Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians jazz, soul and blues. My guest today all the way from New York City is Andrei Papancea, co-founder, CEO and Chief Product Officer of NLX, the conversational AI platform. Growing up in Romania, Andrei first developed his web design skills while still at primary school, you heard that right, with his parents registering a business for him to sell his services to local companies. At high school, he started playing around with AI – Artificial Intelligence, of course you knew that – as he says, “learning a lot by doing” and that approach took him to American Express where he built the first version of the company’s conversational AI engine which went on to process the majority of the traffic on its website and mobile app. In 2018, Andrei launched NLX with co-founders Vlad, his brother, and Peter Szerzo, that’s Hungarian just in case you wanted to know. Their vision, to redefine how people interact with brands by offering frictionless conversational AI technology. NLX’s clients now include Comcast, Red Bull and United Airlines and last year they launched The Showroom, a live customisable conversational AI platform for Amazon web services customers. It’s lovely to have you here and as I mentioned, you’re in New York City so we’re, we’re doing this with the wonders of technology. How are you today?
Andrei Papancea
I’m good, thank you so much for having me today, very excited to chat.
Elliot Moss
Good, good and chatting’s obviously rather important in this world because most of now, in all sorts of ways, are chatting with entities, I’m going to use that word, that aren’t real and that is enter stage left, Andrei. Tell me about your fascination with artificial intelligence and when that began.
Andrei Papancea
Well it’s probably important to note that I’ve been fascinated with technology in general for as long as I can remember, back when I was still in Romania. I’ve been in the United States for about eleven years now but back when I was growing up in Romania and my parents opened up an LLC when I was in Fifth Grade so I can legally sell my web development and design services to local businesses. That journey took me across the computer science stack if you may from building things within operating systems all the way to front end, back end, mobiles like everything from websites to mobile apps to, you know, back office systems, I kind of dabbled with a little bit of everything there and along the way I used to pick up a lot of the projects I didn’t know quite know how to do and as I moved over to, to the US, came here for college, then moved over to New York to get a Masters in Computer Science here at Columbia University and then after a few startup stints both while at Columbia and a little bit after, I ended up joining American Express. And after a strenuous sequence of interviews with American Express and no concrete context of what I was going to work on except for the people I was interviewing with came off very intelligent and interesting so, I was just kind of curious to join them. First day on the job, they asked me like, “How do you feel about working on bots?” and I said, “Well I don’t quite know what you mean by working on bots but sure, let’s go for it” and fast-forward a year, year and a half later, by the time I left American Express, the platform I built for them was handling a majority of the customer service interactions, essentially the first touch point between American Express and its customers over American Express.com and the American Express mobile app and specifically what they built there was a conversational AI platform and assistant that validates card members with all kinds of questions or business processes that they were looking to address with the company. Through that experience, I was exposed to a lot of interesting, well first of all the world of not, I wouldn’t say just artificial intelligence because I’ve been exposed to artificial intelligence more broadly speaking ever since I was in school, artificial intelligence has existed for many, many years and I think maybe for the last twelve months or so, it’s been somewhat synonymous with conversational AI specifically and more so even with the likes of ChatGPT but it’s really not accurate to call of AI just related to those particular services but I was exposed to a great deal of providers in the space at the time that enabled companies or developers to leverage natural language processing technologies so to speak and simply put, those technologies are concerned with extracting structured context out of unstructured text, so simply put, if you say hello to one of these systems and you send it one of these national language processors, you might get back, “Hey, I think this s a greeting, I’m 92% confident that that’s what it is” and then from there, the application, the leverages of output and make sense of coming back and saying, “Hey, I’m the American Express customer service agent, how can I assist you today?”.
Elliot Moss
Andrei, you mapped out very articulately how you arrived at this point of identifying some really interesting technology but you said so many things that are worth quickly picking up. LLC, you mentioned, a limited liability company, your parents set this up when you were in Fifth Grade. How old were you are that time, just because our, people in different parts of the world have different ages for these different year groups. Do you remember?
Andrei Papancea
I want to say probably, eleven?
Elliot Moss
Eleven.
Andrei Papancea
Or twelve.
