Latest / Beyond Fulfillment Podcast / From Failure to Fortune: Amir Haramaty on Resilience, Learning, and Leading aiOla

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From Failure to Fortune: Amir Haramaty on Resilience, Learning, and Leading aiOla · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:05
  Speech by far is the most natural form of communication.
• 0:09
  It's actually three times faster than anything else.
• 0:12
  In one third of the time, you're actually capturing 3x amount of data.
• 0:16
  Today's guest is Amir Hamade, a self described aerial problem solver with four successful exits under his belt and a track record of transforming AI innovation into real world impact.
• 0:28
  Currently the co founder and president of Aiola, Amir's work is reshaping how enterprises harness speech, AI for efficiency and data driven insights.
• 0:38
  Serving everyone from Fortune 500 companies to global chains.
• 0:42
  In this episode, Amir shares his unconventional approach to entrepreneurship, why he believes failure is a crucial ingredient to success.
• 0:51
  And he reveals the behind the scenes stories of building Aiola from the ground up long before AI was a house name.
• 1:02
  You'll hear how he helped companies slash hours off regulatory processes, turn speech into data gold mines, and how timing, technology and relentless iteration combined into a perfect storm to take Aiola globally.
• 1:16
  Get ready for a masterclass in AI leadership pivots and the future of voice driven business transformation.
• 1:25
  As always, if you found value from his content, please like and subscribe.
• 1:29
  All right, Amir Haramati, welcome to Beyond Fulfillment.
• 1:34
  Thank you, Dave.
• 1:34
  It's great to be here.
• 1:36
  Yes, it's great to have you.
• 1:37
  We appreciate you taking the time.
• 1:40
  So Amir, we were just talking about your background here, but before you, your present company and you said you don't like the term entrepreneur, you're a serial problem solver and you've had four successful exits already so we'll definitely
• 1:57
  touch on those that as well.
• 1:58
  But you are the president and the co founder of Iola, which is a speech AI company that's making some serious waves out here in the market.
• 2:09
  Can you just tell us what IOLA is and and who you serve?
• 2:14
  Absolutely.
• 2:14
  So yes, as you mentioned, I call myself a serial problem solver and this is something which I enjoy.
• 2:20
  And as you mentioned, this is my sixth rodeo.
• 2:22
  So the first one forward success we've sold to significant companies.
• 2:28
  Been deep into AI for the last decade.
• 2:30
  Long before A and I became the most used and abused letters in English language at present time.
• 2:36
  The first six with my previous company as the AI platform of choice of McKinsey the management consulting company globally.
• 2:43
  We had a chance with McKinsey to be at large number of engagements with Fortune 1000 companies where I saw the big promise of AI is meeting traditional enterprises and it's not a pretty sight.
• 2:57
  I had many takeaways.
• 2:59
  The three main ones is the understanding that what happened in AI in recent years is incredible.
• 3:04
  Those AI Tools are amazing, but I think we get a bit confused because despite the fact those are AI, they're still just tools, which means and polarize the fact that the biggest challenge is no longer an AI challenge,
• 3:17
  it's truly a data challenge, because the majority of data in the world is still not part of the game because it's uncaptured and unstructured.
• 3:25
  So one is understanding.
• 3:26
  It's all about data, number one.
• 3:28
  Number two, you know, my mother always told me, you have two ears and one mouth.
• 3:33
  Try to keep the proportion.
• 3:34
  I'm still working on it.
• 3:36
  But it's an amazing life lesson, is what you're able to hear if you're willing to listen.
• 3:41
  And the reason I'm mentioning that is whatever we do, we come with tremendous respect to existing processes or procedures, workflows in companies.
• 3:50
  We're not here to disrupt, we're here to enhance and augment.
• 3:54
  We build this incredible technology.
• 3:56
  How can we assist to do things more efficient, safer, smarter, collaborative?
• 4:01
  The last pillar and the most important one is the fact that what you and I have been doing here for the last few minutes, speech, by far is the most natural form of communication.
• 4:10
  It's actually three times faster than anything else.
• 4:13
  In one third of the time, you're actually capturing 3x amount of data.
• 4:17
  Foreign.
• 4:21
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• 4:29
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• 4:44
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• 4:51
  And one day, God willing, you know, your grandkids are going to say, I'm going to find a keyboard in your garage, Dave, and say, hey, Grandpa Dave, what is this?
