Invested in Our New Reality Season 14: Downtown: Evolved.
Episode 5: Invested in Downtown Corporate Culture with Erin Kelly, CEO, Advanced Symbolics Inc.
Why does an AI-driven market research company with clients around the world continue to call Ottawa’s ByWard Market home? Host Sam Laprade chats with Advanced Symbolics Inc. CEO Erin Kelly to find out what Ottawa downtown offers, and what could help it reach its potential.
Below, you’ll get a full guide to Episode 5 of Season 14: Downtown: Evolved, including a full transcript and a snapshot of the themes covered in the conversation led by our Season 14 guest host Sam Laprade.
In this episode:
- Erin explains the evolution of askpolly – an AI-powered market research platform for predicting outcomes based on human behaviour.
- Erin explains why Advanced Symbolics continues to operate out of its ByWard Market location in downtown Ottawa.
- Erin and Sam discuss what other cities around the world are doing downtown right? And what might help Ottawa reach its potential.
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About the podcast:
Invested in Our New Reality is a dynamic podcast where business leaders offer honest observations about navigating our ever-evolving reality. Each episode provides a space for entrepreneurs to speak candidly about the challenges and opportunities they’ve faced, arming listeners with practical advice on how to thrive in the future.
Season 14 – Downtown: Evolved
Ottawa is a globally recognized, innovative, and future-ready city and the best place to learn, work, live, and play.
A vibrant city can provide access to a diverse and highly educated pool of tech talent, world-class R&D, low business costs, innovation ecosystems, larger markets, and an exceptional quality of life, all of which significantly impact the success and growth of loyal entrepreneurs and companies.
Season 14 of Invested in Our New Reality Downtown: Evolved celebrates the companies that make their home in Ottawa’s downtown and those working to transform and revive the city’s centre.
Episode Highlights:
- 2:21 – An overview of Advanced Symbolics and its role in the AI field.
- 4:43 – A bit of history behind askpolly – the company’s AI-powered market research platform.
- 7:05 – How askpolly can change the way companies and organizations make decisions.
- 9:26 – Why was Ottawa’s ByWard Market the right fit for Advanced Symbolics Inc.?
- 10:15 – What cities around the world are doing downtown right?
- 11:55 – What changes can be made, or what can be added to help Ottawa’s downtown be more attractive to businesses looking to relocate?
- 12:33 – What examples from cities around the world could be transported and applied here in Ottawa’s downtown?
- 14:06 – What keeps Erin in Ottawa, and why does she continue to choose Ottawa?
Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Simplecast
Full Episode Four Transcript:
Host, Sam Laprade: Hi, I’m Sam Laprade and I’m so glad you’re joining us for Invested in our New Reality, Invest Ottawa’s podcast for business leaders and entrepreneurs.
Cities have seen a lot of change in the past five years and Ottawa is certainly no different. That’s why the 14th season of this podcast is called Downtown: Evolved – because we’re looking at the evolution of Ottawa’s downtown core. We’re chatting with leaders who call the downtown their home base, as well as the people helping to transform and revive the city centre – a network of engaged stakeholders, helping Ottawa maintain and grow its reputation as a vibrant, exciting place to live, work, play and visit.
Today, we’re chatting with Erin Kelly, the President and CEO of Advanced Symbolics Inc, an Ottawa based company that has become a globally recognized leader in using artificial intelligence for market research.
And Advanced Symbolics. Inc. is no stranger to Invest Ottawa. In fact, the company has been part of the Invest Ottawa Scaleup program and it’s been an IO client company since 2019.
Erin herself is a longtime resident of the National Capital Region, and for all of these reasons and many more, I’m thrilled to have her on the podcast today. Erin, welcome.
Guest, Erin Kelly: Thanks, Sam. Great to be here.
Sam: How are you? How is business?