Elliot Moss
Quite normal, quite normal that a person decides to set up their first business and then have a range of web services. I mean that in itself okay and then I know you studied, you mentioned it but you’ve got a Computer Science academic qualifications, lots of them and different universities. Why, I mean some kids, I’ve got four kids, some are really interested in tech, I mean they all are but we live in a different world to the one that I grew up in for sure, some are super interested in it, some are less interested in it. What piqued your interest about technology, do you remember what it was that it gave you that made you think that life was better with it?
Andrei Papancea
To be perfectly honest with you, someone offered me money to build them a website and at the time I think what they offered me was the average monthly salary in Romania and as a kid, that was just super exciting. I was already very interested, you know I was fortunate enough to have a computer growing up, my parents were able to provide that for my brother and I. By the way, my brother is a co-founder in my current business, which we’ll talk about, but yeah, it was, it was just exciting for me that I got to work on interesting puzzles to solve because you know, I was effectively being paid to learn things that I was interested in learning and it rapidly expanded from there to a point where I was able to, to sustain a lot of my just personal, I wouldn’t say expenses etc., my mum and dad would still feed me and whatnot but other than that like you know…
Elliot Moss
That’s nice. That’s good, it’s good to…
Andrei Papancea
I still remember when I bought my first watch and things like that, it was, it was cool, I just enjoyed making my own money.
Elliot Moss
And it’s good to know they fed you because I mean obviously otherwise we have to have a whole different kind of conversation about kind of parents they were, I am sure they were wonderful. Did they also look after the commercial stuff then, I mean obviously an eleven year old, twelve year old kid, however numerate you are, however great you are technically, if you’re getting money in, you need to make sure it’s collected properly, it’s accounted for and all those things. I assume that they then took on that role for you until you were able to.
Andrei Papancea
Absolutely. My mum managed all of, all of that aspect and effectively made sure that everything was done to spec. I was just concerned with finding customers, bringing them in, transacting them and then delivering the output.
Elliot Moss
Did you, I mean, you say all those things and of course those, that is the foundation of any business, find your market, go get people, but you were a kid Andrei, I mean you’re pretty young now but was that daunting at the time or was it just no, no, I’ve got something I can offer and I kind of know where to look? I mean how did you go about even ascertaining what we would now call a business plan looked like?
Andrei Papancea
To be perfectly honest, it was organic because once I got that first website in place then you know at some point the word spread and then someone else had a friend of a friend who needed something and I got introduced and I delivered for that and then after the first two, three projects…
Elliot Moss
You’re just doing it.
Andrei Papancea
…most of the, the, the offer so to speak was, was pretty organic and referral based. I didn’t actually pursue like a more traditional let’s say any sort of like lead generation or anything like that, there was just demand. And mind you this was early 2000s where, you know, most websites, Flash was still around I remember when I built the bunch of like, I was super excited to build animated websites and there was this one particular customer who, yeah, needed like a very interactive set up because they had the more consumer facing brand, I got to build even like commercials that would get played in, in my home town on like a giant like screen and stuff. So like for me a lot of these things were cool and the fact that there were all these people and, and entities interested in me delivering these types of services, it was just fun.
Elliot Moss
Just fun, I mean that’s, I love the way you just described that and you’re going to hear lots more from my, my Business Shaper, who is describing building a business as fun, which is of course ideal, right, otherwise it would be a pretty miserable pursuit. Stay with me for much more from Andrei Papancea, he is my Business Shaper today, he’s the co-founder, CEO and Chief Product Officer at NLX. Right now though, Let’s hear a taster from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions which can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Dulcie Pearson, strategy consultant at MDRX and Tom Grogan, CEO of MDRX discuss how AI is unlocking value for businesses across the economy.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you pop ‘Jazz Shapers’ into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today all the way from New York City via Romania, is Andrei Papancea, co-founder, CEO and Chief Product Officer of NLX, the conversational AI platform. We were talking about you and how you naturally grew your business, how there was demand and you just went and did your thing, you make it sound so easy. Obviously at some point you then, the family or you make a decision for you to be educated and go to the US. You’ve been in the US for eleven years you said, is that correct?
Andrei Papancea
That’s correct.
Elliot Moss
That feeling of leaving and that feeling of being an immigrant, let’s start with coming to America, invoking a very famous film which is one of my favourites, but that moment and you arriving, what was that like if you can cast your mind back, how did you feel emotionally about coming to a foreign country to study at a ‘big university’?
