A passionate tech entrepreneur, Evandro Barros has remained a staunch believer that data can be the most powerful resource that drives innovation and boost competitiveness with a company. He founded DATAH, a Canadian-based Venture Builder of Artificial Intelligence Companies. Conceived in 2016, the company and was born to solve a major pain of corporations: the time spent to adopt new technologies and how to manage Innovation risks. Evandro speaks on an array of topics. Excerpts from an interview:

Conception of DATA^H

Currently the most challenge for any AI project is how to deploy in a proper way new algorithm and connect them with old process within the company, opines Evandro. “In our research on Artificial Intelligence, we noticed a considerable gap between the new AI techniques and their application in the real world. Partly because many researchers had no contact with the process of implementing algorithms, that’s how we created a structure capable of taking an algorithm from the academy world, testing it in the market and generating a new company in record times.” On average, the use of new technologies in the market goes from 10 years from their creation to their actual use; but the start- up managed to reduce this time span to 3 years. “In 4 years, we have built 7 AI companies solving real problems.”

Flagship AI-Based Solution

The flagship product has been divided into three phases, explains Evandro. “The first step is selecting or creating a team, one of the members being a scientist, usually a Ph.D. student who wants to turn his thesis into reality. The second step is the search for an angel client- someone to implement the solution. The third is to evaluate which other solutions can derive from the new technique created. And finally, a company is designed to explore innovation. Our ecosystem allows a shallow cash burn which gives us excellent risk management of innovation.”

AI- Challenges Galore

Evandro stresses on the need for organizations to analyze their culture towards technologies such as Artificial Intelligence. This would mean thinking about processes, data, infrastructure and vision for the medium and long term. Choosing a tiny target that can generate easily identifiable KPIs for the business is critical.” From there, the number of processes impacted by algorithms will increase. This type of project needs to be connected with leadership positions within the company because it is necessary to understand that Artificial Intelligence will not guess thoughts, it is essential to have clear what are the goals to be achieved and why this matters to the market.”

He cites the case studies of creation of Noleak, a solution that transforms ordinary cameras into machines capable of predicting human behavior. Today more than 5,000 cameras are protecting over 15,000 lives.

“I couldn’t leave without mentioning Synkar, the autonomous delivery robot that avoids direct contact, which is super important now, in addition to sanitizing the products. Yet another technology – Mr. Turing, a technology that learns from texts, contracts and documents, helping companies to answer without having to search their computers. All these companies put together innovation, science and technology.”

Leadership Traits

With a humble beginning, Evandro expresses gratitude to people who gave him opportunities to grow. “Therefore, my leadership is focused on people, on providing opportunities in the right environment for creative minds to create and realize their dreams. I consider myself a facilitator. My job is to get out of the way of fantastic people the obstacles that will prevent them from going faster. A CEO must have the role of guardian. Someone who protects the company’s vision so that the day’s events don’t destroy the moonshot so that even when driving crooked paths, the destination is not lost.”

Evandro believes that to overcome failure, one should manage his/her weaknesses. Self-knowledge is essential for leading innovation projects. In general, the most significant problems come from points where we are not looking at them with due attention. Therefore, it is essential to have self-knowledge so that you know beforehand what can reach you.

He urges startups to always look out for the deceptive and treacherous world of implementation. “Reality can be more challenging than it sounds, and models are generally not trained in environments that perfectly simulate the randomness of information and human behavior in front of the machine. As a result, in general, you spend five times more time implementing than training models.”

The Success Mantra

“I love this quote from Southwest Airlines founder Herb Kelleher – “We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things”. I think action is the most important thing in life. You can dream, you can imagine but what make difference is only action. Ever.”

Way Ahead

The firm is investing in two new companies: FaceFactory that has been using AI to scale artists’ work and teachers through the animation of pre-recorded images and DATALife, which has been helping medical teams develop solutions based on acquired knowledge, signs off Evandro.