AiThority Interview with Taras Tymoshchuk, CEO and Co-Founder at Geniusee

Tell us about your journey in technology and how you started at Geniusee.

My path began when I was a student at University. I was interested in technology transition of the world’s lifestyle. On the one hand, I could not believe that the world could have changed so radically, moreover, in absolutely all spheres of life, but at the same time, it caused an incredible desire to understand technologies and keep up with them. So I began to continuously study global trends in this direction.

For some time, I worked as a Management Consultant and Financial Advisor in one of the Big 4 companies, which helped me to understand business processes in different companies and industries, then I worked in Technology companies as a Business Analyst and Product Manager to understand how technology can improve business processes and day-to-day operations of different companies.

Over time I realized that I needed something more. That’s how I decided to establish Geniusee, as a Technology Consulting company that helps SMB to understand how technology can empower their business and actually implement such technology improvements on their behalf. In addition, we are actively helping startups to implement and launch their disruptive ideas to the market.

You come from a diverse background in Software building. How does experience in your previous roles help to manage Operations at Geniusee?

As I mentioned before, my background working in Strategy Consulting, as well as Technology Consulting and Technology Product Development, helps me a lot to see and understand how different global companies manage their operations and SDLC and also what approaches work the best in their cases. As a result, I mastered a fairly large number of processes, gained vast experience and managed to understand the structure of the IT company as a whole.

Nowadays, I’m trying to apply such best practices that I saw and understood during my working experience in different organizations and apply similar approaches to the Management of Geniusee operations but adjusting them based on today’s market needs and trends. So I can definitely say that the previous working roles have grown in me most of the qualities that I directly use in my current position.

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Insights and Operations

How does Geniusee fit into a modern Cloud IT, Blockchain and Analytics landscape?

Let’s divide this question into three different points. In general, Geniusee has expertise in these three areas as we always follow modern trends of the technology landscape.

If we talk about Cloud IT – we have quite solid expertise working with AWS and Google Cloud, including their services that significantly simplify the development process. We constantly develop such expertise in our company through certification, training, communication with developers of these Nano Clouds, and work in partnership with them. In total, approx. 95% of custom on-demand products that our team have built from scratch have been done based on Cloud. Also, we are involved in several initiatives related to data migration from bare metal servers to the Cloud.

Regarding Blockchain, we have completed several projects for our clients located in the US and Asia, which are based on different types of Blockchain such as Ethereum, Stellar Core and IBM Fabric. In general, we believe that Blockchain technology has a great future despite the current short-term loss of attention from the general public as it removes intermediary and reduces the cost of transaction and provides more visibility and transparency to the regular business operations.

From my perspective, the current trust problem with Blockchain arises not primarily from Blockchain technology itself but from its derived products such as Cryptocurrency and ICOs, is the fact that society tends to overestimate some new technologies in the short term but underestimate them from the long-term perspective. However, at the same time, there is a huge threat to the Blockchain technology existence which is primarily triggered by Quantum Computing. When it is released, there is a huge risk that Blockchain technology won’t be useful anymore.

As for Analytics, we also have quite solid expertise. The best example is a Marketing Intelligence platform for our client based in the US that uses Data Ingestion, ML, and Data Science algorithms to build a buyer profile and help to optimize Marketing Campaigns and visualize such information via BI dashboard. Also, we have built several custom financial dashboards allowing to analyze a company’s performance in near real-time and make data-driven decisions that significantly improve the decision making process and effectiveness of such decisions.

What drives the current demand for complex IT Infrastructure resources?

Like the world, in particular, the IT industry is constantly evolving, the complexity of decisions is steadily increasing. Major solutions require better IT infrastructure and Cloud providers, such as Google Cloud, provide a wealth of good services that facilitate the development and management of infrastructure. 5-10 years ago, most of the infrastructures were hosted on bare-metal servers and required entire teams of systems administrators to manage the infrastructure.

Now Cloud providers have taken most of the infrastructure management on their side, and 1-2 people are enough for most projects. In sum, the demand for complex infrastructure is characterized by the complexity of decisions, big traffic, processing of Big Data, and reduction of human efforts thanks to Cloud providers.

How do Cloud and AIOps come together to accelerate these software developments?

Well, AIOps is not about speeding up Software development, it’s about Software maintenance. If you take the concept of AIOps, it is an AI operation. Generally, it is quite an interesting direction of development of Cloud services and Cloud technologies. At this point, we can see that the largest Cloud providers are launching new services, like AWS Cloudwatch launched Anomaly Detection a few months ago, with the help of which we can track anomalies in metrics from different services.

