Big name signing in the technology sector. Sherpa.ai, the leading Spanish company in artificial intelligence services applied to data privacy, has incorporated Tom Gruber, one of the creators of Siri, Apple’s assistant, and one of the world’s leading experts in artificial intelligence, according to Cinco Días.
The move comes just four years after Gruber, who left Apple for good in 2018, became a product strategy advisor. Gruber will now become the company’s director of AI strategy and will be in charge of managing the company’s growth. In March 2021 it closed a €7.2 million financing round and is preparing another round of around €20-30 million to make the final leap and become a European leader in the field of artificial intelligence.
In an interview with this newspaper, Gruber believes that it is an optimal time to join the company as the industry is at a point of maturity. ‘Artificial intelligence is growing at an accelerated rate and the key is to define which business model we will go for in order to grow and be strong in the next generation of products,’ he stresses.
Gruber stresses that the system is now dominated by the exploitation of big data with artificial intelligence in order to create a fast and correct response system, without errors. ‘It is mature, but it has a limitation such as regulations, because if they mix data, there can be violations of private data policies. And according to Sherpa’s new CEO, the future lies in data sharing. ‘It comes from many different sources and the key is to define how we can make an artificial intelligence model that works with data that comes from many sources, from different companies, with different workers and with different intentions. That’s what we’re looking at at Sherpa,’ says Gruber.
In this sense, the sector that may represent the biggest opportunity for the future is healthcare. ‘It is an activity that affects everyone and that moves trillions of dollars worldwide, but that has hardly any technological development linked to artificial intelligence. Only the big guys have it and understood the value’. In his opinion, this will change as soon as it becomes more digital and shares data.
The Bilbao-based company, whose first steps were taken in Spain and whose natural growth area is Europe, wants to take advantage of the incorporation of Gruber to make the definitive leap to the US. ‘We are intensifying our commercial efforts in the USA more than in Europe. There are three key sectors for the future: healthcare, where we will be announcing a deal shortly, finance, governance and security. All are much more mature than in Europe.