Gain exclusive insights into the synergy of AI and technology in our AITech Interview with Ulf Zetterberg, Co-CEO at Sinequa. Explore the visionary perspectives of a leader driving innovation at the intersection of AI and business.
Kindly brief us about yourself and your role as the Co-CEO at Sinequa.
I’m a serial entrepreneur, business developer and investor inspired by technology that improves the way we work. I’m passionate about human-augmented technologies like AI and machine learning that elevate human productivity and intelligence, rather than replace humans. In 2010, I co-founded Seal Software, a contract analytics company that was the first to use an AI-powered platform to add intelligence, automation, and visualization capabilities to contract data management. During my tenure, I oversaw the company’s fiscal growth and stability, which led to the acquisition of Seal by DocuSign in May 2020. I later served as President and Chief Revenue Officer of Time is Ltd., a provider of a productivity analytics SaaS platform. I joined Sinequa’s board of directors in March 2021, providing strategic planning and oversight during a time of rapid European expansion. With Sinequa’s fast growth, my role also expanded. So, in January 2023, I joined Alexander Bilger – who has successfully served as Sinequa president and CEO since 2005, in a shared leadership role as Co-CEO with the aim to further accelerate Sinequa’s ambitious global growth. Today there is so much innovation happening around the confluence of AI and enterprise search. I can’t imagine a more exciting space right now, and especially with Sinequa as a leading innovator.
What inspired you to explore the various facets of technology?
My inspiration came from the realization that technology can have such a positive impact on human productivity and experience. Technology is a tool and an enabler. Human-centered technology, such as Sinequa Intelligent Search, leverages the power of technology to support human achievement.
Kindly brief us about Sinequa and give an overview of its standout products.
Today the biggest names in pharma, life sciences, manufacturing, and financial services, including Airbus, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, NASA, Pfizer, Siemens, Credit Agricole, Total Energies, Volkswagen and hundreds of others use Sinequa to use data more effectively and to gain business insights. The company was founded in 2002 with the vision to help companies and knowledge workers make the most of their content and data through an enterprise-built Google-like solution. At the time, Sinequa founders saw that enterprises’ valuable information remained largely siloed and underutilized and that corporate knowledge workers were wasting hours a day searching for information. These challenges impact each of the key vectors of business – time, money, risk, experience, and both employee and customer experience. To address this, Sinequa created an intelligent search tool powered by AI and machine learning that unifies information discovery and retrieval under one simple UI, enabling organizations to tap into the vast knowledge and expertise contained within their enterprise data. As our customers’ needs became more sophisticated and the maturity of the Cloud delivered greater scalability, flexibility, and extensibility, we optimized the platform for Microsoft Azure and in 2022 changed the name of our platform to Sinequa Search Cloud. As a pioneer in natural language processing (NLP) and AI technology, Sinequa continues to push the boundaries of innovation and in June last year introduced Sinequa Neural Search, a new generation of natural language understanding (NLU) based on the use of four deep learning models. Neural Search enables unprecedented relevance and accuracy in search performance. In April 2023, we raised the ceiling even higher and introduced Sinequa GPT, leveraging the power of generative AI and large language models (LLM) to enable accurate, fast, actionable, and traceable conversational search in a secure enterprise environment. Today, Neural Search and GPT capabilities are available through two offerings: the Sinequa Search Cloud Platform, a scalable platform designed for large enterprises to build specialized insight apps; and Sinequa’s SaaS application, Workplace Search, which is powered by the Search Cloud and managed by Sinequa.
What are the core values on which the organization is built and what is the mission of the organization?
Sinequa centers on the core values of innovation, excellence, integrity, customer-focus, and teamwork. Our mission is to help the world’s most complex organizations get the most out of their content and data, because we understand that knowledge isn’t power unless you can find it. One of the things we like to say around here is a simple way of expressing what we do – if you have it but can’t find it, do you really have it?
In recent months, we’ve heard a lot about ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing AI, Google Bard, LLaMA by Meta other offerings replacing Google as we know it, or that Search will become obsolete. What are your thoughts on this?
