AiThority Interview with Robert Weißgraeber, MD and CTO at AX Semantics

Could you tell us about your journey in technology and how you started at AX Semantics?

AX Semantics started the early 21st century as a copywriting company, but the rapid adoption of the Internet changed everything when it comes to the written word. As companies increasingly embraced the digital realm they found that there was no way to create the amount of content needed to have a robust online presence. To facilitate large scale text creation, we invented tools that helped companies scale writing without having to hire more editors and writers than their budgets could ever permit.

What is AX Semantics, and how does it empower various businesses with AI ML capabilities?

AX Semantics is the AI-powered content generation solution for the digital age. We give companies superpowers so they can effortlessly publish quality content and grow. Our software is intuitive and quickly able to generate all the content needed to keep pace with business needs. The software is 100% SaaS – everything is available from your desk via your web browser; no programming or IT departments required. Self-service with integrated e-learning allows customers to start automating text within 48 hours – nearly 500 customers have already done this successfully.

In the last five years or so, how have “AI in Marketing, Sales and Communication” evolved with maturing of Deep Learning capabilities? 

Marketing and communications have evolved exponentially. You can’t just rely on the buzzword  “AI” to sell your product anymore. You need to clearly explain what this advanced technology is doing to change businesses and lives. The way you talk about technology is almost as important as the technology. We’ve also evolved in several ways. We have far more languages (we went from 27 to 110+). We have better prediction capability and are better able to use existing data. We’ve also made huge strides in solving real business cases.

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What makes AX Semantics different from others in this unique digital automation space? 

We have a different mindset. We look out for business/user problems as opposed to developer problems. We want to make our software usable for people without developer skills and access – something we call democratizing AI.

You provide unique NLP and Text Analytics products. Which industries and geographies have been the fastest to adopt and succeed with your products? 

Our product has been quickly adopted and used successfully throughout the e-commerce market. Text quality for e-commerce has to be high (highlighting benefits, instead of just enumerating facts). In the past year, we’ve seen successful adoption in Finance and Healthcare/Pharmaceuticals. Finance is usually quick to adopt since they are building innovative end-user products to disrupt their space.

Tell us more about your work in Explainable AI and the kind of adoption you are witnessing within your customer base.

We have a tool that combines ML/Deep Learning components with user-configured input. There is now a clear delineation between features handled by humans and features handled by AI.

What are the modern cyber threats you have to tackle as a CTO?

As a software vendor and Cloud infrastructure customer, we need to carefully watch Cloud credentials. These credentials are often used by hackers for things like mining or malware spreads or accessing user/customer data.

How do you ensure compliance with data privacy laws, especially since you service e-commerce players?

E-commerce companies simply create web-published product data so there are few privacy concerns with that content. For other use cases, especially hyper-personalized texts, or finance/health content, we offer specifically engineered features that allow our customers to go to the highest data privacy standards such as HIPAA and PHI.

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Other than AI and ML, which other technologies are you keenly following? 

I carefully follow everything around user-facing automation/RPA, continuous integration, and delivery.

What is your opinion on “Weaponization of AI, Machine Learning and Blockchain”? How do you promote your ideas in the modern digital economy?

You can always find examples of weaponization or other malicious use in technology. Far more dangerous at the moment is bias/discrimination because that is so inherent with data-trained models. The data always contains human bias. The big issue is that our regulatory processes are not fast enough to solve these significant social problems. And governments cannot compete on skill level with the AI players, making it even harder to create sensible regulation.

What kind of skills/ technical specializations are you currently hiring to lead Product and Marketing teams?

We are hiring growth hacking performance marketeers: employees who are data-driven while not data-blind, good on solo execution, but also team players.

What digital technology start-ups and labs are you keenly following?

I’m following DeepL, Jetbrains, and Coursera.

Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:

Simon Wardley, creator of Mapcamp

Alain Veuve from Parashift

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Thank you, Robert! That was fun and hope to see you back on AiThority soon.