AI Adoption: Going ‘AI First’ at Work – with Kevin Surace

You have covered a lot of ground just in two minutes and also in your life.

It's very impressive.

Let's go back to the father of the virtual assistant there.

You mentioned really that it started maybe in 1998 or something along those lines there.

What really limited the take up of that? Was it the hardware at the time? Was it people weren't ready for it? Was it processing power? What was the limitation?

Great question.

We had three and a half million users.

which was incredible at a time when many people didn't have cell phones.

Certainly there were no smartphones.

It wasn't a hardware issue.

Everything was in the network.

So you called Mary or Portico on your phone and she would talk to you through the phone, right? You couldn't have something in the phone yet because there was no smart smartphone.

Look, three and a half million users was crushing it then.

That was an amazing thing.

However, very expensive service to provide.

It was hard to make money, even at $89 a month, which was kind of the peak of what you could charge.

And even with three and a half million users, not all of them were paying.

There was some freemium model to that that got you into it.

And then the more you used it, the more you paid.

In the end, what actually happened around 2002 was a real downturn in the economy.

I had left the company long before that.

And the downturn in the economy made a lot of people just leave services like that.

And the company couldn't Couldn't afford that.

And you hit a time when you couldn't raise more money because 2002, nobody was raising anything.

And that is what really was the downfall of it.

You have covered a lot of ground just in two minutes and also in your life.

It's very impressive.

Let's go back to the father of the virtual assistant there.

You mentioned really that it started maybe in 1998 or something along those lines there.

What really limited the take up of that? Was it the hardware at the time? Was it people weren't ready for it? Was it processing power? What was the limitation?

Great question.

We had three and a half million users.

which was incredible at a time when many people didn't have cell phones.

Certainly there were no smartphones.

It wasn't a hardware issue.

Everything was in the network.

So you called Mary or Portico on your phone and she would talk to you through the phone, right? You couldn't have something in the phone yet because there was no smart smartphone.

Look, three and a half million users was crushing it then.

That was an amazing thing.

However, very expensive service to provide.

It was hard to make money, even at $89 a month, which was kind of the peak of what you could charge.

And even with three and a half million users, not all of them were paying.

There was some freemium model to that that got you into it.

And then the more you used it, the more you paid.

In the end, what actually happened around 2002 was a real downturn in the economy.

I had left the company long before that.

And the downturn in the economy made a lot of people just leave services like that.

And the company couldn't Couldn't afford that.

And you hit a time when you couldn't raise more money because 2002, nobody was raising anything.

And that is what really was the downfall of it.