The Future Is Now: Paul McBride of Peroptyx On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up The Tech Scene
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Love thy customer and if you can’t love your customer, love your customer’s problem so much that you’ll stop at nothing to solve it.
As a part of our series about cutting edge technological breakthroughs, I had the pleasure of interviewing Paul McBride.
Paul McBride is a co-founder and Managing Director at Peroptyx. The company has recently completed a seed round raise of $2m to support the expansion of its customer base, team and global footprint to 20 countries. Prior to co-founding Peroptyx, Paul was founding GM and VP of Lionbridge AI, building that business from startup to reach over $100M in revenues with a remote worker presence in over 100 countries. Paul began his career as a software engineer with Microsoft, working in Dublin and Seattle on their operating system printing and imaging software for global markets.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
The idea for the name came while watching the emergence of a synchronous, almost magical flashing of swarms of Pteroptyx (sic.) fireflies as they congregated around mangrove trees, mostly in southeast Asia! It is an unforgettable experience for those who observe it and is one that delivers significant economic benefits to the region. This visual spectacle became synonymous with our passion for operational synchronicity and swarm intelligence. The company was born out of the belief that my co-founders Maeve Bleahene, Internet pioneer Dr. Dennis Jennings and I all shared regarding how the everyday human experience was not being adequately reflected by consumer-facing AI systems, or in the Machine Learning models and data underpinning them.
Our combined experience over the prior decade showed conclusively that the quality of the AI experience will ultimately be determined by the quality of the human contribution to the data powering AI. Together, we recognised the huge potential in Machine Learning for companies prepared to make the leap, and put data at the heart of their approach to developing market-facing platforms, applications and services.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
In 2006, being invited by Google to help design and implement a feedback system to evaluate the in-country performance of their search engine algorithm. The experience was a career-changing collaboration with some very cool and clever people, and what we co-produced over the following decade is still relevant and widely used today.
Can you tell us about the cutting edge technological breakthroughs that you believe are capable through accurate machine learning? How do you think that will help people?
Three breakthroughs that I believe will benefit people, or have the potential to benefit people, are in the fields of payments, customer experience and health.
- Payment mediation — while a lot of focus in the world of online payments has been on the payments themselves; their security, user-friendliness, accessibility and so on — there is another aspect to consider and that is when payments themselves represent the main point of contact with customers. For example, when customers are paying for (mostly recurring) services such as utility bills, machine learning can help identify when and where problems might occur before they actually occur, and assist with interventions designed to promote a positive and supportive resolution. Since behaviours and expectations change with country and culture, accurately and contextually representing these aspects in machine learning models will transform the bill-paying experience for consumers struggling to make ends meet.
- Customer interaction — While natural language processing enables virtual assistants to interact with customers at scale, and across markets, it has a long way to go before the interactions themselves feel more ‘natural’ or ‘human’. This lack of ‘realism’ has mostly to do with the quality of data used to train these systems as well as the methods being used to source it. We believe the next significant breakthrough in ML-assisted customer interaction will come with the ongoing, persistent participation of people from all sectors of society who are most suitably qualified to evaluate, influence and improve the models and algorithms being used to serve them.
- Digital health — Recent advances in deep learning enables companies such as Enlitic to optimize a physician’s decision-making by analysing a patient’s past medical history, diagnostic information and symptoms to provide actionable insights. Advanced ML models learn as they process data, improving their ability to identify diseases and provide treatment planning. Once the key issues of data privacy and anonymity are substantially addressed, the potential for ML-assisted, physician-led diagnoses that lead to better quality life outcomes for the seriously ill will be unleashed.
How can it help people — Applied Machine Learning can help people — by tailoring the structure and content of information to meet individual needs and expectations — to be as productive as possible.
How do you think this might change the world?
Machine learning is already shaping our lives in respect of how we travel, eat, shop, search, share and shelter. It has the potential to contribute to a reduction in the world’s carbon footprint by matching the greenest energy outputs with more accurately predicted energy consumption levels.
Keeping “Black Mirror” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about these hyper-personalised ML results that people should think more deeply about?
Left unchecked, the potential for misuse of personalized ML outputs, for example relating to payment profiles, online interactions and health status, is significant. One potential drawback is if governments — who make the laws that govern society — begin to think and act like the corporations who create these advanced, increasingly ubiquitous technologies.
So, the brilliance of the creative endeavors of technology companies must be balanced by the wisdom of conservatism in governments, to maintain responsible social equilibrium through appropriate lawmaking.
