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‘AI is now part of everything we do:’ Pendo CEO talks the play, the why, the importance, the leaders

From its new offices in a downtown Raleigh skyscraper, the team at Pendo has a clear vision of the booming tech Triangle. And the view is clear: Artificial…

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10 months ago

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This article was originally published by WRAL Techwire

“AI is now part of everything we do at Pendo – it will be foundational to all new features and products.” – CEO Todd Olson

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RALEIGH – From its new offices in a downtown Raleigh skyscraper, the team at Pendo has a clear vision of the booming tech Triangle. And the view is clear: Artificial Intelligence is a field to be played, capitalizing on surging interest in AI as a business tool. But the Pendo vision extends well beyond Raleigh with its international office in Israel helping spearhead efforts that date back well before the business explosion triggered by ChatGPT.

Pendo joins AI frenzy, unveiling product suite targeting software improvements

In a Q&A, Pendo CEO Todd Olson talks about how the tech “unicorn” is pushing AI with its Pendo AI product suite unveiled Wednesday:

  • Why specifically is Pendo doing this – customers asking for it? market competition?
We believe AI is a critical innovation to drive value to our customers. That’s why we’ve been investing in AI innovation over the last 2+ years. Our ML team has built customer-specific models so that our customers can instantly uncover trends and insights from their own product usage data. The launch of ChatGPT, Bard and other large language models over the last year have definitely accelerated customer interest in AI, and have enabled us to explore additional ways to incorporate it into our platform.
  • Did Pendo license an AI engine or create its own (does it have a nickname?)
We leverage a combination of customer-specific models built by our own machine learning team as well as leading large language models. Our long-term AI roadmap is called Pendo AI. 
  • How big is the machine learning team?
We have about 20 people in our Israel office dedicated to machine learning – they are a mix of data scientists and ML engineers training the models and engineers that connect our ML systems to the Pendo platform.
  • How long have you been working on this?
We hired a leader for our ML team about three years ago, and she’s built the team since then. Her name is Inbal Budowski-Tal – here’s her bio:

Dr. Inbal Budowski-Tal of Pendo (Photo from her LinkedIn site)

    • Dr. Inbal Budowski-Tal completed her B.Sc. in Computer Science at the Technion, and then pursued a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Haifa (summa cum laude). During her advanced studies, she was fascinated by the field of machine learning, and was a pioneer in applying it to create smart search engines for protein structures. She won the prestigious Google Anita Borg Scholarship and the Israeli Minister of Science Eshkol Scholarship during her studies. In 2015, after completing her Ph.D., Inbal worked as a researcher at Microsoft. Then, her entrepreneurial spirit drove her to take an opportunity to be the first employee and head of data science at a bioinformatics startup, which was acquired by a pharmaceutical company, BiomX, 1.5 years later. She then served as director of AI at EverC, a FinTech startup, before founding the machine learning group at Pendo. Dr. Budowski-Tal strongly believes that understanding the business domain and customer needs is crucial to the success of machine learning projects, and her expertise is adding machine learning capabilities at scale to SaaS products. 
  • How much is Pendo investing in this?

AI is now part of everything we do at Pendo – it will be foundational to all new features and products. While we have increased our investment in AI, it is not a separate R&D investment. It is part of the value we bring to Pendo customers.

  • After recent layoffs is Pendo retooling somewhat to step up AI efforts and might new jobs be created?
This work has been underway for 2+ years – recent layoffs have forced us to be disciplined in our future investment areas and we’ve increased our overall investment in AI as part of these changes. And regarding job creation, yes, automation and innovation has always led to growth and ultimately new jobs.
  • Who at Pendo is leading the effort?
We do not have a single leader focused on AI. Our entire R&D team is taking an AI first approach to their work. To leverage AI internally, we have a tiger team led by one of our sales VPs. They’ve created a training course to help get the entire company up to speed on AI use cases that can help improve processes and drive productivity.  

The post ‘AI is now part of everything we do:’ Pendo CEO talks the play, the why, the importance, the leaders first appeared on WRAL TechWire.

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