At Cogito Corp, co-founder Dr. Ali Azarbayejani develops software that guides human interaction. His company enhances empathetic responses from call center employees with AI.
As CTO of Cogito, Azabayejani uses augmented intelligence to flag moments of emotion – such as indications of frustration – in live calls. His company’s artificial intelligence can then prompt call center employees to note those emotions and tailor their responses accordingly. Azarbayejani’s role puts him in charge of developing and improving this software. Cogito uses state-of-the-art technology not to replace, but to enhance empathetic conversation.
Cogito recently received CCW’s “Disruptive Technology of the Year” in 2019. This award recognizes its rapid growth into the telemarketing world.
Cogito’s Origins and What It Does
Cogito grew out of the MIT Human Dynamics Lab. Headed by some of MIT’s top faculty and alums, the company received funding from many sources. In fact, even the US Department of Defense contributed to Cogito’s development .
“We have the computational power to do massive amounts of learning,” Azarbayejani says. “We have the data and we have the networks to bring it together, and the storage to store it all. That’s really what has allowed us to realize the theoretical capabilities of complex networks.”
Cogito provides cues to agents and allows supervisors to monitor calls more efficiently. Furthermore, it alerts them automatically to calls “in which a customer is having a poor experience.” As a result, Cogito helps call centers provide better service via live “streaming analysis of conversational dynamics, such as mimicry, consistency, turn-taking, tone, and tenseness.”
Ali Azarbayejani: Businessman, Engineer, Ironman
Azarbayejani first involved himself with Cogito in 2009, “building the engineering, machine learning, and product teams and leading innovation.” However, before guiding empathetic conversation, he studied aerospace engineering, electrical engineering and computer science, and computation geometry at MIT.
Azarbayejani’s doctoral research at the MIT Media Lab inspired his first startup, Alchemy 3D Technology. There, he created camera technology that could track, match, and automatically adjust for smoother video.
In addition to being an engineer and researcher, Azarbayejani competes in triathlons and runs endurance races during his free time. Comparing an Ironman Triathlon to building a company, Azarbayejani notes that pacing and resilience are vital to both. “The Ironman is a long race and you have to be prepared to deal with whatever comes up, and you can still have a good race.”
He recommends the same resilient attitude for a startup, treating them both as “marathons, not races.”
The Future of Machine Learning According to Ali Azarbayejani
According to Azarbayejani, the initial application of Cogito was meant to be in “telephone outreach operations with chronically ill populations that have very high rates of clinical depression and very low rates of detection and treatment of clinical depression.”
Responding to the concern that automation takes jobs away from people, Azarbayejani notes: “Automating things that can be automated I generally feel is a positive thing. And putting people to use in functions where we don’t know how to automate things, I think is always going to be an available path.”
Above all, Azarbayejani focuses on enhancing call center experience. “Our mission is centered around helping people have better conversations,” he explains simply.