Andrei Papancea
It was a mix of emotions. I was excited and at the same time I didn’t know what to expect. I remember my first flight to the US ever which was particularly to come here for college. One, I sat next to this one individual on the plane who effectively spent the better part of the flight telling me about how I need to be very careful about what I do and be worried about the police and whatnot in the US and it was just this very eerie conversation where put a little bit, I don’t know if I would say fear but just kind of wariness of like where exactly am I going? By the way, that never, I never came to experience whatever he was talking about.
Elliot Moss
You’re quickly saying, by the way, it’s okay, I’ve had no brushes with the police, it’s fine.
Andrei Papancea
I’m a law abiding citizen so it turns out that generally works okay. But the entire trip was just sprinkled with a bunch of I don’t know, new things but I didn’t quite know, even up until I got to campus then I got faced with let’s call it the American hospitality or for a while that I looked at a little bit as a façade, mainly because people ask you, “Hey, how’s your day?” and where I grew up, if someone asks you about your day, they care about how your day was, so it was like I would start like telling them about my day and whatnot so, I had a little bit of like a culture shock but I feel dissipated relatively quickly, mainly because for the first time I was just emersed in this multicultural environment, there were like you know students from all over the world with all kinds of interesting stories and backgrounds and I feel my adjustment was pretty rapid because of that and now, looking back, like I don’t know if I could live anywhere else, I enjoyed the multicultural nature of, of the United States but in particular I also live in New York, right, which is probably the…
Elliot Moss
Which is a very different place.
Andrei Papancea
Crown jewel in that regard.
Elliot Moss
But I think and we’re going to move into the NLX world shortly, the sense that you try new stuff and the sense that in the world of work that you try new stuff, are you like that in your personal life? Was this move and obviously this is not an individual at a young age making a decision on his or her own but in general do you, are you quite happy to push the edges of what happens in Andrei’s personal life or is that more of a thing that he focusses on because it works and it excites him intellectually for business?
Andrei Papancea
Most certainly. I, I reflected on this more in the last couple of years especially through my current entrepreneurial journey. I do prefer playing at the edge, being at the cutting edge. I prefer being uncomfortable rather than playing it safe. I don’t like routine. Obviously, there’s a certain amount of routine I have in my life just for, for sanity’s sake but I like my day, each and every single day being somewhat ad hoc, obviously I have a schedule, I have a calendar and whatnot but I enjoy not knowing what I’ll have to do in a week, if that makes sense. And that applies across the board in my life, although I do, you know, just enjoying sports for instance, extreme sports, including I took my brother heli-skiing at some point, right.
Elliot Moss
Of course.
Andrei Papancea
I was a little afraid for my life but then after that I, I just enjoyed that adventure that that feeling of adventure and just the challenge of, I don’t know, like the challenge of solving problems makes me feel alive, let’s put it that way and that applies across the board, not just in this instance.
Elliot Moss
That’s a really nice way of putting it. And on the, on the NLX website there’s a great line which I love, which is, “We set our imagination as the limit rather than starting with what the toolset can do today.” Let’s talk about NLX for a minute. So at what point did you, and I know it wasn’t if I understand, apart from your very first business, what was your very first business called way back in the day in year, in primary school, do you remember?
Andrei Papancea
Er yes, Andrei Media and Consulting.
Elliot Moss
Andrei Media and Consulting, of course it was. Then you set up a, I think a co, co-founder in another business called Megata, Mangata, sorry.
Andrei Papancea
Mangata.
Elliot Moss
An on-demand, premium gift service delivery, as you do, delivery service, that was for a couple of years and then I think, you moved into this new world. So just what tipped you over the edge to say, “I am now going to set up this business with my brother, Vlad” and it was Peter wasn’t it, Peter from Hungary.
Andrei Papancea
That’s right.
Elliot Moss
What was the, what was the tipping point at that stage?
Andrei Papancea
Mangata was a quick start up stint I did with my brother, that was our first start up together and effectively he was just in his junior year in college, going into the summer, didn’t have an internship lined up and then I, I had this idea so I thought I’d create an internship for him and turned out into a, a nice little business experience where we learned a whole bunch of things and eventually he went back to obviously complete his college and both my brother and I tend to like riff off of each other, we worked on a lot of consulting projects in the past to, especially as he grew into a young adult like we start collaborating on projects and we were at dinner one night.
Elliot Moss
What’s the age difference, Andrei?
