Interos CEO Jennifer Bisceglie on a Business Transformed by AI & Pandemic
By: James Kotecki
Tags: Supply Chain, Digital Transformation, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Machine Learning

Watch the show above. You can also hear Machine Meets World as a podcast, join the email list, and contact the show.

Photo by Rohan Makhecha on Unsplash

Audio + Transcript

Jennifer Bisceglie:

The problem that we focused on never changed. The technology and what technology is available to solve the problem, that’s what’s changing.

James Kotecki:

This is Machine Meets World, Infinia ML’s ongoing conversation about artificial intelligence. I’m James Kotecki and my guest today is the CEO of Interos, Jennifer Bisceglie. Welcome to the show.

Jennifer Bisceglie:

Thanks for having me.

James Kotecki:

Supply chain risk is something that the average person probably didn’t think about too much before 2020. And then suddenly we all started running out of toilet paper. Your website says “Interos detects and alerts customers to changes in financial operations, governance, geographic and cyber risk throughout their extended supply chains.” Before we get into the AI part of this, I’m just curious, how was this done before?

Jennifer Bisceglie:

In January, people were still saying, “Yes, I know I don’t understand my extended supply chain.” In March it was, “I don’t understand my supply chain and it’s a problem.” And so what we’re seeing is the movement from the manual, once a year process through surveys, paperwork, what have you, to this really drastic move to leveraging technology, like artificial intelligence. This is really a big data problem. There’s so much information out in the world, and we knew that. Now customers are coming to us and trying to figure out how to harness that data to get a true picture of what their extended supply chain looks like, and then how to monitor that so that they can pre-solve for a future disruption.

Jennifer Bisceglie:

Without doing any marketing, our inbounds went up 500% between March and April, based on COVID. Because the world got educated very, very quickly that they needed a technology solution and something that could not just do it once, but continuously monitor. Because there was no way to look at the last three years of financials of a supplier and understand not just how it would act with the pandemic, but how its sub-tier suppliers would react and what that ripple effect was going to be.

James Kotecki:

So I come to you, I’m a business, how do we even get started with that given that I might not even necessarily know what data to bring to the table?

Jennifer Bisceglie:

If you think about Google, in Google you type in some keywords and up pops a list of websites. In Interos’s platform, you type in a business and it visualizes extended … it literally illuminates the supply chain. It maps it out. You bring your third parties or your tier ones or those companies that you normally have fill out paperwork once a year, just bring them their names, addresses, we put it in the platform, it starts — it visualizes what you gave us, and then the platform uses machine learning to start creating additional connections so that you can understand really who you’re connected to globally.

Jennifer Bisceglie:

It ingests over 90,000 different data sources, publicly available. Everything from news sources to cyber breach reporting, financial updates, mergers and acquisition alerting. So we bring all that in. We also now allow customers to bring data into the platform. What we’re doing here at Interos, leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning today, is we’re building the world’s largest business relationship graph. So it’s just one contiguous graph, because our hypothesis here is that we are one large global economy. So on some level, every business is doing business with each other, whether I’m directly connected to you or fifteen hops away. If your tier-three supplier is having a financial problem, or COVID round two shuts down the port or shuts down their labor force, how do you ensure that your tier one and two have the ability or the agility in their supply chain to redirect to alternative sources so it doesn’t ultimately shut you down? So it’s just up and running, bring me your third parties, we map, and then we pre-solve from there.

James Kotecki:

And how do you monitor the monitoring? How do you watch the watcher, so to speak? How do you make sure that your system is actually doing what you want it to do?

Jennifer Bisceglie:

We’ll always have humans involved. So we’ll have humans in the loop developing new capabilities. We’ll have humans in the loop sampling the insights in the output. And then we also have invested heavily from a company standpoint in our customer experience team to make sure that we are, after the sale, we’re partnering with our customers to learn how they’re using it, and to the point of ‘do we need to take a course correction on some of the modeling and the insights because of what the results are?’ So we will always have people, for the foreseeable future, involved from the beginning to the end. It’s just we wanted to make sure we had a fully automated and continuously monitoring platform so that the people didn’t impede the success of the customer.

James Kotecki:

You’ve been mentioning that you’ve been in this business for a while, and my understanding is Interos actually made a transition to be a more AI-focused company a few years ago. Is that true? And can you talk to me about what that transition can teach other folks who want to take a legacy business and add AI into the mix?