• 4:58
  And you're going to struggle to explain to them that I was our most creative way to communicate with machines by punching buttons.
• 5:04
  Okay, it has, ridiculous as it sounds, so it's super clear it's all about data.
• 5:09
  It's super clear, it's all about speech.
• 5:12
  But it's also super clear that what we have today is pretty challenging.
• 5:15
  The combination of languages, accents, various acoustic environments, and again, in supply chains and logistics is a very big challenge.
• 5:24
  And the fourth one, actually, we realize that every industry in every company in every location has a very specific jargon or slang or keywords that in all fairness, there's no automatic speech recognition platform of the shelf that was
• 5:39
  built to handle it.
• 5:40
  Hence, it's a triple challenge.
• 5:42
  One, how can we bump the accuracy in those settings from where it is today, which is subpar and unacceptable?
• 5:48
  Close to 100% in any language, any accent, any acoustic environment, any jargon.
• 5:53
  Two, once you did it, still not good enough because you want to separate the noise from the signal.
• 5:57
  You know, it's less interesting, although I care about it, what the lines are going to do.
• 6:01
  This isn't what's going to be the weather like in Detroit in two months time.
• 6:06
  How can we extract only the relevant information, separate the noise from the signal automatically and take it out?
• 6:11
  Once we accomplish that, it's still not good enough because we are not talking about speech to text.
• 6:17
  We talk about speech as highly unstructured data to highly structured data.
• 6:21
  So speech to data, speech to schema, speech to workflow.
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  And that was the triple challenge that I took or the problem to solve when we founded iota.
• 6:32
  Okay, all right.
• 6:34
  So you founded this company five and a half years ago.
• 6:38
  So that would have been what, late, late 2019?
• 6:42
  Yes.
• 6:43
  Correct.
• 6:44
  Okay.
• 6:44
  And so that was long before AI was a household name, you know, like it is today.
• 6:50
  So what, what was when you had this idea and you realized that, you know, the speech and the data and that there was this big opportunity and given where AI was time, I mean, how did you go about
• 7:04
  getting started?
• 7:06
  It's incredible because one of the challenges is when you do things slightly ahead of time.
• 7:12
  So first, you know, when we talking and I'm dealing with AI again since 2015, but when talking about the importance of speech and why speech, back in 2019, 20, 20, 2021, still people looking at like, almost like, ain't
• 7:25
  broken, don't fix it.
• 7:28
  So I had to find some tangible, you know, I know it sounds cheesy, but the three letters I love the most in English language is R O, N I.
• 7:36
  So everything, if you can do things which are measurable, are quantifiable, that can show value.
• 7:40
  And I'll give you an example.
• 7:41
  One of our very first clients was a meat producing company, one of the largest meat producers in the world.
• 7:47
  And turns out that every day when they start the day, they have to complete a regulatory mandatory process.
• 7:54
  It's called pre op.
• 7:55
  Pre OP inspection is 20 pages.
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  They have to inspect every piece of machinery before the start of the day.
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  Takes them on average two hours.
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  Production is out on those two hours.
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  And I said, what if I'm going to take that entire process and turn it to speech based, hands free, paperless.
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  They're going to walk and talk and information will be filled automatically.
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  We were able to take it from two hours that took manually to 46 minutes.
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  First, for this razor thin margin industry to be able to provide an hour plus of free production per shift of per day.
• 8:29
  It's very dramatic and quantifiable.
• 8:32
  Second, the biggest impact beyond efficiency is the fact that now we created data that previously was just going to the filing cabinet.
• 8:40
  Now that becomes raw material to the AI tools.
• 8:43
  You can connect the dots beyond what human eye can see or human brain can process and you can constantly get evergreen, ever learning insights and intelligence.
• 8:51
  So all of a sudden I can feel like, okay, we're starting to get people to understand because it doesn't matter how small or big you are, you still have to do more with less.
• 9:01
  You still have to work on efficiency.
• 9:03
  You still need to be safer, you want to be smarter, you want again, multinational to be able to speak a single language, even though I speak so many different languages.
• 9:11
  And I followed, I call it the pain trail.
• 9:15
  Identify where the pain is.
• 9:17
  And I was able to show them.
• 9:19
  Not far from you, north of the border, there's a big supermarket chain, a $19 billion supermarket chain and French Canadian by the way, is a very challenging language.
• 9:29
  They have to do a simple process.
