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Artificial intelligence may be all the rage these days, but Michael Peterman was an early adopter of the technology. In the early 2000s, the Naples native worked for a company called AccuData in Fort Myers, where he closely monitored what big tech companies like Amazon and Netflix were doing with all the data they were collecting. I started. “It was around the time when the big Silicon Valley companies were launching early machine learning,” he says.
But the venture that acquired AccuData wasn’t really interested in pursuing machine learning. Peterman realized the potential and decided to strike out on his own, starting his own company in 2007. “I founded VeraData to leapfrog the status quo at the time and bring cutting-edge analytics and vast amounts of data to the nonprofit industry, an area that perhaps needs it more than any other.” is.”
Currently, Fort Myers-based VeraData has approximately 70 employees and uses AI and machine learning to help approximately 400 different nonprofit organizations improve their fundraising and marketing efforts. . VeraData is described as a marketing company, which is exactly the case, but it also calls itself a “performance-based decision science company.” Charities such as the National Children’s Cancer Society need to make all sorts of strategic decisions when it comes to fundraising, and VeraData helps them understand how best to spend their digital marketing money, from the type of font to use in mailings to the size of envelopes. We will support you in every decision. dollars, and perhaps most importantly, how to identify your optimal audience.
“We leverage machine learning and human-assisted artificial intelligence combined with vast amounts of data, advanced creative strategies, and production science to help nonprofits grow their donor pools while raising more funds more efficiently. We’re helping them expand,” Peterman said. “We dig deep into the complexity of donor motivations and preferences.” VeraData calls this field “donor science.”
In a time when qualified workers are difficult to find, Peterman says hiring top technology talent in Fort Myers isn’t as difficult as you might think. “There is a high concentration of data talent in this space,” he says, adding that the company has offices in Fort Lauderdale, New York, Romania, Ukraine and India, and a diverse workforce of remote locations. Peterman himself currently lives in Sarasota.
What does the future of AI look like? According to Peterman, this is a difficult question to answer well. Just like the human brain, AI will continue to get smarter as it continues to accumulate data. But unlike humans, they never forget.
“As more detailed information is captured and standardized, more and more decision-making will shift from humans to AI,” he predicts. “There are no miscalculations or mathematical mistakes, and you no longer have to rely on intuition.”
Beyond that, he says it’s hard to imagine how AI will ultimately impact society. “My bias is to focus on the positive side of this, because that’s our business. But I think it’s important that we come together as a species to establish global oversight of AI development. I’m happy to be working on it,” he says.
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