We are very excited about the opportunities that these technologies create, but they will not make search obsolete. In fact, they are enhanced by search, and when they are combined I believe we are at the beginning of a revolutionary change in how we interact with knowledge to get work done. There’s a lot of attention today on how individuals are using ChatGPT to get things done and automate mundane tasks. But despite all the excitement from individuals, large enterprises and industries are rightfully more cautious and uncertain of where they might be able to use generative large language models (GLLMs). While generative models handle natural language impressively well and are showing great promise for creating content, conversing, and summarizing, they struggle in fact-based and nuanced contexts because they may hallucinate, it’s hard to validate their sources, and they don’t have the latest information – three areas that are crucial for use in the enterprise. But combining enterprise search with GLLMs solves these problems, making Enterprise Search more important than ever. Here’s why: ChatGPT and GLLMs are trained on public content – the internet. They know nothing about the knowledge contained within an enterprise, and training them on that content is ridiculously time-consuming and expensive. But enterprise search knows everything about a company – it has broad and secure access to all the corporate repositories, content, and institutional knowledge – and can provide that knowledge to a GLLM. Using enterprise search to feed a GLLM ensures that it has the most accurate and relevant results from all content, regardless of source, format, or language. It also ensures security, by only providing the GLLM with information that the employee has permission to access. Enterprise search brings GLLMs to the workplace, so that employees can converse with their content with confidence. This is an area of innovation we are very excited about. We’ve already integrated our technology with ChatGPT and other GLLMs and are well-suited to continue our technology leadership.
In your opinion, how important is it to augment AI and ML in a way that they can be utilized to their fullest potential and not be a substitute for human skills?
We are experiencing a revolution in what can be done with AI, but it’s not going to make humans obsolete. Humans innately seek ways to make their lives easier and therefore tend to trust automation if it simplifies something. But AI isn’t perfect; for all its capabilities, it still makes mistakes. The more complex and nuanced the situation, the more likely AI is to fail, and those are often the situations that are the most critical. So it is important that we don’t rely on AI to automate everything, but use it to augment human ability, and rely on humans to ensure that the right information is being used to drive the right outcomes.
How important is it to leverage the power of AI in order to boost business performance?
I’m confident that AI is going to very quickly become a key differentiator in everything we do. Being able to use AI effectively will be a competitive advantage; not using AI will be a weakness. Perhaps you’ve heard the saying, “AI isn’t going to replace your job. But someone using AI will.” That is a new era that we are entering, and the same holds true for businesses. Those who find how to apply AI in new and creative ways to improve their business – even in the most mundane of areas – are going to create competitive advantages. I believe it’s going to be less and less about the technology and capability of the AI itself, but rather in how the AI is applied. ChatGPT is just the beginning.
Please brief our audience about the emerging trends of the new generation and how you plan to fulfill the dynamic needs of the AI-ML infrastructure.
LLMs are revolutionizing search. Sinequa has incorporated LLMs into search to make search faster, more focused, and more forgiving than ever before. The continued advancement of LLMs will propel search experiences to new heights, with better relevance and accuracy, and higher productivity with less time reading and clicking and more time learning. We’ll interact with knowledge using natural language, the exact same way we would interact with another human – with no more need to learn how to “speak computer.”
GLLMs are revolutionizing how we interact with knowledge. It’s a whole new level of “digital assistant,” with much broader abilities than Alexa or Siri. But for business applications that are fact-based and not creative in nature, GLLMs are limited unless they are paired with neural search. That pairing is going to fundamentally reshape how we innovate, perform research, learn, and collaborate. Companies that adopt this technology combination will accelerate their business and companies that find new ways to apply this combination will secure a competitive advantage.
Commoditization of AI models means it’s anybody’s game – and the future belongs to the agile organization and the fast mover. Over the past year, we’ve seen how larger LLMs translate into dramatically better results. The problem is, super-large LLMs are super expensive. There are only a few companies with the resources and capabilities to build them. But they have been commoditized at a record-breaking pace. Everyone has access to one of the largest models for free (ChatGPT) and anybody can pay for access to even bigger models (GPT-4) and companies are racing to make their models available. The models are commodities – your competitive advantage will not come from building a new and better model (because someone else will do that before you do). Your competitive advantage will come from leveraging these models in a new and unique way, one that augments human ability and/or automates some portion of an employee’s work.
Having extensive experience, what advice would you like to give the budding entrepreneur aspiring to venture into the industry?
Be bold. Be fast. Be willing to fail; listen to the market and your customers to learn from those failures and iterate rapidly.
How do you plan to scale up Sinequa’s growth curve in 2023 and beyond?
Our new things this year are Neural Search, Neural Search + GLLMs, verticalization (in manufacturing and life sciences in particular) and SaaS (Workplace Search). Beyond that, we’ll continue to lead the forefront of our industry by incorporating cutting-edge AI into search for the best possible employee experience for managing information.
Ulf Zetterberg
Co-CEO at Sinequa
Ulf Zetterberg is Co-CEO at enterprise search provider, Sinequa. Ulf has over 25 years of experience of leadership for global enterprise software companies. He co-founded Seal Software, the first to use an AI-powered platform to add intelligence, automation and visualization capabilities to enhance the management and utilization of contract data, in 2010. He is also an investor, advisor, and board member to several other businesses, with a primary focus on software and data analytics.