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  They have to check the temperature of the meat inside the refrigerator.
• 9:34
  And it's highly regulatory, mandatory.
• 9:36
  Ministry of Health.
• 9:37
  On the first 600 stores alone, we saved them more than 110,000 of hours that went directly to EBITDA.
• 9:46
  So all of a sudden people realize it's not just cool technology, it's absolutely a necessity of something that allows you to stay in a game, number one and show tangible results.
• 9:58
  If I'm working with one of the largest package delivery companies in the world and they got more than 100,000 vehicles in the US and every vehicle need to be inspected every morning and have a 40 point checklist that
• 10:09
  on average takes between 15 to 20 minutes.
• 10:12
  And now speech based, hands free, paperless, the walk and talk on the forms being filled in 48 seconds.
• 10:17
  So I saved more than 14 to 19 minutes per vehicle per day times 100,000, which is incredible.
• 10:23
  But then because we connected the dots, they know how the tires behave in Miami, Florida versus how to behave in Toronto, Canada.
• 10:30
  And that's very different.
• 10:31
  And that's impact procurement and that's impact service and so on and so on.
• 10:34
  So all of a sudden we start to realize we identified those critical parts then great example not far from you, we met with United Airlines.
• 10:44
  United Airlines is the largest airline in the world, 1047 aircraft.
• 10:48
  And they realized that the biggest asset they have is not the largest fleet of airplanes, but rather the data, the fly to the system that currently is uncaptured and unstructured.
• 10:59
  We started from baggage handling, so if you lose your bag to fill the form in speech and retrieve it by speech to safety and compliance, that now becomes a culture thing.
• 11:08
  Everybody in United becomes now a safety ambassador.
• 11:11
  And now we're going across the board to the point that United would like to have any data entry.
• 11:17
  Of course, everything to be done by speech.
• 11:20
  So we have done it with the largest airline in the world.
• 11:23
  And then we work with one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in maintenance.
• 11:27
  And processes that took previously 900 minutes are now completed in 400 minutes.
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  But not only that, in each flow they were able to capture in 900 minutes 4.3 words per description.
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  Now in 400 minutes they're capturing 12.5 words per description.
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  So we shorten the time for less than half, close to one third and we triple the amount of data.
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  Now they can open up tickets on a fly from the floor.
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  And then we're talking to one of the largest rental car companies.
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  Try to imagine you return your vehicle right now and the entire return process is by speech.
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  Any language, any accident, any acoustic environment, that information is flying.
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  And from the automotive industry to the aviation industry to the pharmaceutical to manufacturing to supply chain to logistics, everywhere that where data is critical, the ability to capture the speech.
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  And now we cross the chasm because now I'm getting companies that realize speech is the way to go.
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  I don't need to educate the market.
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  So it's incredible if you think about the journey is first of all to convince people why to do it.
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  Second, to overcome and invest in the technology and then get to this place where finally the aha moment.
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  And now we got there, we got to that point, but now I'm hitting 1000.
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  Okay.
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  Every time we swing the bath right now.
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  Doesn't matter which company I'm talking to.
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  It's an immediate use case that grows to dozens of use case to truly transformational change within the organization.
• 12:50
  And I'll tell you something, because you mentioned that it's my six startup forward, exceptionally successful sold.
• 12:57
  I never experienced in my own benchmarks such an incredible transformational experience because it's bigger than a given company.
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  It's the a lot of different things happen at the same time.
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  The maturity of AI, the, the connectivity around us the mindset of the people and the need for speed or need for efficiency and the ability to connect them with a simple solution that I can deploy on any Android
• 13:26
  or iOS device, regardless of what is the maturity, digital transformation maturity of the specific customers.
• 13:33
  Anyone can benefit from that tomorrow morning.
• 13:36
  Okay, so you've had this company five and a half years.
• 13:40
  What was the process like developing this technology and kind of refining it to where, where it is today?
• 13:47
  Like where you, like you said you're batting a thousand and you're working with these major, you know, Fortune 500 companies and incredible use cases and that sort of thing.
• 13:58
  I mean, what was the journey like developing the tech to this point where it is now?
• 14:03
  So several things.
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  It's a great question, by the way, which has really been asked, but it's a nice journey for me, even in my mind right now, to reflect backward because while I had this vision, I'm not a speech expert and
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  I was searching for the best speech experts I can find in the world to get some stamp of approval.
