Genie @ CogX - What we learned
Last week Nick and I had the pleasure of of being invited to an exciting crowd of start ups, a-b-c series companies and investors at London's Tobacco Docks. CogX2018 was one of the the biggest AI events in the world with 6,500 attendees, 370 speakers, and more than 110 hours of content.
We got in there to see how GENIE would stand toe-to-toe with some of the bright minds in our industry also looking to tackling the status quo with new business models and ideas, all powered by technology, automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Here are the key learnings from the overall experience with regards to GENIE and some exciting things happening in the world of AI and chatbots.
AI in HR is a hot topic, we spent hours sitting with seed investors and VC's discussing what GENIE does and how that disrupts the market and also tackles recruitment from a different angle.
- Coming from a headhunting POV not a tech POV - We could tell that being a fish out of water adds a different lens on how we identify and tackle problems. We know the key problems that companies have when it comes to hiring and what issues we face when headhunting so we started there and then looked at what tech can best help us solve that problem.
- Having a product in market - GENIE has been in beta with a handful of clients and talent for 8 weeks. The learnings and data we sit on from the usage is incredibly valuable. There are a lot of great ideas out there, but not many of the start ups that have been planned out, built, tested and also already live in users hands.
- The difference between recruiting and headhunting - The real value that GENIE is designed to deliver is time. As headhunters we get hired to spend time to work out who is the best person for the job, then approach them and help entice the talent to have the conversation. This is the difficult part, GENIE is built to do exactly this. The more companies scale the more resource it takes to do the headhunting manually. GENIE can dramatically change this. She has no bias and no limit to how many of the right people she can make approaches to. She finds the RIGHT people FAST. This is a real problem that exists in most industries and something GENIE solves.
- Its all about the talent - GENIE's focus is on serving the talent which seems to be unique as far as we can see. Having a focus on how we can get the best minds around a problem and be of best value to them is something we found investors also were interested in.
Separate to Genie we saw a huge amount of stuff that is already out there which is super impressive - Especially in the customer service area and personal assistance. There was also a lot of talk about Blockchain technology and how that can be used to disrupt markets and give birth to new business models.
We would also like to thank some of the speakers who gave their time to share insights and learnings with the wider community, some of our favourites included: Julian Harris, Rachel Rekart, Duncan Anderson, Nikola Mrksic, Alexander Weidauer, Martin Lambert and Hans Van Dam
Some great things to look at are: