Verneek

I couldn't be more excited for what 2025 will mean for Enterprises that will hit the plateau of productivity of the current AI hype cycle, and for all we'll get to pioneer with our tremendous partners. It's now our tradition to celebrate the new year during our VIP AI event #AINRF in conjunction with NRF Foundation #BigShow, reflecting on the year that passed and strategizing for the year ahead. I can't wait to welcome all the select CXOs at our upcoming event on Jan 13th, and to compile all the learnings and perspectives into our upcoming report on the State of AI in Commerce.

A select group of commerce superstars will be getting together at our upcoming VIP AI event in January during #NRF2025 #BigShow to reflect on our Enterprise market learnings and strategize on how to "Walk the Talk on AI: Hitting the Plateau of Productivity" in 2025. We are excited to welcome Philippe Schaus of LVMH, Jason Morris of Nordstrom, and Michelle Horn of Delta Air Lines to the three-in-a-box panel of thought leaders, moderated by the legendary industry expert Karenann Terrell. For any inquiries about this invite-only C-level event, please reach out to our team at events@verneek.com. Stay tuned for more exciting details in the next few days: https://lnkd.in/d7bvaM5G! #AINRF #VerneekAINRF #AIinRetail #CommerceAI #EnterpriseAI

We are excited to announce Verneek's new VIP AI event during #NRF2025 #BigShow titled "Walking the Talk on AI: Hitting the Plateau of Productivity". During this invite-only event on Jan 13th, we will be getting together with various esteemed business executives and AI experts to discuss how to walk the talk on AI as a consumer retailer, helping curate impactful AI strategies for 2025. This year, we will be also hosting a three-in-a-box panel of retail superstars, with Philippe Schaus, Jason Morris, and Karenann Terrell discussing how to operationalize AI. Stay tuned for more details through the event page: https://lnkd.in/d7bvaM5G! #AINRF #VerneekAINRF #AIinRetail #CommerceAI #EnterpriseAI

A lot of what we do at Verneek is exactly what our proprietary AI Platform was designed to do from day zero, back in 2021, before anyone cared for domain-general AI interfaces for Enterprises. The one thing that surely wasn't on our horizon is the grand power of our AI platform in unifying existing software siloes that Enterprises run on. When you have one AI engine that can ingest any source of data, integrates with any custom APIs, and can get grounded on any environment of choice, turns out you get on the path of disrupting a lot of legacy software companies. Listen to the remarks of our founder Nasrin Mostafazadeh on this topic at #WebSummit.

I had a blast stopping by #WebSummit in Lisbon last week. I got to spend time with so many inspiring technologists and journalists, and my favorite moments were the times when we finally stopped talking about #AI, haha. I seriously would have never imagined that our niche field of science "Dialogue Agents" would one day become the topic of everyday conversations everywhere. I loved the title of our panel conversation "Agents of Change", which beautifully summarizes how AI Agents will be fundamentally changing the world (of Enterprise SaaS) as we know it. With the term "AI Agent" being slabbed on top of anything and everything these days, the main question I keep getting asked is what AI Agents even are... Listen to my conversations with Marcelo Gripa Timur Göreci on this and more to come.

With all the buzz around AI Agents defining the year of 2024, the question is, what will be on the horizon for 2025 and more years to come? Will AI Agents replace SaaS? Join our founder Nasrin Mostafazadeh in two weeks in Lisbon at #WebSummit to learn all our observations from the Enterprise market in 2024 and her projections for 2025. #aiagents #agenticai #enterprise #startups #websummit #verneekai #dialogagents