Was there a “tipping point” that led you to this area of data? Can you tell us that story?
Throughout the 2010s, the team I led successfully scaled a global business, mostly as ‘intrapreneurs’. Throughout that journey, the joy of working with and learning from industry leaders was highly motivating as we experimented and collaborated to solve some challenging human-centered problems in search, advertising, maps, speech, and so on. It also became clear to me that a significant number of next-generation enterprises wanted to or were preparing to embark on the journey to become data-centric, but were missing key guidance and insights around operationalizing machine learning and AI deployments at a global scale. At the same time, our vision around the future of data and its place at the heart of technological shift towards an AI-driven future was not being fully grasped by the C-suite.
With that, we decided to start a company fully focused on delivering sustainable value to enterprises taking a data-centric, cloud-first approach to building and deploying ML and AI in their online products and services.
We gathered a team and together we went to work on building the company, born in Ireland with global talents, committed to creating the future we had envisioned: to place human insight at the heart of machine learning and help brands deliver online experiences to meet the needs and expectations of their individual customers anywhere in the world.
What do you need to expand this method of Machine learning to widespread adoption?
- Evangelise the future value of data-centric AI. Andrew Ng does this very well.
- Educate decision-makers on the value potential of their data and how to unlock it for individual benefit at global scale
- Showcase the exponential returns that result from more persistent engagement with (machine learning-enabled) personalised digital products and services.
- Show how it’s possible to do this in a data privacy compliant way by sourcing and retaining the ideal expert people to evaluate machine learning outputs, to identify and address bias and errors in ML training data on an ongoing basis.
What have you been doing to publicize this idea? Have you been using any innovative marketing strategies?
We are embarking on the journey to publicize the idea, to follow in the footsteps of the early adopters who have seen and experienced the significant benefits and potential for good that ML can bring. Featuring in Authority magazine helps!
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
There are two:
- The first is my oldest friend and eminent psychiatrist Dr. Martin Lawlor with whom I shared a decades-long friendship before his untimely passing. ‘Write everything down, carefully!’ he used to say of any significant event or encounter in business, ‘and you’ll always be attuned to who and what’s really changed, including yourself.’
- The second someone is my co-founder Maeve Bleahene for her unlimited resourcefulness and belief in the possible — this was the foundation of much of our past success and today it has resulted in us building the most incredible team and global infrastructure at Peroptyx.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
We used our success to develop a global network of tens of thousands of remote working locals in over 4,500 villages, towns and cities around the world. We put significant effort into their education and upskilling to ensure they could do their best work, and be paid for it.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why. (Please share a story or example for each)
1. The necessity of balance in thought and action, the practice required to achieve it and the benefits of taking the time to do it well.
Learning how to bring myself back to ‘the present’ is the single most useful self-management / self-preservation technique I wish I had known about sooner. It helped me deal with many challenging situations in work and life.
2. The only long-term growth is the growth in what you don’t know. Always be learning!
Pursuing a doctorate was one of the most rewarding academic experiences of my life and while it remains incomplete (circumstances got in the way!), it reminds me to keep learning, to prepare for the eventual success that learning will bring.
3. Failure is never fatal, success is never final.
Taking the long view, despite the near-term pressures, always works for the best,
4. Build a team of people who can do anything better than you.
5. Love thy customer and if you can’t love your customer, love your customer’s problem so much that you’ll stop at nothing to solve it.
If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
To build a global movement of local people representing every sector of society — with the authority to evaluate and improve AI systems that influence our life choices and outcomes.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
My favourite life lesson quote is: “If you tell, they will forget. If you show, they will remember. if you involve, they will understand.”
The relevance of the quote came home to me as a 28 year old, newly promoted General Manager. Early in my career as an engineer, telling stories and showing how something worked (or didn’t) was generally sufficient to make progress. As a general manager with responsibility for a team of diverse talents, effectively orchestrating them proved much more difficult. Thanks to the wisdom and guidance of my mentors at the time, I developed a deeper understanding and appreciation of the importance of involving everyone in the journey.
Some very well known VCs read this column. If you had 60 seconds to make a pitch to a VC, what would you say? He or she might just see this if we tag them
Peroptyx is a technology company that helps medium to large businesses outperform their competitors by placing data with insight at the heart of the local user experience — on every device, in every location.
Our team has solved global data quality and model evaluation challenges for the major internet platforms and search engines over the past 15 years. We are bringing this unique expertise and insight to the next generation of global unicorns,
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
The Future Is Now: Paul McBride of Peroptyx On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up The… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
