AiThority Interview with Dorian Selz, CEO of Squirro

Dorian Selz, CEO of Squirro, talks about the recent advancements in generative AI capabilities, their acquisition of Synaptica, the impact of AI/ML technologies on the financial services industry and more in this Q&A:

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Hi Dorian, welcome to our AiThority Interview Series. As an experienced technology professional and an entrepreneur, can you outline the path that led you to your current role?

My career is a startup career. I’ve built businesses all my life. And I’ve had the privilege of serving on advisory boards for multiple organizations. In the 1990s, I was Partner and COO of Namics, the largest digital transformation consultancy in Switzerland and Germany, working with major clients like UBS and Siemens on their inaugural web pages.

Later I founded local.ch. We digitized the entire yellow page space and built Switzerland’s largest web property. And then in 2009, we launched Memonic which subsequently became Squirro.

My journey with pioneering tech-enabled solutions has culminated in my current venture, Squirro, where we’re tackling one of the most significant challenges: scaling enterprise data at scale and extracting value from unstructured data in enterprise settings.

Fast-forward to 2024. Squirro is a leading Swiss-headquartered global SaaS platform specializing in enterprise-ready generative AI, search, and business insights. We have dedicated teams in Switzerland, the United States, the UK, and Singapore with global reach and impact. 

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Squirro is recognized for its expertise in semantic search and AI. Could you elaborate on how Squirro’s platform integrates these technologies to provide actionable insights for enterprises?

At Squirro, we empower our clients with advanced AI technologies like SquirroGPT, which transforms vast amounts of data into actionable insights. Our dedication to providing indispensable enterprise AI solutions enables our clients to harness their data to drive growth and efficiency at scale by integrating search, insights, and automation, and addressing critical data security and privacy concerns. 

Squirro marries data from any source with the user intent and context to intelligently augment decision-making. Organizations across industries benefit from our scalable Insight Engine to unsilo, connect, and synthesize all data types and generate valuable, highly actionable information. 

Our Insight Engine is our core, the starting point for building vertical-specific Augmented Intelligence solutions. This creates a seamless and bespoke insights experience that helps everyone in the organization save time.

We are a leading contender because we have been building Insight Engines for the past decade and integrating machine learning techniques of all shapes, forms, and sizes. For us, integrating Large Language Models to provide one of the leading retrieval-augmented generation stacks has been a straightforward process. We serve customers across various domains, including the “Chat with My Data” use case. 

We’ve been recognized as the most visionary Insight Engine (Gartner Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines, 2021) and have developed quite a few innovative projects to expand the benefits of Augmented Intelligence, especially in fintech and regtech. 

Squirro’s platform integrates semantic search and AI to provide actionable insights for enterprises through several key mechanisms. By combining these technologies, Squirro transforms static information into decisive input factors for better and more intelligent business decision-making: 

Data Aggregation and Enrichment: Squirro connects and aggregates diverse internal and external data sources, handling massive data volumes. It enriches this content using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) techniques to discover, organize, and analyze data and content.

• Semantic Search and Knowledge Graphs: The platform utilizes semantic search and knowledge graphs to provide a deeper understanding of the data. This involves classifying content at a sentence level according to the user’s intent and linking concepts to other meaningful data, thereby extending search results and providing a comprehensive view.
• Advanced Data Analysis: Squirro’s AI platform focuses on unstructured data such as text, emails, news articles, and social media posts. By applying NLP and ML, it extracts valuable insights and patterns from this data, which would otherwise be challenging and time-consuming for humans to process.
• Real-time Actionable Insights: The platform delivers real-time, actionable insights through ready-to-use applications integrated into the digital workplace. This helps enterprises make smarter decisions daily by providing a 360-degree view of all enterprise sources.
• Service Management and Integration: Squirro’s Service Management Offering enhances customer support by providing service agents with instant access to historical data and suggested responses. It integrates with major business process management and service management platforms, ensuring smooth bidirectional communication.

Share details about some of Squirro’s recent product launches and their impact on your clients.

Squirro has developed a generative AI platform that employees can trust to deliver reliable and accurate insights, revolutionizing enterprise data management and setting new standards for responsiveness, accuracy, and customer satisfaction. By integrating technologies such as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), evidence-based outputs, enterprise-ready security, semantic search, and unified data access, the platform ensures transparency, data privacy, and comprehensive organizational knowledge. Customization and compliance features further enhance its adaptability and regulatory adherence, while continuous learning ensures up-to-date insights.

The recent acquisition of Synaptica, a US-based SaaS provider of enterprise taxonomy management and knowledge graph systems, augments Squirro’s capabilities with robust semantic graph technology, facilitating knowledge discovery, conversational search, and business process automation. This combination of capabilities drives a new era of efficiency and innovation in customer support, ultimately leading to improved decision-making, increased productivity, and enhanced customer satisfaction.

