In 2016 Paul Kruchoski published in WebForum the article titled «10 Skills you Need to Thrive Tomorrow» analyzing the skills that will be most demanded in the future world of work. The author indicated in the article that, according to the World Economic Forum, complex problem solving will be the most valued competence in the world of work, ahead of the ability to think critically and creativity. The resolution of complex problems will become even more relevant with the global crisis caused by the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. Humanity will have to face health, social, economic and political challenges caused by a crisis of magnitudes that experts are not yet able to quantify. The OECD recently warned that coronavirus is economically surpassing its worst economic forecasts.

When we think of the AI platforms that are shaping how we use voice to interact with phones, home devices and other services, we tend to think of Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Google and Microsoft's Cortana. But there are other players that may prove to have a compelling value proposition of their own. Sherpa.ai, a voice assistant out of Spain that also provides predictive recommendations with a focus on the Spanish language, today is announcing that it has expanded its Series A by $8.5 million to $15 million as it passes 5 million active users of its app. Investors include Mundi Ventures, a Spanish VC fund focused on AI, and Alex Cruz, the chairman and CEO of British Airways. In a still-heated tech climate where startups are raising tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in rounds that sometimes happen only months apart, Sherpa's Series A has been a comparatively slow burn: the startup first announced a Series A of $6.5 million nearly three years ago.

Few people know artificial intelligence better than Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria. The Spanish entrepreneur has engineering degrees and diplomas from MIT, Harvard Business School and the Universidad de Deusto in Bilbao, the largest city in Spain's Basque Country. He is even nearing a master's degree in architecture, is a mentor at Oxford University and has won numerous awards for his work in the tech world. Uribe-Etxebarria is also a proven company-builder. He was studying for a natural language processing PhD in 2009 when he built his first firm, ANBOTO, a virtual assistant for chat and email responses. But Uribe-Etxebarria wasn't finished, and in 2012 founded Sherpa, a predictive, virtual personal assistant based on AI algorithms.

We've seen a big rise in apps and bots, and a lot of them have something in common besides being based on artificial intelligence and machine learning: many of them are written first (or only) for English-speaking users. Now one of the more interesting personal assistant apps created first for Spanish speakers is announcing funding: Sherpa, a personal assistant app based out of Spain, has raised 6.5 million in a Series A round. Xabi Uribe- Etxebarria, the founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that the funding will be used to continue building out more functionality in the app, as well as on more hires and to expand the reach of the app as it gears up for a much bigger Series B and eventual expansion to other languages like English and Portuguese. Sherpa is filling an interesting niche in the market that most English speakers might not even realise exists: many of the interesting evolutions in AI and natural language processing have been focused on English applications, leaving large swathes of the non-English speaking world without the same kinds of services. Uribe- Etxebarria notes that while some apps do have Spanish versions they are basic.