“Next-Gen Entrepreneurship: Leveraging AI for Business Growth,” a panel at the Wisconsin Economic Summit 2024, featured (from L to R): Lonni Kieffer, Corey Jaskolski, Taralinda Willis, and moderator Craig Dickman.
Next-generation Wisconsin entrepreneurs have tapped the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to grow their companies and solve problems for their customers.
Three company founders shared their insights at the third annual Wisconsin Economic Summit, hosted by WEDC in La Crosse Oct. 15-16.
Corey Jaskolski, founder and CEO of Delafield-based RAIC Labs, leads a company that provides deeper insights and more accurate visual data analysis for a wide range of applications. Labeling that data by hand takes enormous amounts of time and money.
“You can’t label billions of images. It takes huge amounts of people,” he said, adding that AI make it possible to process that information in an intuitive way that helps customers.
When Jaskolski decided to leave a job with National Geographic and come to Wisconsin, he said, friends either didn’t believe him or they expected him to start an agriculture-related company.
“Starting the company here, I thought the biggest challenge was going to be getting talent, and I was pleasantly surprised that that’s not the case at all,” he said, citing the superior quality of life in Wisconsin compared to Silicon Valley. “We’ve been able to recruit really good talent.”
Taralinda Willis, co-founder of Madison-based Curate, which analyzed large amounts of data at the municipal level to make it useful for business, had her successful company acquired by FiscalNote in 2021. AI was a key component in that success.
“We gathered data from a little more than 12,000 municipalities across the country and 4,000 school districts,” she said. “Finding the needle in the haystack is where we used a lot of AI. … That’s where AI has been really powerful and interesting.”
One challenge Willis faced was startup funding. She recounted a meeting with a prospective investor in Curate who balked at its small number of customers, saying Willis needed at least 1,000 customers to justify an investment.
“Just for the record, we had about 225 customers when we sold,” Willis said, urging more education in what investing in a startup really means. “That can really improve the network and ecosystem here.”
Another firm capitalizing on AI’s promise is Green Bay-based Aramid Technologies, a company that produces SmartCert, which digitally and interactively manages often voluminous supply chain documentation.
Lonni Kieffer, the firm’s co-founder and chief operating officer, said AI has provided a “Tom Cruise jump-on-the-couch moment.”
“It’s that exciting for us,” Kieffer said. “We’re extracting over 200 different data points from that documentation,” enabling the automation or streamlining of examining parts for country of origin, chemical and physical analysis, and other factors that must be evaluated as part of the intake process.
Kieffer, whose company is supported by the innovation hub and venture center TitletownTech, said startups are heavily focused on the potential and power of AI.
“It’s so exciting to taking something that you can customize, that’s going to generate high-quality data and the kind of results companies need to move forward with their operational goals—reducing costs and supporting that younger generation of talent,” she added.
