Ian Campbell has backed startup that offers a new level of customer insights.
ATSO Vesterinen is not the first technology entrepreneur to be attracted by Western Australia’s windy weather.
For the Finnish IT expert, it was kitesurfing that brought him, family in tow, to Perth in 2009 and prompted him to visit numerous times afterwards.
For the state’s startup aficionados, the story of how a Silicon Valley venture capitalist came to WA for the kitesurfing and, along the way discovered Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht and invested in what became Canva, is one many hope to mimic.
In the case of Mr Vesterinen and his latest enterprise, Aiwo, wind power has worked in reverse: pulling the inventor to Perth where he has established an Australian base for his Finnish-headquartered business, backed by business partner Ian Campbell.
The former senator and one-time environment minister in the federal Liberal government of John Howard, Mr Campbell met Mr Vesterinen via a mutual acquaintance, Ross Norgard, and has already helped Aiwo get introductions to major Australian businesses including Foxtel and Nearmap.
Mr Campbell, who is also a director and executive with key businesses of Canadian giant Brookfield, said he would join the advisory committee of Aiwo and become an investor in the global business, which is using Australia as a test case for geographic diversification out of its homeland.
A Perth office is to be established for that purpose.
Aiwo claims to use artificial intelligence to provide a previously unobtainable level of customer insights for those in businesses dealing with large volumes of detailed data, which can sometimes make it challenging to understand customer needs.
Mr Vesterinen said that, following the sale of a previous business, he spent some time focusing on the possibilities of AI. Around this time (five years ago), he was approached by two former colleagues who had a problem they hoped he could solve.
“They were doing qualitative research companies and they were struggling,” he said.
“It takes a lot of time.
“For them it was very hard to scale the business and deal with bigger amounts of data.”
Mr Vesterinen built a team to try and crack the problem of distilling qualitative data into something that did more than skim the surface. He said the Eureka moment was using text analytics and qualitative analytics to process the data and build an AI model on top of that.
The development of the software behind Aiwo did not use existing models, which tended to look for key words to put text into simple emotional buckets.
Instead, using the power of AI, Aiwo’s machinery examines all words, including transcripts for audio files in call centres, to determine far more about what customers are interacting with a business for.
“It is contextual, that makes a difference,” Mr Vesterinen said.
“When you understand your customers contextually, it is a much deeper understanding.”
Mr Campbell offered his own analogy to summarise the difference.
“It is like the difference between texting someone and talking to them,” he said.
“There is a lot more colour.”
Aiwo’s product focus is on failure demand analysis, looking into the reasons customers decide to walk away from a product offering.
As every salesperson knows, there are many points at which a customer may choose to call off a deal or decide not to renew it when that time comes around.
In the interim, there is a high cost in drawing customers to a product and then interacting with them during the sales process.
Similarly, dealing with the frustrations of users who have signed up for a subscription service or some other product when it involves a repeat purchase in the future also has a big cost if they fail to continue.
Many of these issues – sometimes fatal to products or the companies that launch them – fail to permeate upwards to the higher management levels where critical decisions can be made about fixing them.
“We use AI, first in the world, to remove those contacts,” Mr Vesterinen said.
“We identify the reason, the products and services, where it is located and give them [the product provider] a task list to remove the error.”