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  And I found one of them which happened to be at the time leading the Alexa research for Amazon.
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  And after a short period of time he said, amir, you're onto something really big here.
• 14:28
  You haven't offered me a thing, but I already accepted.
• 14:31
  If you want me, I'll drop Amazon on Heartbeat and join you as a chief scientist.
• 14:34
  And he did.
• 14:35
  So first, we build a world class research team.
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  It's an all star team of researchers.
• 14:41
  Second, without going too technical, but the big LLM guys today are using constantly brute force to boil the ocean, if you will, and then to try to narrow down to your specific use case, I say, why the hell
• 14:54
  I need to boil the ocean in order to make coffee.
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  All I need is that much water.
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  And we came with a complete different approach.
• 15:00
  We came with a unique approach that basically said we identify four key components.
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  One, we need to overcome the jargon.
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  Nobody ever pay attention to jargon.
• 15:09
  Second, we need to be able to separate the noise from the signal.
• 15:12
  Third, we need to deal with any acoustic environment and forward, we need to turn the speech not to text, but speech data.
• 15:18
  And we went deep and doubled down on IP and we're able to do something which nobody did before.
• 15:25
  So I don't need to train models, that's for argument, say right now, you, big warehouse in Korea, okay?
• 15:32
  And it's a language we don't speak.
• 15:34
  And there's a specific form that over there.
• 15:37
  All I need from them is that one specific form in Korean that we don't Speak I don't need data to train it, all I need is a list of keywords.
• 15:45
  We build a proprietary and patent platform, it's called Jargonic that in several hours gonna take this information.
• 15:51
  It's called zero shot meaning there's no training required.
• 15:54
  In few hours we're going to build a small language model for that specific process in Korean, in that warehouse, in those settings, in that acoustic environment with those jargon and accent, very close to 100 accuracy that you can
• 16:08
  deploy it on any Android or iOS device number one.
• 16:11
  And number two, we realize we never play a lot, we need to play nice.
• 16:15
  So whatever back end system you have, if it's a erp, if it's a Oracle or SAP or CRM like Salesforce or whatever, we have a simple API that we can integrate the information and fit it wherever you need.
• 16:27
  That's a big pivot which we did about two and a half years ago.
• 16:30
  So from taking just developing this incredible technology and amazing speech to data skills to go after pre existing processes and just take one process at a time and transform it once we hit.
• 16:46
  So one was to understand we're going to do something completely different.
• 16:50
  We build a lot of ip, we have multiple patents about this specific technology, we secure this highly defendable four areas that nobody can do better than us.
• 16:59
  And that put us in a position today that we outperforming companies that invested hundreds of millions of billions of dollars in research because we took care of the critical path and now we package it per industry, per language,
• 17:11
  per acoustic environment.
• 17:13
  So that's an amazing journey.
• 17:15
  We learn a lot of things and you can see the point almost where the people took place about two years ago.
• 17:21
  Great.
• 17:21
  We have great technology but now we found the best way to apply it to where it makes the biggest impact.
• 17:27
  And for me it's amazing.
• 17:28
  You know I was in London yesterday with one of the largest airport operators in the world.
• 17:35
  They got it.
• 17:36
  300 airports, they got it.
• 17:37
  Dozens and dozens use cases.
• 17:39
  Last week I was in one of the stock exchanges, they got it.
• 17:42
  They want to use all the orders on a floor, tickets by speech, tweet.
• 17:48
  As previously I was the C level executive again of rental car companies and all.
• 17:52
  So it doesn't matter which vertical.
• 17:54
  I enjoy working in those meetings because I'm never going to learn what they already forgot about the business.
• 18:00
  But once we demonstrate the order that possible, you can almost hear the wheels turning in their heads with immediate use cases where we steer them to where we can make the biggest impact at the shortest period.
• 18:11
  Of time with minimal obstacle possible.
• 18:13
  And one thing I learned, success.
• 18:15
  Breed success.
• 18:16
  And once you achieve it quickly, then you're golden.
• 18:21
  Okay.
• 18:22
  All right.
• 18:22
  So it took, sounds like it took several years before you really hit your stride.
• 18:27
  And two years ago, I mean, that's around the time too that I really started to, you know, burst on the scene.
• 18:33
  Was there, was that, was that a part of just the, you know, I mean, almost like a perfect storm in terms of you just got the technology right and then everyone started to realize what AI was.
