CognitiveScale Commits to Helping 1 Billion People by 2020 through World’s First AI “Do-Tank”

Launches Four Multi-Year Initiatives That Accelerate Adoption Of Responsible AI

CognitiveScale, the leader in augmented intelligence (AI), today announced its commitment to bring AI to at least one billion people by 2020 through products and partnerships built on a Responsible AI framework. Supporting this initiative is AI Global, a non-profit focused on bringing Responsible AI to global challenges including healthcare, financial well-being, inclusion, education, and economic opportunity.

The Case for Responsible AI

While AI has the potential to reshape how companies operate, experience has revealed a significant gap in the ability to design, deliver, and scale enterprise AI systems reflecting an organization’s core values. Those values and policies include user profiling and data rights, model explainability, algorithmic fairness, and decision accountability for self-learning systems. This has led to a prevalence of small AI deployments with limited commercial adoption and innovation.

CognitiveScale sees the answer as an AI design and architecture approach called Responsible AI, where systems are characterized by transparency, accountability, and fairness and users have full visibility into how data is being used.

Developing Responsible AI systems requires a deep understanding of human ethics and values in self-learning systems, translating these values into technical requirements and products and implementing continuous governance and evaluation to ensure safe, beneficial, and fair use. CognitiveScale has developed its products and methods based on these principles, allowing organizations to confidently use AI to make complex decisions, engage end users, and amplify process intelligence.

“Adoption of AI at scale will happen when people and businesses feel secure integrating human and machine intelligence to solve complex problems and power better experiences,” said Manoj Saxena, Chairman of CognitiveScale and former General Manager of IBM Watson. “The only way AI realizes its potential is through products and methods built with a ‘People and Ethics First’ Responsible AI design and full participation from every sector.”

Leading AI from “Think Tanks” to “Do-Tanks”

Launching at CogX 2018 in London, CognitiveScale is introducing four multi-year initiatives that accelerate adoption of Responsible AI and underpin the commitment to help one billion people by 2020 through AI. These initiatives shift the focus from AI “Think Tanks” to “Do Tanks” and allow companies to collaborate using open specifications based on Responsible AI frameworks that minimize vendor lock-in:

• AI Global Marketplace: In partnership with AI Global, CognitiveScale is launching the world’s first open AI marketplace with over 2,000 high value AI agents, skills, models, and data sets. Based on open specifications, the AI Global Marketplace brings the power of an app store to software developers, data scientists, AI researchers, and product managers.
• Open Specification Publication: CognitiveScale is launching the open Cognitive Agent Modeling and Execution Language (CAMEL). CAMEL defines a standard, language, and platform-agnostic specification for programming cognitive agents. CAMEL will be released as a family of open specifications starting with the Open Cognitive Skills Specification, available immediately at https://camelai.org and on GitHub.
• New Cortex 5 Edge Software: CognitiveScale is releasing a new version of Cortex 5 AI Lifecycle platform with unique edge compute capabilities for data and model privacy, transparency, and security. Called Cortex Edge, this foundational AI technology addresses one of the barriers to Responsible AI adoption—the requirement by major vendors to have clients upload their data to the cloud. It can be deployed in a data center or private enterprise cloud, supporting Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or IBM Cloud and scaled on demand with CPU and GPU optimized processors.
• AI for Social Good Accelerator: In partnership with The Entrepreneurs’ Fund and the Saxena Foundation, CognitiveScale will create an AI for Social Good Accelerator to support 10 global non-profit and academia partners to solve 100+ societal challenges with AI by 2025. Every year the accelerator will offer grants, free software, paid internships, AI expertise, and seed funding focused on areas such as social justice, healthcare, human trafficking, and empowerment of women in technology. The first set of challenges will be announced in October 2018.

“Digital rights, including ethical artificial intelligence usage, is one of the most pressing issues for any country responsible for serving its digital citizens,” said Alex Benay, CIO, Government of Canada. “The work and research currently being conducted is precisely the type of project we should be focusing on in today’s data-driven economy.”

Across the globe, CognitiveScale has successfully demonstrated the potential of AI to reshape digital businesses and is using that foundation to support multiple markets and sectors.

• In the United States, CognitiveScale is collaborating with leading companies in banking, insurance, healthcare, and digital commerce to transform front office customer engagement and back office operational excellence.
• In the UK, CognitiveScale is supporting financial services in rolling out AI-powered wealth management and trading insights, helping millions of Britons participate in the AI economy.
• In India, CognitiveScale is working with leading academic institutions to develop next-generation AI and blockchain based software to support building enterprise AI systems with human data rights, governance, and automated compliance checks.

“Responsible AI is an opportunity and an imperative for business, government, and technology leaders worldwide,” said Akshay Sabhikhi, CEO, CognitiveScale. “The enthusiastic customer response and early results from our Responsible Enterprise AI initiatives and Cortex products gives us confidence that we have the right strategies to deliver and scale AI responsibly.”

CognitiveScale develops augmented intelligence software that solves complex business problems at scale for financial services, healthcare, and digital commerce markets. Built on its Cortex augmented intelligence platform, the company’s software helps enterprises apply AI and blockchain technology to increase user engagement, improve decision-making, and deploy self-learning and self-assuring business processes. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, CognitiveScale has offices in New York, London, and Hyderabad, India, and is funded by Norwest Venture Partners, Intel Capital, IBM Watson, and Microsoft Ventures. CognitiveScale’s rapidly growing roster of global clients includes USAA, Barclays, Morgan Stanley, Prudential, MD Anderson, Dell, Ascension, and NBC among others.