He was driving to the airport and this problem kept bugging him.  There has to be a better way.

We have an artificial intelligence solution, he thought, but it only runs on a dedicated server. But why do I have to buy a device in the US, have it shipped it to my lab in Canada, provision it with our solution and then ship it back to my customer in the U.S. ?

Then it hit him.  Why can’t I provision this in the cloud, do that in less that an hour and my client will have immediate access?

I know what you’re thinking.  What is so interesting about this?  Isn’t the solution obvious – easy in fact?  And the answer to that is, yes. In 2023.  But what if I told you this was what was going through my guest’s mind in 2009. Almost 14 years ago.

At that time he was talking about something that few companies had done.  There wasn’t much of a road map in place and there were lot’s of problems to solve to make that vision work.

Laurent Simoneau was and is the CTO of Canada’s Artificial Intelligence company, Coveo. Along with co-founder Louis Tetu, he has been a driving force at Coveo and a cloud pioneer for almost two decades.

Through the years he’s continued to innovate and learn lessons in both the cloud, and in AI — answers to questions that many companies are still grappling with.

Some startups came to market in the cloud and then found that the costs of a consumption model meant that their rapid growth was sinking their business, especially in a freemium model – Laurent anticipated this, maximizing the efficiency of his solution to manage costs as they grew.

Having done this, his company has found real benefits,  having one software version for all customers, having virtually an infinite, but also an elastic resource.

And he hasn’t stopped. Today he’s still pioneering – looking for ways to continually optimize. And he’s on a quest for that elusive, exceptional customer interface…

We can learn a lot from his past experience and his future directions.  Not only about how to manage the cloud – but in how we might take new ideas like conversational AI and harness them to solve real problems for our companies and our customers.  So I was thrilled to have him come by our virtual studio for this week’s weekend interview.

Hey, if you are reading this, please take a minute to let us know what you think. We do this for you, the listener and we can only get better if you help us.

Have a great weekend!

The post Laurent Simoneau, CTO of Coveo – Talking about cloud and AI on Hashtag Trending, the Weekend Edition for February 25, 2023 first appeared on IT World Canada.