Matt Ober is a general partner at Social Leverage. Matt was most recently the Chief Data Scientist at Third Point, where he built the data analytics and technology platform used to enhance the firm’s investment capabilities in equity, structured credit, venture capital, and cryptocurrency. Prior to joining Third Point, Matt was the Head of Data Strategy at WorldQuant and part of the WorldQuant Ventures founding team, focused on private investments in fintech, data, and technology companies. This piece first appeared on The Rollup, Matt Ober’s newsletter.

What does the future of expert networks look like? Can we use AI? It’s natural to think about customer support and call centers being enhanced or even fully run by AI. But what about an expert network? Do we really need humans interviewing humans? Can we leverage AI to ask the questions? Do we get more from AI than we would from humans? We could understand voice inflection, sentiment, etc. We can create transcripts, summaries, scores, and reports.

Tegus was acquired by Alphasense. We are seeing consolidation in the expert network transcript space. Data is as valuable now as it’s ever been. What if expert networks could interview experts 24/7, whenever the expert is available? I know I hate filling out a calendar of my availability when asked to do an expert call. What if I could do the call at 10 pm on a Tuesday after my family is asleep? I speak to a machine that sounds like a human, which asks me questions about a specific topic. Then after the call, the expert network has a transcript, summaries, extracted data points, analysis of my tone and sentiment and produces scores. You could offer this to clients at a fraction of the cost of a normal expert call. You could multiply the amount of calls you are doing regularly 100 times.

What are the benefits of using AI for this? You could take the survey business to the next level. How many of us have been asked by an expert network to do a survey for $25 to $75 for anywhere between 10 to 30 minutes of our time? What if this was done via an AI machine over a call? They could get my answers but also get additional derived data from my tone, some commentary at the end, and then be able to auto-generate reports.

The expert network space saw disruption when Tegus changed the game and did calls at cost to capture the valuable transcripts. But now we can take this to a whole new level. Arguably you could run thousands of calls a day if you had the demand and supply of experts. For example, Ribbon.ai, a Social Leverage portfolio firm, can do phone screenings 24/7 using its AI Recruiter offering. What if a product like it could ask questions of experts instead of candidates? There are so many ways to capture unique, rich data from a call, and doing phone screens is just the beginning.

I can imagine a world where we see new up-and-coming expert networks that are 100% machine AI interviewers. I can imagine a world where the top expert networks partner with AI companies and increase their expert calls by 100 times and create a transcript library that is growing 100 times, month over month. The AI capabilities are out there. It just takes ideas and execution now!