Andrei Papancea
We’re four and a half years apart. Nowadays it feels less and less but yes, we’re maybe a small school generation apart. And we had at some point a project for a client that required us to do some conversational AI style stuff, like some chatbot that enabled that particular business to interface with their clients through this conversational interface and after that project and a few others, we realised like well hold on we’re rebuilding this thing over and over again and the other thing I realised is, nobody was really looking at this space or the technology through the lens of how I experienced it at American Express and coincidentally, my high school friend, Peter, is of Hungarian heritage but we grew up in the same home town and we met at a contest back when we were both back in Romania – by the way, shout out to Peter, he is an Olympic Gold medallist internationally in physics, so anything Math driven, Peter is just phenomenal.
Elliot Moss
You know what’s emerging, I got to tell you, you know what’s emerging, Andrei is that I’m talking to someone obviously I knew is rather intelligent, I mean a couple of computer science, you know Columbia University and one before that, you are surrounded by people that we may call geniuses, I mean this does help, I’m not, you know I’m not disregarding your entrepreneurial flair but the intellect you need to actually make this stuff work under the hood is big, right, these aren’t, these aren’t normal industry pursuits, people that get into…
Andrei Papancea
That’s right.
Elliot Moss
…artificial intelligence really need to understand how to make things work.
Andrei Papancea
That’s right. Well, and ultimately, I’m perfectly content with my skills and abilities so, I like to get other people.
Elliot Moss
Which we, and how would, and how would you define those skills, what’s your number one skill? If I only gave you one to put into my magic hat, what would it be, the super skill?
Andrei Papancea
I’m just a generalist problem solver and in that problem solving part of the solution might involve relying on others to deliver it but I tend to, I don’t know, over the years as I reflected that I think I have a pretty good ability at dealing with abstract concepts and distilling them into something that can then be solved. We have a, an amazing advisor who used to run Blue Origin for a number of years, took it from ten people to over 1,500 as it’s at present and I’ve always been fascinated with space and whatnot so, you know, I asked him at some point so like “Hey, Rob”, his name is Rob, “How does one get started on a rocket company?” you know, like especially when you’re just ten people like, and his answer was just like, I found it to be so insightful because it, it’s that concept that you know Amazon has I think touted pretty early on where you work backwards from the problem and it effectively, they thought well first of all you know rockets have some shared components from where engineering got us to today and one of the most important components is the pay load, they 20.25 this case, they will probably want to bring back down to earth. Well, how big should we make that pay load? Let’s make sure it fits six people. Why six people? Three couples, right, so all of a sudden you think literal rocket science and distil it into just smaller problems that you can solve as a unit and then eventually you can solve the more holistic problems. So, I, I think a similar approach to, or I’ve learned to take a similar approach to problem solving over the years and in that there are problems I can solve and there are problems that I can define that I need someone else to solve.
Elliot Moss
And, and just to articulate in your own words what problem were you solving when you set up NLX?
Andrei Papancea
We’re solving the problem of enabling businesses, enterprises, to streamline their operations to scale more easily using the power of conversational AI. As you mentioned, concepts like artificial intelligence, even software engineering more broadly, they’re complex, they need subject matter experts and people with a level of expertise that might not be accessible to everyone so, my goal and my co-founder’s goal through this journey is to simplify and democratise access to this type of technology, in particular conversational AI in this case, and allow businesses to focus on what actually matters, their business problem, how they scale efficiently, obviously the pandemic has exposed a lot of operational inefficiencies. I was in New York throughout and one day you can literally buy toilet paper, the next day you cannot and that’s, it’s a pretty surreal thing to experience especially in a place like New York, right, where for as long as I’ve been here, it feels like the world caters to it and to see how brittle that layer of convenience in today’s world is, was, was quite fascinating. So ultimately you see all these businesses that can’t meet demand to answer questions or help their customers and our product and our company is meant to enable them to, to scale those operations but scale them properly in a way where their customers receive good service, so it’s not just about deflection where “Hey, here’s a bot, I’m going to make sure you never get to speak to a human being ever”, it’s like, “Hey, here’s a bot and there might be a number of things that you can self-service on right away versus waiting half an hour or an hour on hold.”
Elliot Moss
Makes sense. Stay with me for my final chat with Andrei Papancea who is making problem solving sound very, very straightforward and I think you and I both know it isn’t. We’ve also got some new Jacob Collier so that’s another reason to not go anywhere, it’s all coming back here on Jazz FM.
