What is your mission as a technology company?

To help companies identify, understand, develop and implement the most ingenious and ethical AI solutions tailored to their needs.

What have been the main highlights of 2021 for your business?

Officially founding! Acquiring our first customers, and kickstarting our inbound marketing strategy.

The last 18 months have had a huge impact on every level of the economy and society, what are the main impacts you’ve seen within your sector?

Well, corona triggered the urge of companies to become digital. “Digitalize or die” was probably the motto for many of them.

If it is true that in many sectors companies had to be in “stand by” with the development of projects (such as car manufacturers), other industries could exploit AI to increase even more their competitive advantage (such as Amazon).

Companies like “Bosch” decided to integrate a full AI strategy in its core, which happened to be a great decision during the pandemic.

What have been the emerging trends facing founders in your country?

Like many founders this year, we have started up in a work from home world – it takes a lot of ingenuity to drive our business forward with limited access to resources and physical contact.

What are the primary challenges you see facing tech in 2022?

One of the challenges that I see here is the new world of work. I’ve put a lot of thought into how to develop my business – should I have a 100% remote team? Or should I go for a hybrid option where team members work a few days from home and a few days in the office? In tech, we truly have the option to build a business 100% remote, but I am still figuring out to what extent that is more advantageous than a hybrid or even 100% office option.

What are the challenges you see for the AI industry in 2022?

Specifically in the field of AI is the lack of professionals. This is a matter that has been announced for years now, but just like I expected, the demand for professionals is growing exponentially whereas the supply tends to do it in a more linear way. Getting oneself into data science nowadays is synonymous with job security for 10 years.

How can they be overcome?

In regards to AI, the way to solve this in a period of 1-2 years is to train internal employees. Just like AI is disrupting some typical jobs in companies, it is also creating new ones. Managers should be able to identify those jobs being disrupted and train the employees to cover the new positions appearing thanks to AI. This way you are solving problems at once: increasing your AI fluency without scare external expertise, and recycling your loyal existing employees. Of course, in AI Shepherds we can help businesses through that.

What are your growth plans for next year?

We’re planning to quadruple our customer base, and we’ll be developing our first scalable product in the field of NLP and quality. From a marketing perspective, we want to invest heavily in the awareness phase of our customer journey.