Seeing all the reactions to Anthropic's new "computer use" functionality made me think about what we historically used to call *AI Agent* before it became this hyped up marketing term that people slab on top of anything these days. Back in 2007, James Allen and his colleagues at University of Rochester / IHMC, won the best paper award at Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) for their first of its kind "Agent" which they called "PLOW Agent". PLOW would learn to control your browser and execute on tasks such as finding the nearest restaurants using tools, all during a realtime collaborative session with a human who demonstrates it for the first time. Back then, I was a high-schooler who had just started researching commonsense reasoning (which was touted the "holy grail of AI"), so I found the following demo of PLOW reasoning in action quite mesmerizing. Fast forward, both Omid Bakhshandeh and myself joined James' research lab called "Dialogue Systems", with the goal of building AI Agents that can execute tasks via a goal-directed dialogue -- which is very much what we still pursue at our company Verneek! I believe that one of the main reasons that the public finds AI scary, jumping from "it controls my browser" to "it will control the humanity", is that we lose sight of grounding our progress in the historical context of the the compounded decades of research in AI. The truth is that none of this tremendous progress has happened overnight. Behaviorally, there are so many parallels between what Anthropic's "computer use" does and what "PLOW" did more than 18 years ago. They both very much "control" a browser and perform textual and visual understanding and reason about the task at hand to achieve set goals by taking actions in an environment. What has been truly a game changer is the general nature of the technology that powers today's AI. The fact that we can capture multimodal understanding, knowledge representation, reasoning, dialogue management, planning, and much more, all through one (deep neural network) system is still very mind blowing to me and many scientists -- specially those of us that come from James' school of thought that started in symbolic reasoning before the deep learning revolution. There couldn't be a more exciting time be to alive to do what we do! Kudos to the Anthropic team. You can watch the rest of James' talk via this archived Microsoft Research link: https://lnkd.in/djq2bAyJ

I get asked all the time why we "pointed our big AI guns" to the world of Commerce and Consumer Retail, fully focusing on it since our inception. The answer is simple: 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘂𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗥𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗹 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗼𝘆𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝗻 𝗨𝗦 (𝟮𝟲% 𝗼𝗳 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗔𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗻𝘀) 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗮𝗴𝗴𝗿𝗲𝗴𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗻𝘂𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘂𝗺𝗲𝗿𝘀 (𝗕𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆) 𝗼𝗳 𝗮𝗻𝘆 𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘆! No one would have believed us when we predicted the appetite of retailers for adopting a brand new disruptive technology back in 2021. Fast forward, 𝗿𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗹 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗱 𝗹𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝗻 𝗔𝗜 𝗮𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲. 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗺𝘂𝗰𝗵 𝗱𝘂𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗮𝗰𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗔𝗜 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘂𝗹𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗹 𝘁𝗼 𝗲𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗹𝘆 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗺𝗻𝗶-𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗹 𝗲𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗮𝘁 𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲, all the way from making store employees more productive to making shoppers more engaged and satisfied. 𝗔𝗹𝗹 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗵𝗮𝘀 𝗺𝗮𝗱𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗹𝗮𝘂𝗻𝗰𝗵𝗽𝗮𝗱 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝗳 𝗔𝗜 𝗮𝘀 𝗮 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘂𝗻𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗮𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗮 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗽𝗿𝗶𝘀𝗲 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻! We believe that a lot of industries will copy our commerce playbook on how to productionize AI strategy effectively. I'm so excited about the future of Augmented Intelligence (AI) that we are co-creating with our tremendous retail partners. 

So much of the fear about AI has been fueled by the chatter on how AI has these so-called "emergent behaviors" that no one anticipated or built it for. As someone who spent my academic life on Commonsense Reasoning, which is by many accounts the holy grail of language understanding, I take issues with such characterizations. I keep reminding people that decade(s) before LMs became this Large, the best techniques we had for world/causal modeling and script learning were actually language models. All my years of research showed that predicting what happens next in a sequence of events, using LMs trained on the web-scale text corpora, was indeed the best way to predict complicated knowledge structures about the world! This is also why at Verneek we look at LMs as our intermediary reasoning engines grounded on top of environments, i.e., #ContextualRetrievalGeneration. So not much is quite "shocking" on how LLMs are so good at building representations/structures of language. It is so easy to feed on the hyperbolic takes on "AI getting out of control" if we don't look at the historical context. All the doomsday fear-mongering merely distracts all of us from both the real harms and the real benefits of AI, as #AugmentedIntelligence. Listen to some of my conversations at #Collision on the same topics.

We have believed that human language is the new machine interface for decades now! There is truly nothing more rewarding than working at a deep technology early-stage startup that is working around the clock to redefine what the future of search and discovery will look like. 💫 Join us on our ambitious journey of building the most helpful AI! We are hiring across all roles, ranging from AI Research to Engineering, Operations, and beyond. If you are interested in joining us but we don't have a defined role that matches your background yet, chances are, we can still consider your application. Email us at careers@verneek.com or apply here: www.verneek.com/careers #hiring #airesearch #ai #genai #ea #nycjobs #mlengineer #machinelearning #nlp #nyc #fullstackdeveloper #scala #frontenddeveloper #startupjobs #devops #mlops