Toby: My role here at Darktrace is the Global Head of Threat Analysis. My day-to-day job involves looking at the 100 or so cybersecurity analysts we have spread from New Zealand to Singapore, the UK, and most major time zones in the US. My main role is to evaluate how we can use the Darktrace platform to work with our customers. How can we ensure that our customers get the most out of our cybersecurity expertise and support when using AI to secure their network? The other half of my role at Darktrace is subject matter expertise. This role involves talking to reporters like yourself or our customers who want to hear more about what Darktrace can do to help them from a cybersecurity perspective, discussing the context of current events. That part of my role was born out of a nearly 20-year career in cybersecurity. I first started in government and was one of the founding members of the National Cybersecurity Center here in the UK.

Ashutosh Saxena is the Founder and CEO of Caspar.AI, that builds AI-enabled homes for senior and luxury housing. Dr. Saxena received his Ph.D. (2009) in Computer Science from Stanford University with Andrew Ng. He was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. At Cornell, he founded RoboBrain, a joint venture between Stanford, Berkeley, Brown, and Cornell to develop a knowledge engine that allows robots to learn from internet videos and share their learnings in the physical world with each other. He has over 12,000 citations in the area of Artificial Intelligence, with numerous awards including: SF Business Times 40 Under 40 (2020), TR35 Innovator Award by MIT Technology Review (2018), Eight Innovators to Watch by Smithsonian Institution (2015), NSF Career Award (2013), Microsoft Faculty Fellow (2012), Alfred P. Sloan Fellow (2011).

Asif: Tell us about your journey with your multiple startups and successful exits. What were some of the biggest challenges you faced? To date, I've built three venture-backed companies, one bootstrap company and a fifth company I, unfortunately, had to close down. My most recent exit experience was also my most successful. I founded BlazeMeter, back in September of 2011, and we were acquired by CA technologies in October of 2016.

About Nigel Willson: For nearly twenty years Nigel has been at Microsoft helping clients to write the future, most recently as Global Strategist with a focus on innovation and near future trends. He is a frequent speaker at events on artificial intelligence & respected social media contributor on AI / ML & tech topics. Asif: What do you predict will be some of the biggest business opportunities & industries affected by Artificial Intelligence? Nigel: Artificial Intelligence has already become so pervasive it is in every industry and locality in the world is some shape or form, I think the opportunity is making truly a transformative technology by making it available to everyone. By democratising AI, we can make it accessible to consumers / business users through embedding it into the applications that they use on a daily basis (like office productivity applications) for language translation, transcription (voice to text) and digital personal assistants.