• 18:45
  I think that's the two words that's the perfect description, the perfect storm.
• 18:48
  Because sometimes some things are up to us, some things are not up to us, but it seems like all, everything happened just at the right time.
• 18:55
  You know, the technology mature to the level that, no, I can take it to the next level.
• 19:01
  I know how to apply it.
• 19:03
  I don't need months to handle clients.
• 19:05
  I don't need weeks, I don't need days.
• 19:06
  I can do it in hours.
• 19:07
  So now I can do it at scale.
• 19:09
  I prove and validate it and the awareness around it.
• 19:13
  You know, I made a self made, self made, not funny joke to illustrate to my team the opportunity in front of us.
• 19:20
  And I say, no, we have a French chef, French ingredients and French kitchen.
• 19:25
  We must do better than a French toast or French fries.
• 19:28
  So that perfect storm put us in a great position.
• 19:31
  Like, you know, we're not here for the plain vanilla.
• 19:33
  Not due to respect to playing vanilla.
• 19:34
  It's great.
• 19:35
  But yes, it's a combination of our own maturity, but even more so, the global maturity around AI, the acceptance across organization and everything is moving so fast.
• 19:48
  You know, you and I've been around enough to recognize there are a lot of things that happen, okay, from, from the Internet to connectivity to smartphones, nothing moves so fast as this revolution.
• 20:02
  It's bigger than any other revolution we face in the past.
• 20:05
  One, from a, from the agriculture to the industrial to this one.
• 20:09
  And this is bigger by far.
• 20:11
  So timing, timing, timing, but being at the right spot, at the right time with the right technology, yes, that's a perfect storm.
• 20:19
  Okay, all right.
• 20:20
  And then how, how is your role evolved too?
• 20:23
  Because it sounds like you're, you're kind of, you know, you're like the president, you're a co founder.
• 20:29
  Sounds like you're tasked with really bringing on new business and dealing with all these companies and doing presentations and whatnot.
• 20:37
  Is that, is that what your day to day looks like A lot.
• 20:40
  It's a great observation because I took the role as A co founder to be the CEO for the longest time.
• 20:46
  So basically all those years of building the teams and building the product and validating and dealing with all the day to day operation 24 7.
• 20:55
  I was doing that to the point that about a year ago we realized, okay, we got halfway to the promised land.
• 21:02
  But you know, one of when I'm bumping to clients sometimes and you know, you try to pitch the technology or whatever and you get a sense like they're very happy where they are, they don't want to move forward.
• 21:14
  I ask them, can I write something on the wall?
• 21:16
  I say sure.
• 21:17
  And I write Dave wbyh, WBYT and says that's in Hebrews and no, that's what brought you here, will not bring you there.
• 21:30
  And the same applied for Iola.
• 21:32
  And by the way, this is a great experience that only when you're a seasoned serial entrepreneur, problem solver, you know, they recognize you cannot apply the same game plan across the board, across stages.
• 21:44
  You need to be able to adjust on the fly.
• 21:46
  You know, we talk football before we start this recording.
• 21:48
  The best coaches in the NFL are the one that can make the adjustments on the fly.
• 21:53
  Okay, you had your game plan, but things changed.
• 21:55
  Somebody got injured, the other team is doing other stuff.
• 21:57
  The ability to adjust on the fly.
• 21:59
  So we realized we have a huge opportunity.
• 22:01
  We got to a great position.
• 22:03
  But for me to continue to run the day to day operations from no disrespect to any of those, to HR to procurement, to it is taking very valuable time from what I do best.
• 22:13
  So I brought a very strong COO that's capable to run the operation.
• 22:18
  My co founder joined full time to the company so he can take the CEO and I can be 100% of my time under the title of co founder and president.
• 22:26
  But I'm 100% of my time responsible right now for strategy, for business development, fundraising that you never stop raising.
• 22:35
  You saw the announcement probably about a few weeks ago.
• 22:38
  We just did another $25 million round.
• 22:40
  On the round we wanted to fund 15, ended up with 25 and now we even expanding it.
• 22:44
  So that's what I'm doing now, building those strategic partnership alliances, the overall strategy and that's what I enjoy the most.
• 22:52
  And I think understanding where we at and make the adjustment on a fly to equip ourselves to the next phase was a very important step that we took about a year ago.
• 23:02
  Ah, okay, okay.
• 23:04
  Appreciate you, you know, detailing that.