Erin: Business is actually really good. It’s been a very, very great year. We were fortunate even during COVID because obviously being in market research, there was a lot of market research happening during COVID. I mean, it was, it was good, I mean different types of research, right? Obviously different customers. Coming out, of course, it’s a very new world and so there’s lots of market research that needs to take place. It’s been really great and definitely a lot of change. We’re seeing a lot of change in the industry and we’re fortunate that we’ve been able to adapt to that change to keep up with it. There’s a bit of softness I would say in the investment market for tech these days. It’s not like the boom days of the pandemic. But business and customers are strong.
Sam: Now I like to think I’m kind of hip, so I throw around the terms AI and all that, but I’m not I’m not up on it like you are. So we’ve all heard about AI, we’ve all heard about artificial intelligence. But I want you to talk to us a little bit more about exactly what Advanced Symbolics does in the AI field.
Erin: I’m actually getting to the point like we are AI, but sometimes, I think I should stop saying that we’re AI is like everything’s AI now, right? And reminds me of the gluten-free days when, like, you had gluten-free water. Right? Like, it’s like, obviously. So it’s like attacking AI on it or green on it or, you know, we’ve just entered that phase so. But thank you for asking.
So just fundamentally what all real AI does, is it learns autonomously. OK, so AI adapts and it learns. So you’re not pre-programming it to do something. Often you will have AI’s that are trained to do something. Now Polly is the first commercial AI in the world that actually doesn’t need to be trained by humans. So she is completely self-learning, which is very unique.
What she does is she’s predicting human behavior, so predicting outcomes. And we’ve done everything from we’re doing foodborne illness in Canada, so right now, avian flu, predicting the spread of that, we identified the salmonella outbreak in the fall and predicted its spread and when it would resolve. So she is a predictive AI.
And the way she does those predictions is by knowing how to properly sample a given audience on social media, and that’s the important part. You don’t want to be listening to everybody because there’s a lot of bots, there’s a lot of nonsense. You have to be able to know who to listen to, and we get our guidance on that from the census data because you have to make sure you have the diversity of the population represented as well. But she is able to listen in on the right people in order to identify issues and, more importantly, predict how people will react to a given scenario in the future.
So you know, of course we’re using this for healthcare research and all of that and mental health. We also use it just for brand research, companies that want to test their messages before putting them out there want to understand it. Doing product development – you know, what will the car of the future look like now that people are working from home more and things like that. How should we design products differently. So, things that don’t exist yet, but you want to post them to Poly and use her as market research to figure out how people will react in the future to a given scenario.
Sam: OK, that’s really cool. That’s really cool. So I love the fact when that you call her, she and that she’s called Polly. So, talk to me about the calling her she and calling her Polly. Where did the name come from.
Erin: Yeah. So it’s very important for us in the beginning to see Polly as a member of the team. We even say AI stands not for artificial intelligence, but for alien intelligence, right? She’s a different kind of intelligence, but she is intelligent. She’s an autonomous learner. And so, we wanted her to have that personality and everybody in the company calls her she or calls her Polly. She’s a part of our team. She’s female, because to us, Polly’s main trait is empathy. She is empathizing with people because she has to understand them, right? In order to understand people, you have to be empathetic. So that’s why we saw, as a gender, she is leaning more toward, you know, if you look at certain traits that tend to be more toward one gender or the other, she’s more empathetic, more female.
The name, what happened was, initially what we used to do is each of our projects, each AI would get its own name. So we had Rocky for our, you know, tourism AI and we had all of all of these other AI’s right? Because they were subject matter experts, if you will. You know for different projects.
Polly was actually initially she was the AI for the Brexit and Polly got Brexit right. She predicted it would be an exit at 52%, which is exactly what it was. And when I was being interviewed for that, I was saying she this and she that and the person who was interviewing me said you keep calling the AI she, does she have a name? And I said yes actually her name is Polly. And we called her Polly because that was political right? So, it was short for politics.
And after that, we retired Polly because she was Brexit, you know, we probably should have called her Brit or something. But we retired her, but then customers are coming in saying I want Polly. Polly got Brexit. I want Polly and we’re like, Polly’s gone, like, no, no, no.
So finally, we just decided, you know what? She’s always Polly. She’s smart. She can do lots of different things. And that is our AI, and we don’t give different iterations, different names now.