Jennifer Bisceglie:

When I started this business, which will actually be 16 years old in February, I never lost sight of ‘this is the business problem I wanted to solve with technology.’ So global supply chain risk and understanding. So we took the first thirteen years, did it solidly with consultants, and built up a huge vault of intellectual property that has created a moat around us, that it’s going to be really hard to catch us.

Jennifer Bisceglie:

We also read the tea leaves really well and we watched the market. When I got asked to look at the same supplier by multiple organizations, I now knew it was time to at least have some piece of a front end technology to collect once and share across multiple customers. And then in 2018, which was our big pivot year, I just saw everything speed up. There were laws that were being put in place that were pushed — that were being flow down clauses from customer to supplier, to supplier, to supplier, and really just saw speed.

Jennifer Bisceglie:

And so at that point in time, we bought one of our data aggregator partners so we had a fully automated end-to-end data pipeline. We transitioned the personnel, and not because we had to let anybody go. One of my proudest moments, to be honest with you, as a business owner, was that people just understood that Jennifer and the company were going in a technology direction. And anybody that wanted to continue to be an analyst, and we had some really great analysts on our team, they went someplace to be an analyst. And that’s a big success. If I were to give advice, it’s just never lose track of the vision and really pay attention to the market.

James Kotecki:

I think so much of the drive to implement AI comes from a place of fear or panic or looking at your competitors and seeing that maybe they’re already doing something, and now I have to figure out and scramble what to do. Based on what you’re saying, maybe not AI in this exact form that you have it now, but somehow that vision of technology was kind of baked in from the beginning.

Jennifer Bisceglie:

It was 100% baked in from the beginning. And I look at AI, in its current iteration in the platform in our solution as again, this is a big data problem to solve. And the next instantiation as we go into ’21, when we start actually going into data science modeling, that’s when it really starts getting to some of the cool stuff. But I think the biggest problem, James, is the problem that we focused on never changed. The technology and what technology is available to solve the problem, that’s what’s changing.

James Kotecki:

And I would be remiss not to ask you, what’s the cool stuff that you’re alluding to in 2021?

Jennifer Bisceglie:

To start being able to, and I hate to say predict, but allow you to pre-solve. So watching as three businesses act this way, and today that led to one of them going out of business or some sort of merger and acquisition action. Can I time series out organizations 60 to 90 days in the future and allow you to say, “Huh, I think this is what’s going to happen”? And again, that allows you to pre-solve.

James Kotecki:

You seem to prefer the term pre-solve over predict. What is the difference between those things, in your mind?

Jennifer Bisceglie:

I think pre-solve sounds like a business thing for me. Predict sounds a little bit magical. And it sounds good in a news article, but as a business owner, prediction’s hard. How am I sure I’m actually predicting the right things? Versus pre-solve, what Interos is doing is it’s bringing the information and putting it in a package in front of you that allows you to make decisions. So that just feels … I sleep better at night with that one.

James Kotecki:

Are you learning things from your platform that you did not expect to learn? Because you are kind of, in effect, building out a model of the global economy.

Jennifer Bisceglie:

Right. We are. So if I was allowed to really kind of push the boundaries in this session, it’s we are modeling the world’s economy from the bottom up. And if you think about most of us, we focus on the developed countries. I have my eye on solving the problem of supply chain today, but also looking to your point, if I can model out the undeveloped countries and bring that into the government, think about situations like climate change and global warming, and where do we grow food to support today’s population? And we might be able to uncover places that are in undeveloped countries that who knew? Because the data wasn’t available. I think all of that is on the table.

Jennifer Bisceglie:

But right now I need to keep the team focused and the company focused, because COVID unfortunately created a business opportunity for us that educated the world that they need to do continuous monitoring and mapping out of their extended supply chain, which is going to keep us very busy for a long time.

James Kotecki:

No doubt. Jennifer Bisceglie is the CEO of Interos. Thanks so much for being here.

Jennifer Bisceglie:

Thank you. I enjoyed it.

James Kotecki:

And thank you so much for watching. You can listen to the show or watch the show. Whichever one you did, you can do the other version because this is a podcast and a video. You can also email the show, MMW@infiniaml.com. Please like, subscribe, share, you know what to do. I am James Kotecki, and that is what happens when machine meets world.