Also, 2 weeks ago in AWS re Invent a ML-based AWS Detector has been released that helps analyze, investigate, and quickly identify the root cause of potential security issues or suspicious activities. In general, I see a big future in AIOps that will essentially help solve many of the operation cases without the direct intervention of Cloud engineers and DevOps.

Almost every industry is heavily disrupted by Big Data, AI, Blockchain, and Predictive Intelligence technologies. What kind of future are you building with your AI and ML products?

I think these technologies have a lot of potential, which is a bit open, but so far it has not been open enough in this market yet. In general, we have several completed projects – based on AI and ML models disrupting Marketing, Retail, Finance, and Publishing industries. In particular, we help our clients to:

• Make more effective data-driven decision in the shortest period of time based on a huge volume of processed financial data;
• Optimize the Marketing budget by reducing the target audience only to those who will most likely respond positively to your Marketing campaign and cold outreach;
• Reduce risks of fines and loss of reputation due to inappropriate content that might be posted on a marketing blog or in a newsletter by checking such content before publishing with NLP algorithm in the shortest period of time;
• Improve customer experience in retail through computer vision analysis of visitors’ emotions.

I also wanted to add that with the development of Quantum Computing, new opportunities will emerge for the Machine Learning development. And we are actively following it since our company has a fairly large ML department, and we constantly work in areas such as NLP, Computer Vision, and Data Analysis.

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Marketing and Customer Success

As a CEO of a tech company, what do you discuss with CIOs and CTOs of various companies? How do these discussions help to make Geniusee better?

Meeting with experts from various companies, we most often discuss technical trends and how to use them in the best way in Software development. This is the main topic because the technology is changing at an incredible speed. Some of them can greatly change the Product Development process.

We also share our experience in developing strategies, which in turn helps to look at familiar things from the other side. In turn, this helps Geniusee employees expand their expertise and be always up to date with new tools and services. Summarizing the above, during such discussions we are always in the fact that in order to be successful in today’s world you need to follow the trends and quickly respond to technology disruptions.

Apart from the ones in the US, which industries and geographies are you currently targeting?

At the moment, we have customers from different parts of the world, from Japan to the United States. But anyway, for the most part, our customers are concentrated in the US and Europe. I would expect that this will be our main target market during the next 5 years.

In terms of focus, currently, we are concentrating on technology focus which includes development of high load and scalable solutions based on cloud infrastructure (AWS, Google Cloud), using microservice or serverless infrastructure. As a result, in terms of industries, we will focus on Fintech, Retail tech and Edtech domains, which actually more often need such scalable solutions.

AI Predictions

What are your predictions on the future of AI-based Cloud and On-premise Security Platforms in 2020-2024? Where do you see the IT security platforms in the next 2-3 years?

I think that the number and quality of services will significantly increase during the next several years. With their help, it will be possible to improve the security of AIOps services. A good example again is the AWS Detective. I think that Amazon and such Cloud providers as Azure and Google will invest more in the development of these services, which will improve the Data Science models, that will reveal more security issues. And also in these services there will be opportunities to connect them directly to on-premise architecture.

As a result, infrastructure will be fully managed by AI algorithms that will automatically scale and reduce infrastructure based on load, predict and optimize usage budget as well as protect it from security threats

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

This is an interesting topic. I think that it is logical that as well as Trade, Finance, Healthcare and other areas of life, the military industry and politics use AI. I still think there’s nothing to worry about. I believe that if such developments will be aimed at combating crime and reducing illegal actions in general – it would be the right decision.

I do not support the use of AI as an opportunity for the accumulation of weapon technologies for struggle of different countries. Our CTO worked on one of such projects, namely circular review system vehicles. This system provides a complete omnidirectional view for armored vehicles crew (transparent walls effect) and the possibility to receive necessary data and interactive tips on helmet screen.

In terms of Economics, I think there will be an increase in open source records and public data. Based on this Data, the Scientists and Engineers will be able to build different prediction models, look for some correlations, and improve state management with the help of ML.

What other emerging technologies within your industry are you interested in?

I am also interested in serverless computing. Serverless architecture is an innovative approach to deploying and writing an application that allows developers to focus on code. This trend is also known as a function-as-a-service (FaaS), where the Cloud service provider is responsible for starting and stopping the container’s platform, checking infrastructure security, reducing maintenance costs, improving scalability, etc.

This approach can shorten time to market. system complexity and operating costs.

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

Andy Jassy

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