Sam: Oh, I am so glad I asked that question. You have no idea. I love it. I love the answer. OK, so as you mentioned, your AI Polly technology has been able to predict everything from election results to spread of disease to brand impact. How does this change the way that companies and organizations make decisions? Because a lot of, you know, think back, a lot of this was navel gazing – data informed stuff has only been around for the last couple of decades.
Erin: The goal of our company is to help organizations, whether that’s the public service or companies, associations, to make better decisions for people, presumably for their customers or their constituency.
So for example, let’s look at government and we don’t usually work for political parties, but we will work with the public service like Health Canada or what have you. How do they get their information? Well, they can do surveys often the surveys are like small groups, and it’s really hard to get people to respond. They’ll do public meetings.
But you know, the people who come out to public meetings tend to be a special class of group. You know? Really activists really in that far, you know, group of the population.
Moms and dads were busy running their kids to sports and all of this they don’t have time to go to town halls, right? And so often you’re being influenced by lobby groups, what does the Chamber of Commerce think? What does this group think? And you’re not hearing from real people because real people don’t have time or don’t take the time to fill out your surveys and all that.
But they are talking online and we can get that perfect sample, as I mentioned, of real people. On social media and we have all sorts of ways of determining that they’re appropriate for what we’re trying to measure.
And by doing this, you know, if you want to understand what effects, so for example, one of the things we’ve looked at is if you have a subsidy for low-income people to use public transit, will they use it? How will they use it? How what’s the best way to get that to them?
And by measuring the right people, the people that you want to address and getting that information, you can best deliver that program to that right audience. And so that’s what we want is for things to be delivered better and for people to be better represented to companies and to government, so that they can have better delivery of services.
Sam: Brilliant. Your clients are located all over the world. I’m so proud of that for you. It’s amazing. Your offices are located right in Ottawa’s ByWard market. Why did you feel the city’s downtown core was really the right place for you to set up shop Erin?
Erin: The number one attraction to us for the Byward Market was the proximity of the University of Ottawa. So, you know, if we want to get students coming in and interns and hiring and being centrally located, it is also centrally located, so it’s great we have staff who live in Gatineau, we have staff who live all across in different parts like Kanata versus Orleans and so being central all the trains and buses come downtown, so being central was important to us for that reason.
Sam: One of the big conversations we’re having right now in Ottawa and of course you’re not going to be surprised by this, is the theme of this Seasons podcast is Ottawa’s evolving downtown core. You do a lot of traveling for your job. What cities are doing downtown right? And what can we learn here in Ottawa from maybe cities that you visited?
Erin: There’s so many, and you know what I like different things about different cities. But you know I love London. I find London so easy to get around. And New York, I find New York very safe and fun like the parks in New York are amazing. You go there, you can sit down, you can play games. They’ve got books, you know? It’s just like a trust system. Bryant Park and all of these, you know, great restaurants. Different. There’s like something for everybody. You’re not just eating at chains or what have you. You can go to really funky places.
Cities where I find I really love is where they’ve got a good food scene. They’ve got really great restaurants that draw you in. Excellent public transit – travelling to a city, I’m not renting a car, right? I ride the subway, I ride public transit and so being able to easily access it, it’s logical, it’s easy to pay, you’ve got Google Wallet, right? Which is great.
I used to get the Oyster card and all of these every place I went, but now it’s just Google Pay. It’s fantastic. Maybe an app or two. So you know vibrant downtown that’s safe, accessible and there’s things that draw people downtown and give it that groovy vibe. You can bring a customer to a nice restaurant and have a good experience. That’s what I look for in cities.
Sam: So as someone who works right in the heart of the city, what amenities could be added or what changes could be made to help Ottawa’s downtown core become that go to place for businesses looking to relocate.
Erin: We’ve been there for seven years – and you know, we like having the restaurants, we like having the Rideau Centre there. I mean there’s lots to like about being downtown. We’re all downtown people. We like downtown, but I don’t feel that Ottawa is doing what it needs to do to preserve our downtown.
