Is there a way to explain artificial intelligence in a simple way? Yes, it exists. Or at least they are convinced of it Giacinto Fiore and Pasquale Viscanti, 42 the first, 32 the second, originally from Altamura, where their creature is based: Artificial Intelligence explained simply (in acronym, Iass). The project is ambitious: to make people become their AI Play video platform, where every week they host an interview with scientists, subject matter experts and managers, the Netflix of artificial intelligence.
The idea, as often happens, was born around a desk: Fiore and Viscanti deal with sales and marketing for a large company, they share a room (“when something went wrong we threw the highlighters on it, ”they recall today), are passionate about technology. They begin to explore the boundaries of AI. Like? In the simplest way possible: they interview people who know best, the experts, record and distribute pills of knowledge in podcasts following the instinct: “If it interests us, it will also interest someone else”. Passion turns into a hobby and the hobby soon takes on the guise of a possibility: abandon the certainties of the desk and found a startup, which is then a community of artificial intelligence enthusiasts. As long as it is “explained simply”, in fact.
The big leap comes to March 2020. There is the coronavirus, the spread of the pandemic leads to the lockdown, Fiore and Viscanti are imprisoned in Altamura and decide it’s time to dedicate themselves 100% to their creature: is the birth certificate of “Artificial Intelligence explained simply”. The community now boasts 16 thousand subscribers, with a substantial part of subscribers to premium services. Good numbers, but not enough to support the business plan. So Fiore and Viscanti, in addition to AI Play, invent the AI Week, the Artificial Intelligence Week, now in its third edition to be held in May, and an AI Excellence Observatory which today has 20 companies in the sector, with a turnover of 50 million and 500 completed projects.
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How was this partnership born in the shadow of artificial intelligence?
We worked together in a company that is now part of the Zucchetti Group. We were in the same room: this is where artificial intelligence began to appear in our lives. We wanted to understand what it was and how to tell it on the market. On Google we found many university teachers with lectures to pupils, scientific articles, mostly in English, but very little in Italian. So we started interviewing people we knew to get a little deeper into what artificial intelligence was. So we came up with the idea of making these lessons available to everyone, obviously with the consent of the interviewees. The result was a podcast with audio pills of the interviews. We immediately realized that there was great interest in the initiative, because many people wrote to us to find out more.
And so comes Artificial Intelligence explained simple …
In February 2019 we published the first episode with data from the Politecnico di Milano. But it was still a hobby. Then in February 2020 the lockdown triggered: at that point we decided to dedicate ourselves totally to this project because we felt that the AI would explode.
How did you develop the project?
There were some important elements that guided us. First of all, the users of the community on social networks that were becoming more and more numerous. There was a positive response to what we told in the podcast, so, to try to reach more people, the idea was born to condense the results of the first year into a book, which we have titled in a deliberately curious and pop way: Will artificial intelligence save pigs?. An experience that worked and that we have repeated this year with the second book, that is Artificial Intelligence explained simple.
What is the business model that allows you to stand up?
In May 2020 we made the debut of AI Week, an online event on artificial intelligence, where we involved speakers and sponsors, companies in the sector that have invested and carried out workshops. This was an important step, so much so that we will do the third edition. The second step was the creation of the Observatory, a network of Italian companies that produce AI and that we try to accelerate with a series of communication services and helping them to match demand with supply. In this way we enhance the community, which now has 16 thousand subscribers.
And what services do you provide to the community?
AI Play, our platform that we want to become a sort of Netflix of artificial intelligence. Users can access for free, but to have the entire video catalog available, as well as those of Professor Luciano Floridi and Federico Faggin, inventor of the microprocessor, it is necessary to subscribe to a premium access. But the bulk of revenue right now comes from AI companies that leverage ours communication channels. We then produce events and create special visibility packages for the 20 companies of the Observatory that have 500 active projects and invoice 50 million euros in total.
What kind of companies are they?
