Kaitlyn C's Profile

Thank you for writing about this Isabella! I always use Spotify’s daily mixes and suggested playlists, but I had no idea what was going on behind the scenes. I’m also worried about their AI-created music.. I feel that music creation should be left to individual artists and songwriters to preserve authenticity and our humanity! I would hate to have generic music created by AI dominate the music scene in 10-15 years. Usually AI is very exciting, but this particular use case is frightening to me.

Thank you so much for writing about ELSA, Lina! I’ve never heard of ELSA – I really appreciated learning more about the founder’s personal experience with the problem (pronunciation) and how she used that to create a scalable, affordable solution via AI. I hope ELSA expands beyond English!

Thank you so much for writing about SexyFace, Saad! I loved learning about how the founder used a commercial use case (dating) to train the model and then repurpose the AI for such a meaningful use case as saving refugee lives. I wonder what other use cases the technology could address – maybe for crimes and investigations, the technology could be used to scan through police databases for suspects that might match facial composites?

Thank you for this insightful post, Elizabeth! I largely agree with your points around value creation; however, I think the social newsfeed value creation lever can have a few drawbacks. For one, users can set their transactions to “private” or “friends only”, which negates this value-add feature for the platform. I was also told by a vendor that hackers take advantage of the social newsfeed to target individuals or small businesses (I switched my transactions to private after that). I also question the actual value-add to seeing some of my connections pay rent or pay someone for a drink (I find this somewhat creepy and invasive). In regards to Venmo’s sustainability, I agree with you in that it could be displaced by Zelle and Cash App (my mom and all of her friends use Cash App for reference). Zelle also has a huge advantage through its direct banking partnerships.

Thank you for writing this post, Jiwon! I’ve had my Peloton bike since 2018, and I’m a huge believer in the sustainability of its platform given its connecting world-class instructors with a passionate community of at-home work out fanatics. I think you hit it spot on when referencing the personal connections between the instructors and at-home riders – between the personalized shout-outs for milestones and birthdays to the instructors’ active social media engagement, I think Peloton has done an excellent job fostering the match and ongoing relationship between riders and instructors. I also find it interesting that Peloton constantly adds new instructors to the platform and strives to have such a diverse set of instructors so that riders continue to come back to the platform for fresh content and new connections with instructors.

Thank you for writing about this company, Patric! I’ve often thought about the discrepancy between the amount of wearables and health data that I track and the lack of deliverable, integrated health insights. I’d be interested to know if Evidation is currently profitable (i.e. does it have a constant stream of sponsorships and partnerships to support paying out a growing user base). I’d also be interested in the specific monetary rewards for consumers and if by receiving compensation for their data, consumers are essentially giving up all rights to their own health data. I’d also be concerned about Evidation’s screening of possible sponsorship partners. For example, if an insurance company were to leverage Evidation’s data to screen out less active or sedentary individuals, I wonder if this could lead to future lawsuits for the company. Overall, I think this is an excellent example of a platform providing a much needed service (integrated health insights) in exchange for critical health data that research institutions may leverage.

Thank you for the super interesting post, Isabella! I found it fascinating that CVS is using data analytics and predictive models to target patient cohorts with low medication regime adherence. I would love to know exactly which variables CVS uses to make these predictions. I was also wondering whether CVS could go a step further with healthcare personalization by integrating physician visits outside of its MinuteClinic (i.e. a patient would have to input their last 3-5 years of physician visits or a brief medical history prior to filling a prescription or making a MinuteClinic appointment). As a customer of MinuteClinic, I’ve really appreciated its scheduling tools (I didn’t realize these tools leveraged AI). I wonder if COVID helped accelerate some of these technology investments and implementations. I’m sure the high volume of vaccine appointments would not have been possible without their enhanced scheduling tools.

Thank you for the super interesting post, Karthik! I was surprised to learn just how much Kroger has invested in its data analytics unit, especially given the low margins and highly competitive grocery store market. I wonder how much of this investment was purely reactionary to Amazon/Whole Foods and Walmart, since both offer curbside pickup and delivery options. I worry that both of these options might prove more attractive to customers given the low-cost delivery option, not to mention these grocery stores are implementing a similar personalized shopping experience for customers. I also wonder what % of Kroger’s customers have detailed registered Kroger profiles versus walk-in customers without a store-specific profile. If a large percentage of Kroger customers are unregistered, I’m not sure how Kroger could segment its customer base and intelligently inform its data engine.

Thank you for the interesting blog post about TWC! I had no idea that they were acquired by IBM and am excited to leverage their highly specific GRAF forecasts in the future. I also didn’t appreciate that TWC was able to consolidate its 13 data centers in to the cloud and reduced the cost to 1/70th of the pre-cloud infrastructure cost. I’d be interested to know how long this migration effort took (and how expensive the implementation process was). I also wonder if the weather channel would consider expanding to B2B offerings in addition to its existing advertising programs (i.e. deliver businesses’ location-specific weather data and predictive sales insights for businesses that do not currently advertise with TWC).