Slack's former head of machine learning wants to put AI in reach of every company – TechCrunch

Adam Oliner, co-founder and CEO of Graft used to run machine learning at Slack, where he helped build the company's internal artificial intelligence infrastructure. Slack lacked the resources of a company like Meta or Google, but it still had tons of data to sift through and it was his job to build something on a smaller scale to help put AI to work on the dataset. With a small team, he could only build what he called a "miniature" solution in comparison to the web scale counterparts. After he and his team built it, however, he realized that it was broadly applicable and could help other smaller organizations tap into AI and machine learning without huge resources. "We built a sort of mini Graft at Slack for driving semantic search and recommendations throughout the product. And it was hugely effective … And that was when we said, this is so useful, and so powerful if we can get this into the hands of most organizations, we think we could really change the way people interact with their data and interact with AI," Oliner told me.