• 23:07
  No, and actually nobody ever asked me the question.
• 23:09
  It's the first time I'm opening the kimono and explaining everything that happened behind the scenes.
• 23:13
  So you have something that nobody heard before.
• 23:16
  Yeah, well, especially be it being a co founder of a startup.
• 23:20
  And it sounds like there's rapid growth.
• 23:23
  I mean, sometimes too, right?
• 23:25
  That, that's, you know, there's, there's never, it's like there's never enough hours in the day when you're dealing with the team and then you're always thinking about sales and growth and then you're fundraising.
• 23:35
  Right.
• 23:35
  So yeah, being.
• 23:37
  That sounds like a great move for you guys where you brought in help to deal with the day to day and you can really focus your zone of genius with, you know, scale.
• 23:46
  Absolutely.
• 23:47
  And I tell you one other thing which is very, very important.
• 23:49
  You know, everybody likes to talk about success and don't get me wrong, I'm very proud to talk about it.
• 23:54
  I believe my failures were way more important to my success than the, the success stories.
• 24:00
  Okay.
• 24:01
  And sometimes I found myself dealing with a client and a client gets super excited about the technology and I found myself like, say, hold on a second.
• 24:10
  I'm very proud of our technology and I'm confident in our ability to generate value, but I can guarantee you failure first.
• 24:17
  Say what?
• 24:19
  I guarantee you failure first.
• 24:21
  And that failure, failure is so critical for success.
• 24:25
  Especially if you fail quick, fail hard, you know what not to do.
• 24:29
  And that allows you to be able to make the adjustment on the fly.
• 24:33
  I'll give you a very fresh example.
• 24:35
  We're dealing right now with a very large German client and we build a language model for that specific process in German.
• 24:43
  And we are very proud of that model.
• 24:45
  But when they deploy it, the performance was horrible.
• 24:47
  Dave, what turns out is the actual users were immigrants from Turkey who speaks Torque German.
• 24:56
  It's a version highly accented with Turkish accent.
• 25:00
  No model off the shelf was ever built to deal with that.
• 25:04
  The beauty of what we do is we have the ability on the fly to record that and automatically build a language model not for German, but language model for Turks, German in those settings, etc.
• 25:17
  Etc.
• 25:17
  So we had to fail first in order to make the adjustment specifically to the setting here, with this accent here, with the background noise here, etc.
• 25:26
  Etc.
• 25:27
  So in order to do so, it's never a laboratory test, it's always battlefield test.
• 25:33
  Okay?
• 25:33
  In battlefield, you get dirty, you get scratched, you get injured, you're learning, you're tired, you're sweaty.
• 25:40
  But as long as you know what you're doing and you know how to guide it, and this Is by the way, once you develop that confidence that whatever come your way, you will handle it.
• 25:50
  Because one thing I always assure to our partners and clients, nobody can be as more committed or dedicated.
• 25:55
  We are and we have the best brains in the world.
• 25:57
  We get things done, there's no question about it.
• 26:00
  But sometimes in order to get things done, we need to make some, some failed attempts so we can fine tune it.
• 26:06
  What's the best way to do it?
• 26:07
  And that's a very important part of a startup journey, especially when you're moving for, from early stage to growth stage.
• 26:16
  Yeah, yeah.
• 26:17
  And like you said too, as you've kind of like listed off successes and how the company's grown throughout this, throughout this interview, talking about the failure and that being even more important, I'm sure that's something other entrepreneurs listening
• 26:31
  can certainly resonate with.
• 26:32
  Because, you know, failure is part, it's, it's a necessary part of success.
• 26:38
  It's a, it's, it's, it's a critical part of success, in my opinion.
• 26:40
  Yes, it's absolutely, it's a necessity.
• 26:42
  But if you fail to learn from your failure, shame on you.
• 26:46
  Okay, you don't want to eat this empty calorie.
• 26:49
  If you have to suffer that pain, you better learn the lesson to make sure not even get close to that pain that you felt.
• 26:57
  Very true.
• 26:58
  Okay.
• 26:58
  All right.
• 26:59
  And so with as far as you've come in these last five years and where the company is positioned now, I mean, what's next for Iola?
• 27:07
  You know, it's incredible because I think the game just started.
• 27:10
  I'll give you a fresh example.
• 27:12
  So we build this tremendous partnership because I believe this is moving so fast.
• 27:16
  It's not just about us.