Sam: You know, when I think about all the things we like about other cities. Is there anything that you see that maybe the lessons learned from there that could be transported here in terms of cleaning up that the downtown area?
Erin: Public housing. I think we’ve just got to have a backbone and we’ve got to admit we have a problem and find ways to help the homeless people in our city.
Sam: If we used Advanced Symbolics AI Polly technology to gather information on how Ottawa residents feel about revitalizing the city’s downtown core. What do you think we’d find out from Polly?
Erin:I’d have to run it and see! One thing that I do know, have the downtown be more occupied in the evenings. There’s a lot of, you know, everybody goes home to the suburbs and ByWard Market is a little bit of different in the summer. But in the winter it’s kind of dead at night and that makes it spooky. And the other part of downtown is obviously it really does close up quite a bit.
There’s not enough to do except for Elgin St. but there’s not enough to do. Fine dining and all of that and activities, I think people would like to see, I mean, it’s going to take a long time I guess, but if you’re moving that stadium downtown, maybe that will help.
There needs to be more to do in the evenings and nice fun things to do in the evenings and that’s I think the number one thing people would say.
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Erin: And Sparks Street. What do we do with Spark Street? Right? Like you know, it’s again it’s just like a waste of such an opportunity there.
Sam: Let me ask you, what keeps you here in the Ottawa region? I mean, you’re like you said, your customers are all over the globe. What keeps you in Ottawa?
Erin: The green space. So I I grew up in Toronto, so I spent part of my childhood in Montreal and part in Toronto. So I lived in the, you know, the two big cities that cradle us and I moved to Ottawa in my 20s because a friend of mine moved here and I came to visit her and I fell in love with the outdoor activities. Like you know, you can go to the lakes here, you can swim in them – you can’t swim in the lakes in Toronto.
We have Lake Ontario, but nobody in their right mind would go swimming at a beach in Toronto, really. At least not when I was a kid. Maybe they’ve cleaned it up a bit, but really it’s not, you don’t have that culture. Here, we do. We go to the beach, you can go swimming, paddling.
My kids grew up kayaking and paddle boarding. My daughter is now going off to McGill and she’s she wants me to drive her at the very last minute cause she’s like there. I’m gonna be downtown Montreal. I’m. Not gonna have my paddle board. I’m not gonna have these things, right? She loves to go spelunking at Lac Phillippe and skating on the canal. Well, when it’s open. But these things are unique to Ottawa. You don’t have that in those big cities.
And when you want to take in a concert trip, go to Toronto, make it make a weekend out of it and have some fun. We used to have more concerts in Ottawa. We don’t have as many since COVID. It’s got the advantages of what a downtown should have, you know? Because we are a city of a million people and that’s great. But 20 minutes and you’re it’s like you’re in the country. You’re in cottage country. So, it’s just fantastic, right?
And even, you know, Dow’s Lake and all of that you don’t have to go 20 minutes you can canoe or kayak down the canal and it makes you just feel like you’re in Amsterdam right? I love that about Ottawa.
Sam: It is quite a beautiful city and I know I’m proud to call it home. I can tell you are as well.
Erin: Yeah, very much.
Sam: I probably could talk to you for two more hours. I’m fascinated by everything you’re doing. It has been a delight to speak with you. I can’t wait to follow your journey more and really follow your company as well.
I’ve been pleased to learn more about the remarkable work being done at Advanced Symbolics, but also your thoughts on the city centre. Thank you so much for being part of this conversation today Erin.
Erin: Thanks for having me, Sam.
Sam: And thank you so much for having all of our listeners join us. Again, we’ll see you next time. Thanks for listening to this episode of Invested in Our New Reality. We’re committed to bringing you dynamic conversations with business leaders who are transforming and reviving the National Capital Region.
So, stay tuned to our next conversation about Downtown: Evolved and be sure to reach out to us at investottawa.ca with your thoughts and comments. We’d love to hear from you. Until next time, I’m Sam Laprade and I’ll chat with you again soon.
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