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Ronald Croen
Partner
You & Mr Jones, Inc.
Bio
Ron Croen is a Partner at You & Mr. Jones, heading up You & Mr. Jones Brandtech Ventures, which specializes in seed and early stage venture investments. Prior to joining You & Mr. Jones, Ron co-founded and served for ten years as the Chief Executive Officer of Nuance Communications, the global leader in speech recognition, natural language understanding, and related voice automation technology and applications. Ron led Nuance from the spinout of the core team from the SRI International research institute in Menlo Park, California to a top 10 IPO of the banner year 2000 and beyond. Ron also founded Volio, which pioneered the use of advanced speech recognition and natural language understanding technology in conversational video for highly engaging brand marketing. Ever the entrepreneur, Ron has been active in Silicon Valley and Boston as an investor, business leader, mentor and teacher. His dedication to encouraging the talent of tomorrow led him to serve as Entrepreneur-in-Residence and to teach Entrepreneurial Leadership at his alma mater Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts.
Sessions
  • Chatbot Superpowers: The Democratization of AI! Investors Founders and Artists Share Insights
    10:45 AM - 11:00 AM May 31
    Chatbots: the democratization of AI, beyond Alexa. How will Chatbots give us all superpowers? 2016 was the year of Virtual Assistants, with over 300M invested in Chatbots alone. Messaging apps surpassed social networks in terms of daily users. Microsoft went as far as to say that the operating system of the future isn't Windows but "Conversation as a platform". Chat bots and virtual assistants have become omnipresent in our interaction with brands and soon will be an extension of our humanity. From bots that help us drive, to manage our finances or even our love lives, these bots will become increasingly an extension of our selves. The democratization of AI has begun, as platforms are enabling users to build their own bots without coding. How are investors, artists and innovators looking at this new trend? Where are the greatest opportunities? How should AI startups go about looking for funding? How are these new bots changing our realities? This panel will consist of investors in frontier tech who are expanding their portfolio to include AI/chatbot related tech, a founder (s) of some one of the most disruptive chatbot companies and an artist/futurist using AI and virtual assistants as a medium. Some key questions will be: - how will AR and bots collide in terms of content creation? - Virtual Assistant and chat bots: traction in past 4 months. - how are virtual assistant going to change our lives? - how will care bots help us care for the elderly and teach the young? - how will AI and chat bots affect how we view death and memories? - will chat bots ever be as easy to create as a selfie? - how do we get more women and minorities excited to found some of these companies? - what practical advice do the investors have for founders seeking to raise capital for their AI/Virtual assistant ideas? - how far away are we from “Her”? what are the components needed to get there?.
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