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Founded 9 years ago in 2012, ViSense has since become a leading global artificial intelligence company for digital commerce. Theodora Lai, Director (Business Development), Tembusu Partners, sat down with Oliver Tan, Co-founder and CEO of ViSenze, to discuss his entrepreneurial journey, ViSenze’s technology and the future of AI in our post pandemic world.

What were your motivations starting ViSenze?

“Most entrepreneurs don’t regret the decisions they had to make, but they somehow always regret the chances they missed taking.”

I enjoy creating new things and making an impact, so I didn’t hesitate when I saw the opportunity to bring out a wonderful AI, computer vision technology developed at NUS. Having been in the corporate world for 15 years, it took me just two weeks to decide that I did not want to retire in a suit and tie, and I never looked back since.

With my prior experience in media and ecommerce, I wanted to explore how technology could be applied there. So although AI and e-commerce was in its nascency, I saw the potential taking this going forward. So that’s how ViSenze was started with my three co-founders, focusing on the ecommerce strategy to help retailers and brands better engage with their customers.

Tell us more about ViSenze and how did the company adapt to the challenges of Covid-19?

ViSenze is an AI solution focused primarily in commerce, powerful intelligent search, personalization and product recommendation solutions. We work with brands, marketplaces and retailers – online, traditional and omni channel retailers. Some of the biggest names that we work with are Zalora, Uniqlo, ASOS, one of our longest lasting clients, as well as Myntra, the number one online fashion retailer in India, and Urban Outfitters in North America.

So Covid-19 essentially shut down physical accessibilities to stores and forced people to accept online commerce as the only source of shopping activity there was. This migration of traffic led to three times more traffic and data generated than before, which was good for us because we could now help our clients make sense of the data that has now exploded.

The key question we had to address was how to help our clients engage their customers in a more discerning way? To personalize, recommend, and accelerate shopping behaviour more efficiently towards making a purchase decision? This was the priority and what we focused on to sharpen our value add, and allowed us to do a lot of upselling to existing clients last year.

What do you think the future of AI and ecommerce is going to look like as a result of the pandemic? 

On Ecommerce

Digital transformation is already happening in retail prior to Covid-19 as digital commerce and traditional retail converges across the consumer journey. The pandemic just accelerated it. I see more physical stores reopening in 2021, but not in the same form, shape or manner than before.The challenge then becomes for retailers and companies such as ourselves to determine how to create a more seamless, connected customer journey that moves back and forth the stores and online? And that’s where we are seeing acceleration and new innovations happening.

On AI

“We are living in the fourth industrial revolution now that is AI. Despite all of the science and technological advancement that we have, we still could not prevent a global pandemic like this from happening and disrupting every other vertical there is.”

The AI world is moving extremely quickly, and Covid-19 has accelerated AI development with both positive and challenging short and long term impact.

In the short term, AI adoption will rise globally, businesses will have to prioritise AI investments, deployment, and talent, in order to stay ahead and stay relevant. Nobody can ignore AI and it comes at the their peril if they choose to ignore. In the ecommerce space, with consumers now leaving a trail of data across platforms, AI helps to make sense of that data to engage and reengage them even if they don’t make a purchase at the first instance.

But of course, this comes with its challenges.

Firstly, data governance and privacy is another area that AI has to contend with, where data analytics must be respectful and governed by ethical rules.

Secondly, the AI skill gap will continue to grow, especially between richer and poorer countries. For Singapore, we too face the acute gap and peril, because AI talent tends to move to big AI superpowers in US or China with big budgets, big markets, big data that they can actually play with.

And finally, there will be an acceleration in AI driven automation that will unfortunately displace jobs. The hard question is what will governments and business leaders do in order to address this ahead of the massive AI adoption?We could see problems within the decade when people currently in the workforce are automated out of traditional jobs and have no alternatives because they have not been retrained for AI.  

With rising VC interest in AI and deep technology, how should founders approach VC funding?

“Select your VCs carefully because it’s about choosing the right partners to have this respectful and humble relationship with.”

Some VCs have told me very honestly, “Oliver, your technology and business is fairly sophisticated. It’s something that I don’t quite understand and may not be able to contribute meaningfully to.” High respect for that, right? Because as much as they are excited by the opportunity, it’s the VC humbling himself or herself and knowing that this is not a business that they know how to value add to strongly.” Now, that is actually a very good way to start a conversation.

Pitching to investors is part and parcel of every founders role that cannot be delegated to anybody as the founder that delivers on the promise to investors. But of course, as much as the founder delivers the results, investors must also be committed to form a strong relationship.This doesn’t mean just sitting in a two hour board meeting every quarter, that’s not a relationship, but to be more involved in the process, because a founder goes through a lot of ups and downs. If an investor constantly looks at only linear growth every quarter, then I think the founders and investors are setting themselves up for a very difficult conversation.

So my advice to founders is to select your VCs carefully because it’s about choosing the right partners to have this respectful and humble relationship with. But understand that very rarely do VCs and start-ups fall in love at first sight, if it does then that’s very dangerous, because it’s only looking at the superficial optics.

How do you feel about reaching the decade long mark next year?

“Every morning I tell myself how I can do better compared to yesterday, last week, or last year.”

Every morning I tell myself how I can do better compared to yesterday, last week, or last year. I’m not able to solve all my problems, or address all the opportunities all, so I constantly prioritise what’s most important and never lose sight of the big picture. That picture is AI and digital commerce, and how do I stay ahead of the curve?

The coming 10th year will be no different from every other year, significant in terms of age perhaps, but really, it’s a constant drive to improve ourselves, and to be better than the last year. I look at how I can continue to excite my team, how to bring new perspectives, new challenges and opportunities.

Covid-19 has proven that if you are not pre-positioned for AI, digitization, building all these data analytics tools, and plugged into the social network itself, you will not take off as evidenced by many traditional retailers who have had business models disrupted and could not leverage the sudden spike in online traffic.

Any advice to aspiring founders?

Don’t be seduced by quick successes. Of course, I mean, we want real life heroes to inspire others. But real life heroes don’t succeed on the first try as well. It might seem like many start-ups have made it and within five years, they are already a billion dollar company. Because for every one success, there are many, many things that you don’t see behind that.

So if you had succeeded, without having failed first, to me, that’s not success. That’s luck. Be prepared to fail and fail many, many, many times. Be prepared to be discouraged by many people, including your personal heroes or even those people who are closest to you.

The last advice I would say is, be humble and be prepared to be humble. There’s no better life learning experiences than one that makes you fail again and again. And makes you question why you do what you do. At your darkest moment, and if you can learn how to figure it out, you can withstand any stresses, any onslaught during your start-up journey.

Most start-up founders don’t tell you their darkest moment. But every one of us have our darkest moments. Because everybody wants a hero, we tend to showcase successes. But a start-up founder’s journey is never easy. So be prepared. And if you are still not “dissuaded” by me, then come join the journey!

Learn more about ViSenze here.