So your business, this business which is solving the problem you just described about making it easy for businesses to scale using artificial intelligence appropriately, as you said. You’ve had it funded, people are investing behind you, significant funds, where does it go from here? What are the, the big challenges that you see right now? I mean, I’ll give you mine, my view of artificial intelligence is, it’s misunderstood. Artificial intelligence and there’s, there’s two big schools of thought, it’s great for humanity and it’s a massive, massive threat for everybody that’s got a job. Where does Andrei sit in terms of those very simple ends of the spectrum?
Andrei Papancea
The way I look at this is not unlike maybe the industrial revolution or let’s say the automotive revolution, right. Up until the care was invented or let’s maybe go to the steam engine, right, you’d rely on carts and horses and things like that and all of a sudden you have trains and other types of vehicles that can transport people faster, more efficiently, with less, you don’t need animals anymore for just to kind of leave it to that. You know, the technological revolution evolved all the way to where you have computers and now computers can do all kinds of things better and better and faster for people. Now, if I just kind a double-click a little bit on what the state of artificial intelligence is today, all artificial intelligence models today are rooted and deeply rooted in statistics which means they are effectively stochastic models, there are some level of, of just Math that goes behind them, there’s no like actual sentience with them.
Elliot Moss
What was your name then? What did you call the model?
Andrei Papancea
Stochastic. So it’s like you know, it’s, it’s just rooted in, in Math and statistics, there is no…
Elliot Moss
I see.
Andrei Papancea
…magic so to speak. The magic is that computers can execute a lot of calculations and computations very, very fast and obviously algorithms have evolved over years where the fascination and, and the innovation of things like ChatGPT for instance, are made possible. And by the way, absolutely fascinating technology, super helpful in so many different ways but at the same time going back to the impact of such technology, especially like ChatGPT or you know whatever an Alexa does, which by the way we, we enable these enterprises to deliver these applications across chat, voice, in our multi model channels. Now, in practice, if you call up your bank for instance, right, and you are asking about some FAQ, some repetitive, routine process that these artificial intelligence systems can automate. That poor soul on the other end of the line is not excited to be reading off a script, right, maybe I’ll plant this for you and anyone who, who listens to this, next time you talk to someone to get service of any kind and you have a more complicated process, just see how likely the person on the other end of the line, they’re excited, they’re excited to, to just kind of like do something that’s outside of their norm and that’s because humans are, are fantastic at dealing with abstraction, computers are not, computers are inherently actually very stupid, I’m going to say it, they’re just able to execute transactions, millions, billions of transactions incredibly fast and that beats humans by a longshot at those particular tasks that are repetitive and predictable and routine etc., but then we’ll still need humans to drive the innovation, to use the marvel that the human brain is that’s able to kind of deal with so many abstract concepts to do something else, I see it as a shift and I think you can think of technology in general like, like this, it’s meant to augment humans so it unlocks their time to do something else and that something else is hopefully something that can continues to better humanity, more discoveries, I mean people are explorers are their core, right.
Elliot Moss
So you’re positive that you are saying for humanity, if we get this right, there’s exploration, there’s fun, there’s the reduction in this, this boring stuff that doesn’t excite us. Well, I mean, I really hope you’re right and I think, I’m with you, I’m always an optimist however, I think even if the world’s burning, I go no, no it’s okay, we’re going to solve the problem. I would love to chat to you for so much longer, Andrei but we’re going to run out of time really fast. Thank you so much for making the time today all the way from New York City, where there is toilet paper now, for lots of good reasons, I mean it’s important that New Yorkers have toilet paper and we could have a whole other conversation about that as well. Just before I let you disappear into the sunset or sunrise actually, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Andrei Papancea
Well, let’s see, I’d say What a Wonderful World, it’s, it’s one of my favourite songs and I don’t know, I associate with songs that give me a very hopeful feeling, I’m a pretty positive person and yeah, I’d say it’s, it’s probably one of my favourite songs.
Elliot Moss
That was Louis Armstrong with What a Wonderful World, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Andrei Papancea. He talked about preferring to play at the edge, being uncomfortable and also saying he doesn’t like routine. All excellent traits for an entrepreneur. He talked about being a generalist problem solver, really important when you’re running a business and you set one up. And finally, I really liked this, he talked about working backwards from the problem. Not a new thing to say but a really good reminder of what makes things work, great stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.