms, related concepts, and misspellings to achieve humanlike search results.  

Describe the disruptive innovation achieved by the company.

Luminoso’s suite of applications is powered by proprietary QuickLearn® technology, a natural language modeling system that incorporates the latest research in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language understanding (NLU) to deliver best-in-class text analytics. QuickLearn’s background space is built on both ConceptNet, an open data semantic network maintained by Luminoso Chief Science Officer Robyn Speer, and word embeddings learned from text on the Web, and uses our proprietary transfer learning and unsupervised AI to automatically analyze text across all industries and use cases. Luminoso introduced QuickLearn in 2016, and in December 2019 announced QuickLearn 2.0, the first commercially-available solution that reduces bias when using NLU to comprehend text. When QuickLearn 2.0 analyzes a dataset, it includes a step that identifies and counteracts biased language to mitigate the effect of bias on the project. Reducing bias in the analysis of text feedback lets organizations uncover more objective insights to help drive their businesses forward. More so than any other NLU system, QuickLearn 2.0 can solve the difficult problem of how to quickly understand and learn from domain-specific data, without bias, and without the need for training and maintenance.  

Explain how your innovation disrupts the existing market.

Unlike other text analytics solutions, Luminoso’s applications don’t require training, coding, libraries, or ontologies to fully analyze unstructured text data and quantify feedback, allowing customers to start analyzing datasets immediately. Luminoso’s suite of AI-powered text analytics applications work across every industry and use case by automatically learning and applying industry-specific jargon, acronyms, and context.  

Brief us about your role as a CEO and your contributions toward the company.

I have more than 25 years of experience leading organizations through periods of transformational growth, while delivering significant value to both customers and shareholders. When I joined Luminoso, I saw the opportunity to apply my experience of scaling companies and disrupting markets to the world of text analytics. Prior to joining Luminoso, I was an Operating Partner to Denham Capital Management, and a founding member and Partner of Fairlead Advisors. At Fairlead, I led negotiations for acquisitions, divestitures, equity and debt financings, strategic partnerships, licensing agreements, and company restructurings for over 20 different companies across a broad range of industries. I previously served in a number of C-level positions. As the CEO of Cadre Proppants, a mining company, revenues doubled during my tenure. I was the CFO of NRG Energy, Inc. a large independent power producer, which went public on the NYSE during my tenure at NRG. As the CFO of The Trigen Companies, an energy company, I jointly led the turnaround and doubled profits, resulting in the sale of the company that more than doubled its equity value in less than three years.  

Tell us how the company is contributing to the market and benefiting the clients.

As the only provider of a truly generalized text analytics application, Luminoso is helping clients improve a range of different business problems, such as customer experience, employee change management, and plant operations. For example, Luminoso powers organizations around the world to automatically quantify critical qualitative factors that drive customer satisfaction found only in the customers’ conversational text, which in turn helps these companies improve customer experience. Here’s one example of how Luminoso helps businesses improve customer experience: Officeworks is Australia’s leading retailer and supplier of office supplies, tech, and furniture solutions for home, business, and education needs, with more than 165 stores and over 8,000 team members. To learn what its customers want and need, a standing survey is located on its website, receiving hundreds of responses a day. The Great Service Score survey is core to Officeworks’ ability to listen and adapt to the changing needs of its customers. Analyzing results has become increasingly difficult as volume and variety of feedback rise. This complexity makes it harder for the Customer Insights team to quantify and report on customer-reported issues and summarize results for executives. Timely context is necessary for both the understanding required to make decisions and the ability to measure impacts from business changes and improvement efforts. With Luminoso, Officeworks has the ability to make sense of large volumes of feedback data quickly and efficiently. This helps the company understand drivers of satisfaction, as defined by the customer, and provide guidance on how it makes improvements. As an every channel retailer, Officeworks offers choice and convenience in buying, whether that be in a store, online, or on the phone. Luminoso creates insight into where experience is inconsistent, across all channels, so Officeworks can pinpoint areas for improvement to better serve its customers. As an omni-channel retailer, Officeworks offers choice and convenience in buying, whether that be in a store, from the website, or on the phone. Luminoso creates insight into where experience is inconsistent, across all channels, so Officeworks can pinpoint areas for improvement to better serve its customers.  

Brief us about the challenges and potential drawbacks of your disruptive innovation.

As exciting as it is to sell a brand new technology, this also means that the company is solving problems that customers didn’t know could be solved. With this in mind, selling successfully requires significant education and demonstration. Doing this efficiently requires careful preparation, a disciplined process, and a willingness to constantly learn what works for current customers as well as prospects.  

How do you see the company/industry in the future ahead?

The future of AI is democratized, or “no code” – the technical term for describing applications that business users can easily learn immediately out of the box. As AI applications become more commonplace across non-technical departments – from operations to customer service, marketing, and sales – Luminoso expects to see more vendors develop applications that people without data science or developer backgrounds can use. Luminoso’s team is focused on the democratization of AI and no-code text analytics, which is one of the key reasons the company has seen such significant growth in the adoption of its applications.