I have joined OpenStream

On the 1st of March I joined OpenStream as Chief Product Officer. I cannot tell you how excited I am. For nine years I have given advice - and now I am back to the act of creation again. Now, I could probably have gone anywhere in the conversational AI market. So why OpenStream?

OpenStream is a research organization with a platform that incorporates their research. It’s not a product company with a R&D department. This semantic difference is important. The opportunity… and also challenge of building the cutting edge research into equally impressive and cutting edge products was just too good to pass up.

In conversational AI everybody has their eyes on ChatGPT. While ChatGPT is amazing and immensely useful, I do not see it as the technology that will revolutionize enterprise conversational AI. The ability to hold very advanced unscripted conversations with a lot of variables, while maintaining logic, reasoning, legal compliance, emotional empathy and policy compliance will be solved by plan-based dialogue systems - and not next word prediction engines like ChatGPT. And OpenStream has the most advanced and most promising plan-based dialogue system in the industry.

That’s not the only thing they have though. There are vision systems, gesture recognition, multi-modal generation, large language models, avatars, and tons of other research projects. Some built into the EVA platform, some in prototypes, some just as papers. Just getting an overview is proving a challenge. And of course we are using Large Language Models like ChatGPT as well, in fact OpenStream has been using LLMs long before it was suddenly cool to do so.

I’m still not past the learning phase of getting into a new role. There is however one challenge that I saw before I joined and that I still see. The challenge is: How do we make Plan Based Dialogue as easy to make for business users as the far less sophisticated Scripted Dialogues of our competitors? It’s a challenge I know we will solve, together with a lot of others.

If you want to be part of our journey of delivering the most advanced multi-modal and conversational platform in the world - then shoot me a direct message and we’ll talk. I am excited, and I promise you, I will make you equally excited.