 Here we are at the ITU headquarters in Geneva. It's day three of course of the AI for good global summit And I'm joined now by a special type of guest an investor Ash Fontana, managing director of Zeta Ventures So you are telling me in our audience that there's money to be made in AI? Yeah, absolutely. Our belief with Zeta is that all software will change With the advent of intelligent systems that is every existing category in a line of business whether it's sales marketing clients, risk anything and every single market whether it's agriculture manufacturing food energy otherwise Will completely change all the software used in those industries will change from being you know What we have today, which is fairly simple workflow software a lot of the software we use today is just like a fast calculator that writes to a database to software that helps you make a decision and with that change every Single company. There's there's opportunity for new vendors to emerge making intelligent software So that was our belief in starting Zeta and that continues to be our belief more than ever And so we think you know investing in those companies organizations communities projects that Making this shift to intelligent software Will be profitable for some people and have people have a receptive to your pictures. They have yeah You know, we started the fund in 2013 and I think people thought the field was still quite small in 2013 Even though a lot of the research had really picked up by then We were starting to see really good results in terms of intelligent systems that can perceive things in images or recognize meaning in speech Or at least recognize words in speech very very well Who was starting to see it was starting to see consumer applications of it But people still thought it was small people didn't really believe it However, just in the three years Up to 2016 There was a huge amount of progress and then in 2016 and 2017. There's been a huge amount of press In the area. So people I think are really seeing the opportunity now um Are you thinking about short-term investment? Are you prepared to give these companies or ai a long goal? Yeah, I mean our model is to spend at least they are around about 10 years with each of these companies So we're certainly taking the long view That said, I think you know a lot of the opportunities to win Over incumbent systems like non-intelligent systems Are there today? So a lot of our companies are already replacing the incumbents that have sort of Very simple workflow software with their intelligent software today and they're profiting from that That's it. Do you buy this that it's um, this is fourth industrial revolution stuff? Yeah, funnily enough We frame the intelligence era as the fourth generation of computing So I'll talk about that for a second and then I'll talk about industrial evolution You know computing we think the first generation of computing was inventing all the hardware You know essentially fast calculators the integrated circuits and silicon 70s and 80s Then that became a bit of a commodity it became pretty well known how to make those circuits And they will produce some very high volumes So the value to be added in technology in the technology industry was in making software You know encoding a real world workflow into a piece of software Microsoft was the big company of that area era Then with the advent of the internet we got to what we thought think is the third era of technology and Computing which is interconnected computing. So the internet cloud based systems that sort of stuff Now today it's pretty easy to build a cloud based system and access You know that cloud infrastructure through amazon google and microsoft etc And really where the value is being added in the use of technology fundamental use of technology Is in how it helps you make a decision by analyzing huge volumes of data and then presenting that back to you or Creating an autonomous agent that can infer or learn from huge volumes of data So we frame the intelligence era as the fourth era of computing You're taken even more broadly in that than that We do think it is you know analogies to the industrial revolution are quite useful For a number of reasons, you know the obvious one is The way that labor replacement can happen industrial revolution was machines replacing physical labor The intelligence revolution is machines replacing Mental labor Decision making and a higher order functions of human beings So that's one obvious analogy And certainly the the policy and the ethical issues involved with that are very important But also the opportunities that that presents us are very important And secondly, you know, it's fundamentally a machine revolution So The machines are what's driving this shift. Okay, great. So basically ash If you're a startup out there with great AI ideas and you're looking for a bit of money Come and see this guy He may be able to give you right you a little check there to keep you going And he's given you 10 years to get your idea off the ground. You can't get better than that ash fontan fontana Thanks very much. You're with zed adventures. Thanks for talking to us. Thank you chris