An AI maturity keynote at Fórum Inteligência Mercado, São Paulo

The agreement was signed in São Paulo on 14 January 2019, five months before anyone stood on a stage. APES, the Associação Paulista de Ensino Superior, trading as Live University, booked Tarry Singh as a guest speaker for one hour at an event running on 10 and 11 June at Hotel Caesar Business on Rua Olimpíadas, Vila Olímpia. The host covered the flights, two nights at the Tryp São Paulo Itaim and the taxis between airport, hotel and venue. deepkapha.ai billed one thousand euros, described in its own schedule of charges as a symbolic amount for its AI philanthropy work rather than a commercial fee. The cover letter went to Fernanda Tozzi.

The event was Fórum Inteligência Mercado, 2019 São Paulo edition, run by Live University Ibramerc. Photographs from the afternoon of 10 June show the main ballroom full, people at long tables with notepads and headsets for simultaneous interpretation, two speakers working a stage lit green and magenta, and a sponsor wall of about a dozen logos including Geofusion, Alteryx, LexisNexis and Cortex. The forum's subject was market intelligence rather than machine learning, and the deck starts accordingly, from the beginning.

It opens with a plain definition: artificial intelligence, machine learning inside it, deep learning inside that. From there it climbs a five plateau model of AI maturity, with mathematics, statistics and engineering fundamentals at the base, then data visualisation, machine learning, deep learning and applied AI above. Two case studies carry the argument. The first follows a global telecommunications client across eight months, through a data science scorecard, an AI value map drawn per business domain, and business plans for more than twenty AI solutions valued in the deck at 2.5 billion euros. The second is the breast cancer work with the healthcare division of GOPA, where badly organised annotated images were cleaned up and a first prototype reached about 82 per cent accuracy on a very small dataset.

Two clauses shaped the hour. Private equipment was barred for projection, so the slides ran from the venue machine. No commercial approach was permitted during the lecture, which sat easily with a talk given at a symbolic fee. The closing slides ask the room to do two things: place their own organisation honestly on the maturity pyramid, and take on the human side of the change, meaning behaviours, attitudes, culture and projects that cut across silos.

He stayed for the second day. A frame timed at 08:33 on 11 June puts him at the simultaneous interpretation booths before the room filled, the darkened auditorium visible through the glass. Later that day the programme moved into the hotel lobby, delegates on yellow and purple stools, a Live University Ibramerc screen behind the speaker carrying the forum's line in three broken syllables: not by theory, not by test, by dis-rup-tive.