• 27:18
  So we partner with Accenture.
• 27:20
  Accenture is 900,000 people that realize that Iola can bring a very key component to what to do.
• 27:26
  We partner with USD Global, then we partner with Nvidia.
• 27:29
  And Nvidia, you know, today is not only the wealthiest or the richest company in the world for trillion dollar, but it's really the gold standard.
• 27:38
  And Jensen, the CEO is rockstar.
• 27:42
  And they have their own event, it's called gtc, which is Woodstock.
• 27:45
  Okay.
• 27:46
  To people still understand what Woodstock was.
• 27:48
  But a few weeks ago, GTC, Nvidia's GTC took place in Paris.
• 27:55
  And unprovoked on his keynote speech, Jensen spoke about Iola.
• 28:00
  And now the GPUs of Nvidia is empowering Iola to transform the biggest players in the world.
• 28:06
  So we're getting tremendous recognition and Those partnership allow us to get rich and distribution to get scale.
• 28:13
  And so now we can do multiple things.
• 28:15
  For example, we can take, like I mentioned before, any specific process or workflow and with IOLA application just deploy this use case as I mentioned a few minutes ago about the Korean warehouse, for example.
• 28:26
  That's great.
• 28:27
  Then I got a great piece of advice from the CTO of SAP who told me, Amir, this is amazing, but why do you build an API?
• 28:34
  So any existing application you can apply to, so the data entry can be done by that in a few weeks time we got it and then we fully integrated to Salesforce for example and one of the largest consumer
• 28:46
  companies right now, 5,000 salespeople using that.
• 28:50
  Just finished a meeting with Dave.
• 28:51
  I walk into the car, I'm talking about the weather, I'm talking about the practice this afternoon, I'm talking about the NFL coming up in two weeks.
• 28:58
  And then I'm talking about the deal.
• 29:00
  By the time you log into Salesforce, the relevant information and only relevant information is already sitting there.
• 29:06
  But it doesn't stop there because everybody today talks about agentic or AI agents.
• 29:11
  And Jensen claims that AI agents are going to be multi trillion dollar opportunity and.
• 29:15
  Absolutely right.
• 29:17
  But guess what, Dave, Even AI agents need to be prompt and speech is still the most natural form of communication.
• 29:23
  And you're going to stumble to the same fundamental challenges we already solved.
• 29:27
  So now we're taking care of existing processes through the application.
• 29:30
  We can attach it to any existing application through an API and we are fully primed right now to support any agentic environment.
• 29:39
  So IOA took care of the past, present and the big future in front of us.
• 29:43
  So I think again it's such an exciting journey and we put ourselves right now in the biggest stage and got tremendous exposure.
• 29:51
  And between Nvidia and United and then Fast Company selected Iola as one of the 50th most innovative companies in the world.
• 29:59
  All three things happen like in a four week span in the summer.
• 30:03
  The exposure is incredible.
• 30:04
  Fundraising changed completely.
• 30:07
  The exposure to different industries and replication.
• 30:10
  So to those partnership and alliances, I definitely believe that we earned the right to eventually become a multi billion dollar.
• 30:17
  Multi billion dollar company.
• 30:20
  Wow.
• 30:21
  Okay.
• 30:22
  All right.
• 30:23
  And Amir, if people listening to this, they want to reach out, learn more about what IOLA does, how they can potentially use the service or reach out to you for any other reason.
• 30:34
  What's the best way people can get in touch with you?
• 30:37
  Absolutely.
• 30:37
  So one again, Iola website is very, very informative and it's Iola AI that's it.
• 30:44
  And you sit there and there's a lot of.
• 30:45
  We release research papers and we talk about the challenges we encounter.
• 30:49
  And again, I'm always accessible and happy to talk to people and happy to assist.
• 30:55
  And it's very simple.
• 30:56
  It's amiriola.com.
• 30:58
  that's it.
• 30:59
  And you'll find me.
• 31:01
  Okay.
• 31:01
  All right.
• 31:02
  We'll link all that in the show.
• 31:03
  Notes for everyone.
• 31:04
  All right.
• 31:05
  Perfect.
• 31:06
  Amir, thank you so much for taking the time to be here and sharing all this valuable wisdom from your journey with our listeners.
• 31:11
  We greatly appreciate it.
• 31:13
  Thank you for the time.
• 31:14
  I enjoyed the conversation very much and would love to talk again soon.