Italian companies, many are spin-offs of universities that have launched themselves on the market, but who do not know how to promote themselves in terms of communication and are turning to us. But there are also multinationals, like Spitch, an American company based in Switzerland and also present on the Italian market. We work with everyone, from large groups to small startups, and we are also becoming business accelerators for the market. Our message is that there is no need to recreate an algorithm if there is already one that works perfectly on a specific application domain, that is, it is useless to start from scratch if the technologies are ready to carry out a project. The Observatory was created to respond to 3 particular criticalities of the Italian market: the first is the lack of communication within the ecosystem of companies that produce AI, and therefore often find themselves reproducing ready-made things; the second is the lack of a marketing department within these companies and a sales department that are ready to bring them to market; the third is that the managers, at the helm of the 4 million Italian companies, still have not understood exactly what AI is and how they can make the most of it. The Observatory is a container of companies that communicate with the market through our community. When these companies carry out a project with a member of the community, it is there that we finalize everything, through a percentage that is recognized in the event that the business closes.
An expanding market …
It is estimated that in 2024 the turnover of AI in the world will weigh 500 billion dollars. In 2020 it was 281 billion and this year it will close at 300 billion. An impressive race: in 2024 it will become a primary market.
And in Italy?
In Italy there are about 500 companies that produce AI solutions for a turnover which, according to data from the Milan Polytechnic Observatory, is around 300 million euros. We will see what the data will be in 2022, but we do not expect big changes because there are no companies that have occupied the market in an important way. We can expect a maximum increase of 10-15%, as was the case last year compared to the previous one. We are talking about a much slower pace of growth than the world value.
And motives?
In Italy we need to work on the culture of adopting technology e not just about the technology itself. We don’t have to make the glass cup and keep it on display. We must learn to give a lot of importance to making people understand how that glass cup is better than a plastic cup, what are the advantages, what the benefits it brings within the company. There is only one way to do this: it is called disclosure. A platform like AI Play is ready to perform this function: any Italian company that produces AI can raise their hand and say “I want to open a channel on AI Play where to communicate and explain”.
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Is there media attention to AI?
There is important work to be done on popularizing this technology and this is probably an area that the media should cover with more attention. In Italian strategy for artificial intelligence, which was relaunched no later than 6 months ago, the role of dissemination in this sector is spoken very clearly. Rai is named which, as a public service, should create a television dissemination channel to objectively explain these technologies, to make it clear that man is at the center of the project. On Rai Play there is a miniseries with a 20-minute video in which we try to explain what artificial intelligence is and what its impact is in the various sectors. But the turnover is still too small to attract the big communication players.
Where are we with the training?
At this year’s AI Week we inaugurated the John McCarthy Award, who is the inventor of the term artificial intelligence, aimed at Italian university researchers. We received 40 entries which were reviewed by a panel of experts. Matteo Fabbri, from the University of Modena, won, who came up with the idea of exploiting computer vision to verify the social distancing between people, which is now also used in concerts. The problem is not the talents, which we also train, the problem is that companies that are outside Italy take them. Unfortunately, most of our AI researchers go abroad, which is also why we wanted to reward those who have done research in Italy.
And so the tech companies they want to hire struggle to find staff …
Obviously it is a training problem, but it is also a market problem: we will meet Leonardo Bacciottini, first graduate in Quantum Engineering at the University of Pisa, which has already been contacted by American companies, perhaps IBM or Microsoft, which have probably made important offers with which Italian companies are unable to compete. So it is not just a problem of the quantity of people trained, the question to ask is whether Italian companies are really able to compete on the labor market in the AI field. Inside our Observatory there is a company, called Hyperable, which does just that by profession: it works together with universities, especially in Rome, to follow students during their studies and as soon as they graduate they are ready outside. from the door with the contract in hand. Their job is collect projects from companies and find students and graduates capable of carrying them out. There is little to complain if they end up abroad attracted by contracts and prospects that they would not find in Italy. Companies should fund Italian research in universities if they really want our students to prefer to stay in Italy rather than go abroad.
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