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Ernest Chan

We provide Corrective AI to enterprises to help correct their business decisions by computing the probability that a decision is wrong. We also help businesses optimize their operating parameters (e.g. how many staff members should be on call) via machine learning that takes into account the external environment.

Tell us about yourself?

I received my Ph.D. in physics but spent my whole career researching machine learning and its business applications. It turns out that a physics education is great preparation for machine learning research (Prof. Geoff Hinton, the “father of deep learning” at U of T, was a physics undergrad too.) We found a lot of applications in asset management, but just now are finding them in the oil and gas sector too. Smart manufacturing will be our next target.

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

Only use full-time employees/contractors for software development – never outsource to external software development consultancies.

What problem does your business solve?

Computing the probability that a business decision is wrong and optimizing the parameters of the business process using our patent-pending Conditional Parameter Optimization algorithm based on machine learning.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

In asset management, every investment decision can be quantified with a probability of profit. The same idea can be generalized to any business decision. This technology obviously can have an enormous impact on any enterprise.

What is your magic sauce?

We eat our own dog food. Corrective AI is being applied to a hedge fund we manage, putting my personal investment at the mercy of our machine learning algorithms.

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

To succeed in helping large enterprises in multiple verticals optimize their business process via machine learning.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

Fundraising in a difficult market environment. Also, it took us a while to find our product-market-fit: our greatest value is to larger enterprises, not consumers or even small businesses.

How can people get involved?

Visit our website www.predictnow.ai to download the large number of white papers and articles we have written or watch our educational webinars.