By Christopher Lynch, Executive Chairman and CEO, AtScale

Harnessing the incredible potential of artificial intelligence (AI) for its invaluable impact on the human race is an incredibly powerful guiding vision. And it’s not tomorrow’s vision. AI is part of everyday life, guiding us today. In this article, I am going to discuss how AI is fundamentally shaping smarter decisions that impact our world.

By embracing AI as a national imperative and making AI solutions relevant and accessible to all, we can charge forward and change the way businesses all over the world make their most important decisions. When decisions are powered by AI, there are numerous benefits, including:

• The ability to capture and leverage the knowledge, experience, and best practices of the world’s leading data scientists;
• Delivering unmatched automation and ease-of-use for machine learning initiatives;
• Reducing intensive labor and day-to-day tasks for workers across industries;
• Insight for marketers on consumers’ interests and wants that will allow companies to respond quickly to the market’s needs
• Empowering users to build and deploy highly accurate machine learning models in a fraction of the time; and
• Improved outcomes for individuals and organizations all over the world. For example: better healthcare, more job opportunities, improved efficiencies, and fewer daily tasks which free up time for creativity and ideation.

Using AI to Make Smarter Decisions During the Pandemic

Companies that harnessed the potential of AI were in a position during the pandemic to weather the storm and continue to thrive despite the pandemic’s massive impact on consumer behavior. One example comes from AtScale, where I am Executive Chairman and CEO. We are a team of world-class scientists and engineers that provide a powerful semantic layer platform that establishes a central hub for business metrics and AI-generated, actionable insights that make it easier for non-technical or scientific individuals to uncover, access, analyze and use data to make decisions and solve problems.

How did AtScale change pandemic response for the better?

The company created a free Covid-19 insights model designed to inform organizations and empower them to make better, more informed decisions, in a language they could understand, about the buying mindset of their customers based on economic, behavioral, and COVID-19 insights. Datasets accessible in the model came from the New York Times, World Health Organization, Johns Hopkins University, Robert Koch Institute, Google’s Global Mobility, the Transportation Security Administration’s Checkpoint Travel Numbers, Open Table Reservations, the US Department of Transportations’ Monthly Travel Statistics, and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

AtScale released research reports that quantify the impact of the pandemic on various industries, including one discussed here on the impact of COVID on retail.

Medical Decisions and Advancements Powered by AI

Another area in which AI is helping us make smarter decisions is in biomedical research. As an innovator and disruptor, AI is key to medical advances. Combining AI’s synthetic data with primary data and third- party data predict and model in a continuously improving, always-getting-smarter way will accelerate these research discoveries and advancements. So much so, that in our lifetime we will be able to use AI to cure cancer, to provide personalized medicine and preventive medicine, and predictive knowledge so we can anticipate and address health challenges – like cancer and new, rogue viruses – in the future. Imagine the day when these are minor nuisances instead of major health crises. It is not a matter of if, but when.

How the AI Community Makes a Difference

Finally, it is critical to remember that future enhancements to AI and how we can evolve our use of it will come from the next generation of technology leaders, engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs. It’s important that today’s AI community continue to cultivate, mentor, and support this next generation of talent. When we are champions of our own people, then we empower them to lead the charge and complete the vision.

By giving our own time to grow and shape the next AI community, we also inspire the community to use its success to generously give back. AI, machine learning, big data, and the entire technology community are all in a unique, prosperous position to take on powerful roles as philanthropists. As a serial entrepreneur and technology executive, I have leveraged my background to unlock the power and resources of the Boston area tech community to transform fundraising efforts for pediatric cancer through a nonprofit called Tech Tackles Cancer. To give you an example of how the tech community can rally its resources for a cause, Tech Tackles Cancer recently hosted its annual concert event to fundraise for One Mission and St. Baldrick’s, organizations that support the fight against pediatric cancer. The event is distinctive in that it is fully embraced by AtScale employees and the Mass. technology community to “tackle” pediatric cancer. In just a few hours, the nonprofit raised more than $350K, bringing the total fundraised to $3M.

With the ability of AI to understand an environment and to think, learn, analyze, and act, we should consider AI as a technology partner and champion that will impact our decision making in a radical, even life-changing and beyond-our-imagination ways. There is no question that AI will change the world – it already has – and just like the true nature of AI, those changes will come faster and advance exponentially as we cultivate the next generation of AI innovators and the machines we create learn, adapt, and draw inferences from patterns of data that would take us decades or even centuries to understand.

Christopher Lynch

Executive Chairman and CEO, AtScale

Chris Lynch is the Executive Chairman and CEO at AtScale, the industry leader in data federation and cloud transformation. Prior to AtScale, Chris founded and was a partner of Reverb Advisors. Reverb is an advisory firm that works with cyber security, data science, and next generation application and infrastructure companies achieve their entrepreneurial goals. Chris is also co-founder of hack/reduce, a non-profit that is driving Boston’s big data ecosystem, hack/secure, a non-profit shaping the

Cybersecurity community across the U.S. and is an advisor and mentor to dozens of entrepreneurs and startups.

Prior to Reverb, Chris founded and was General Partner at Accomplice (www.accomplice.co), a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology companies. Chris backs entrepreneurs building companies based on disruptive enterprise technology and is most often the founding investor.

Before joining Accomplice, Chris held CEO and leadership roles at tech startups where during his career he raised over $150M in capital and returned more than $7B to his investors. Chris was CEO of Vertica (acquired by HP) and Acopia Networks (acquired by F5 Networks); and held executive leadership positions at Arrowpoint Communications (IPO, then acquired by Cisco), Prominet (acquired by Lucent) and Wellfleet Communications (acquired by Bay Networks).

Chris is an avid supporter of the St. Baldrick’s foundation. He first became involved with St. Baldrick’s more than four years ago when he launched the first annual hack/reduce Charity Cup. Since then, the event has raised more than $1M to help fund pediatric cancer research.

Chris earned his MBA from the McCallum Graduate School of Business at Bentley University and his bachelor’s degree in business management from Suffolk University. He received an honorary doctor of commercial science degree from Bentley University.