New York, Feb 9, 2021: Artificial Intelligence (AI) has shown significant possibilities for workplace progress, and growth in productivity. As we are surging towards technological advancements, businesses are embracing AI and unlocking its power of extracting actionable insights for workplace safety. After businesses have started realizing the enormous value of AI and its value in data analysis, they started to look after its more beneficial and productive sides. With an intent to acknowledge and admire some exceptional leaders who are visioning future with advance technologies, CIO Look is coming up with its edition “The 10 Most Influential Artificial Intelligence Executives in 2021.”
One of the avid entrepreneurs featuring in this edition is Sercan Esen, the Co-founder and CEO of Intenseye.
Sercan Esen: An Ardent Entrepreneur in the Artificial Intelligence Universe
We listened to the personal experiences of a successful entrepreneur and AI specialist from Sercan Esen, the Founder of Intenseye, an artificial intelligence supported employee health and safety platform.
Can we listen to your story from corporate life to the enterprise ecosystem?
After completing the Management Information Systems Department of Boğaziçi University Istanbul in 2015, I worked at Sony Electronics Istanbul in three different positions until the establishment of Intenseye. After being in the software team as a “Senior Software Developer” for two years, I started working on AI projects, which is my main area of interest. In this position, I can say that I worked on a brain-computer interface, AR / VR, and artificial intelligence concept projects, as well as established and managed teams that developed these projects. After that, our Intenseye adventure started.
“Now Intenseye is my job, I will quit corporate life.” how did you get to the point?
Our interest in machine vision and deep learning developed in a coding competition we participated in in 2017. Still, we were excited to do AI-based video analysis with my current partner Serhat. In the contest we participated in, we had already set up a system operating with the same logic. As a team, we designed glasses that visually impaired people can use and aim to make their lives easier. When you put on the glasses, the system detects the objects in the environment and turns them into meaningful sentences. With this project, we were the first in the country. Since those days, we find the potential of artificial intelligence very valuable. When we consider the values we can participate in human life, our excitement got even more and we decided to quit our corporate lives. Then we decided to construct Intenseye mentally and bring it to life physically. We say it is so good so far.
So what exactly does Intenseye do? Can you talk a little bit about the added value you create in the business world?
In fact, we are an AI-powered employee health and safety platform. Our main goal is to try to predict work accidents through image processing and to prevent dangerous situations before they happen. And from day one, we dreamed of creating a global product that everyone can use. We connect to cameras that exist in production facilities and storage areas; We make real-time analysis with artificial intelligence-based deep learning algorithms and receive real-time notifications of security breaches from the system. We do not need any hardware or setup for these processes, so existing camera systems are sufficient. Of course, we do not obtain personally identifiable information from the visual data we process in all these processes. We attach importance to the privacy of personal data.
How far have you come since you started?
Since the beginning of our Intenseye journey, every application we have developed has enabled us to integrate into different sectors and different systems. Although we start with sectors such as energy, automotive and auto parts, we now operate in food production, heavy industry, textile and chemical industries in addition to these industries. Occupational health and safety is, of course, important in every field, especially in this sector. In this sense, I think we offer a solution to a vital problem for production facilities. Our partnerships with global companies such as Google, IBM, Microsoft and NVIDIA, the support from our investors and the degrees we have received in various competitions are also proof of this.
So how did Intenseye achieve success?
Both globally and in Turkey have made large-scale cooperation with organizations such as I mentioned above. Right now we are rapidly scaling our team across Istanbul and New York. We were able to respond to our users needs very quickly to implement new features to solve their daily health and safety challenges. This agility and teamwork are the two major effects behind our success.