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Squirro’s cutting-edge generative AI platform is  designed to revolutionize enterprise data management and redefine industry standards for responsiveness, accuracy, and customer satisfaction. The key capabilities that make Squirro’s solution reliable, accurate, and trustworthy for employees include:

• Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG): Squirro combines Large Language Models (LLMs) with its proprietary Composite AI and Insight Engine technologies. This approach ensures that AI-generated responses are grounded in an organization’s own data, providing contextualized results, while minimizing hallucinations. 
• Evidence-based outputs: Every AI-generated claim is backed by auditable evidence, with sources linked to the LLM response. This transparency and explainability are crucial for building trust among users.
• Enterprise-ready security: Squirro’s GenAI solution is fully integrated across enterprise systems and can be deployed in an organization’s private cloud, ensuring data privacy and security.
• Semantic search capabilities: Squirro’s semantic enterprise search goes beyond traditional keyword-based search, understanding context, meaning, and relationships between words and concepts.
• Unified data access: The platform provides access to data from various sources and formats through over 100 enterprise data connectors, enabling a comprehensive view of organizational knowledge.
• Customization and personalization: Squirro’s AI adapts to specific industry needs and user preferences, offering personalized insights and recommendations.
• Compliance and governance: The solution is designed to meet strict regulatory requirements, with built-in access controls and audit trails.
• Continuous learning and adaptation: Squirro’s AI continuously refines its accuracy and relevance through ongoing learning, ensuring up-to-date and reliable insights.

Squirro works with several central banks and leading financial institutions. How is AI transforming the financial services industry, and what future developments do you foresee?

Squirro’s cutting-edge semantic search and generative AI platform capabilities  significantly impacted the financial services industry by enhancing data management, search capabilities, and decision-making processes. These innovations have earned Squirro a spot in the 4th Annual AIFinTech100 awards for 2024. 

• Integral to Squirro’s innovation in the knowledge management space is the use of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), which streamlines the entire lifecycle of data from acquisition to deletion, ensuring swift, accurate collection, and efficient processing. This approach not only improves data integrity, security, and compliance but also significantly enhances the accessibility and relevance of information within large enterprises through advanced data indexing and hybrid search methodologies. Squirro’s RAG technology offers the implementation of stringent access control lists (ACLs) that maintains data security and compliance on a large scale. An Interactive chat interface and comprehensive system interaction also facilitates seamless user experiences and high-quality content generation and retrieval.

• Squirro’s generative employee agents have notably improved the effectiveness of 900 client advisors in asset management by providing seamless access to enterprise data and automating routine tasks. By offering enterprise-ready generative AI, search, business insights, and automation solutions, Squirro empowers financial institutions to harness the full potential of their data, leading to improved efficiency and productivity.

As AI continues to evolve, where do you see the technology heading beyond 2025, particularly in the context of its integration with industries such as finance and healthcare?

The Generative AI space is evolving at an unprecedented pace, and we are committed to providing a platform that empowers our customers to stay ahead. Large Language Models will have a more significant impact beyond chat applications. By combining the strengths of knowledge graphs and LLMs, we are unlocking new levels of efficiency and accuracy in customer support, allowing businesses to focus on what matters most – delivering value to their customers. We will continue to drive innovation, with our first addition being knowledge graph enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) delivering  scalable enterprise data solutions in addition to  implementing robust practices and a proactive mindset that prioritizes the accuracy, consistency, and reliability of data. 

We have seen a strong acceleration of digital transformation. The way that we interact with each other, collaborate, share and consume information has changed fundamentally. Ideas and information are predominantly exchanged in the form of unstructured data. The sheer amount of information can be overwhelming, let alone the complexity due to the format and context.

With more and more data being generated, we have seen the fundamental need to make sense of the contained information and break it down into digestible pieces is growing.

In addition, the EU AI Act is set to take effect in January 2025 mandates that providers and deployers of AI systems ensure a sufficient level of AI literacy among their staff and other persons involved in the operation and use of AI systems. This requirement, outlined in Article 113(a), emphasizes the need for comprehensive AI literacy, considering technical knowledge, experience, education, and training and the context in which AI systems are used.

Therefore we will see a worldwide investment in AI literacy and compliance, ensuring data integrity in order to avoid fines, or risk non-compliance and facing penalties.

By prioritizing AI literacy and robust data management systems, businesses can safeguard their data and reputation, but failure to do so will result in devastating consequences, making the hidden costs of non-compliance a harsh reality. 

What are some emerging trends in AI and data analytics that you believe will shape the future?

As we look to the future, I’m excited about the potential of AI to reshape how businesses operate and make decisions. At Squirro, we’re not just observers of this change – we’re driving it, helping enterprises harness the full power of their data through advanced AI technologies.

How do you stay informed about the latest developments and innovations in AI and technology?

As Solution providers, we actively participate in vendor briefings to keep Gartner analysts informed about our latest products, services, and strategies in the rapidly evolving AI industry. The Vendor briefings serve as a conduit for sharing our innovations and market insights.           

Of course, our engagement with Gartner is not just a one-way street; it’s a dynamic feedback loop. We leverage Gartner’s market intelligence to refine our offerings and strategies, ensuring they align with industry trends and customer needs. Additionally, our partnerships  within our broader ecosystem allow us to tap into a diverse pool of knowledge and innovations in AI technology.

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This multi-faceted approach—combining our own developments, Gartner’s expert insights, and our partners’ innovations—enables us to maintain a comprehensive and up-to-date understanding of the AI landscape. By fostering these relationships and knowledge exchanges, we contribute to and benefit from a rich tapestry of industry expertise, driving continuous improvement and innovation in our AI solutions.

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