Short answer: Jennifer Dulski says DealMap used NLP sentiment analysis on tens of millions of local reviews with models her team trained themselves. Google bought it, and she says those pieces sit inside Google Maps business descriptions today.
Watch this answer from Episode 52 (starts at 4:23) · Episode 52 notes and transcript
From Episode 52: She Sold Her First AI Company to Google in 2009. Now She Is Fixing How Teams Work., starting at 4:23.
Jennifer Dulski [4:22]: Yeah. It was so interesting. So AI did exist. It just wasn't available to all of us. And I know this because my first startup, the DealMap, which I did not mention in my intro, was an AI company. In 2009, we ran an AI company where we did sentiment analysis and used natural language processing to analyze tens of millions of local reviews, and we actually built the models ourselves. Like, my whole team would stay up super late at night coding, like, big bill is bad, big burger is good, and training the models on how to learn that stuff. And ultimately, Google ended up buying that company, and, those early pieces sit inside Google Maps now when you look at businesses, and it says, this place is casual and good for kids and so forth. So it's been around, and I knew in 2020 when I started this business that I wanted it to have an AI component. My original outline says personalized custom AI coach, but I couldn't really build it in 2020 the way we wanted to.
Jennifer Dulski [5:27]: So Rising Team actually originally started it more as software, particularly team building software. The idea was any team, any leader at any level could run a team building interactive session even remotely, so everyone's distributed without needing to hire an outside facilitator. And in 2021 and 2022, when we were mid pandemic, that was urgently needed for most companies. And then in when all the LLMs launched, we were able to build this personal trainer AI layer on top. And what makes it amazing is that, there are a lot of AI coaches on the market. The thing that we do that is hard to do is is the team building piece helps RT, which is the name of our AI coach, understand your team. So instead of giving you generic advice, it can say, okay, you need to have a hard conversation with Tom. Tom really likes his feedback super straight on. Let me write you a script. Let me practice that conversation with you so it will land with Tom.
Jennifer Dulski [6:30]: Versus if I want to have a different conversation, with Debbie, I can say, Debbie likes some encouragement with her feedback. Let's draft a script that's gonna work with her.
Sam Nadler [6:40]: Jen, I would love to see a demo.
