AI Assistance and Small Business

Will assistants provider cheaper access to expertise to the small business first, because its a cheaper source of knowledge?

How AI Can Help Small Business Solve Big Problems

Podcast:

Intuit's Ashok Srivastava explains how AI-powered software can help individuals and small businesses.

Small business owners and self-employed individuals typically face financial and operational challenges. Artificial intelligence is giving them a leg up through applications such as smarter accounting software and fintech services like expanded access to capital. At the recent AI Frontiers conference in Silicon Valley, Ashok Srivastava, chief data officer at financial software firm Intuit, the creator of TurboTax, QuickBooks and Mint, spoke to Knowledge@Wharton about how his firm is using AI to “power prosperity for the current and future generations.”     

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Knowledge@Wharton: How did you get interested in AI and data sciences?

Ashok Srivastava: It’s an interesting story. In some ways you might say it was predestined. My father was a mathematician and a statistician who worked in many areas of information science, experimental design and so forth. When I was young, he bought me a book on artificial intelligence (AI) and told me that I had to read it during the summer. Being the good son, I took it and I read it in the university library. It made a tremendous impact on me. Ever since I was a child, I was interested in making things do things for themselves. That was just my way of thinking. I remember that I used to think like that even while playing with toys. AI seemed to be the way to do it.

Well, I ended up reading that book and thinking about it, but frankly, I then put it aside and went about my journey in electrical engineering. I got a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and I focused on signal process and control theory and those types of fields. But towards the end of my Ph.D., I became interested in machine learning. That was the point where I started to work in machine learning and neural networks and bringing ideas from signal processing and time series into it. That got me into the field and I’ve been in it ever since. ... "