Cowboy CEO Fred Brown is back in the saddle with his hands on the reins of another company in the forefront of artificial intelligence technology.

Brown currently is CEO of Colbert-based startup Omniscia Health Inc., which aims to deliver digital health care using Brown’s skillset in conversational AI.

“I’m enamored with health care,” Brown says. “There’s so much opportunity to make it more efficient and better for patients.”

The Journal last mentioned Brown in 2017 when Next IT Corp., the conversational AI company he founded in Spokane in 2002, was acquired by New York-based technology company Verint for nearly $30 million.

Next IT pioneered AI-powered virtual assistants, including “Ask Jenn” for Alaska Airlines and “Ask Sgt. Star” for the U.S. Army.

Next IT wasn’t Brown’s first rodeo in the tech arena. The same year he founded Next IT, Brown sold Linesoft Corp., a powerline design software maker, to Liberty Lake-based Itron Inc. for $42 million.

Brown founded Omniscia Health during the pandemic in early 2021, after his noncompete agreement with Verint expired.

Brown says Omniscia Health is using new developments in AI to make the platform faster, while putting up guardrails to generate consistent, repeatable, and ethical results.

One emphasis of Omniscia Health is providing a platform to recruit candidates for clinical trials using its advanced automated dialog engines.

“Protocols to do a trial might be very specific,” he says. For instance, part of the selection process for a trial might exclude people who are taking certain medicines or it might require patients to be in an advanced stage of a certain condition.

“We can automate that,” Brown says. “We can eliminate the time doctors and employees do that.”

The platform also can be used to promote trials.

“It can be used as a marketing or promotional tool to try to get patients to come,” he says. “There’s lots of ways we can do that.”

Brown says Omniscia Health’s target customers in the health arena include drug makers, government agencies, and insurance companies.

“The customer could ultimately be the patient,” he adds. For example, the technology could be used to remind patients to stay on medication and treatment schedules.

Omniscia Health currently has six full-time employees, all of whom work remotely.

“I like the virtual nonoffice environment,” Brown says. “We interact multiple times a day. My team is the best I ever had. … Every one of them is handpicked and stellar.”

The team has been concentrating on building a scalable platform for the technology, which will require the company to hire more people as it grows.

“We didn’t scale Next IT very well,” he says. “Last time, I was too much of a consultant.”

Brown adds, “We’ve spent two years getting a platform together.”

Now that the platform is ready to sell, the startup could become profitable in a matter of months, as the company is having some promising discussions with organizations in Texas, he says.

While the Omniscia Health platform is built on a health care model, it could be adapted to other applications, such as for the financial and sports and entertainment industries, Brown says.

“Anytime someone needs to automate the customer talking to the company, I can add value,” he says. “That’s what I do.”

For example, Brown says the platform has generated interest from a local concern outside of the health arena to assist with interactions with customers. While he declines to disclose the identity of the potential customer because no contract has been signed, he adds, “Let’s just say it’s a new sports team.”

The Cowboy CEO moniker is more than a metaphor for Brown, who was born on a ranch.

Just four years ago, at the age of 60, he won a calf-roping contest in Joseph, Oregon, against some of the top ropers in the world on a horse he trained.

“I’m still competitive,” he says. “I’ve roped competitively for longer than most guys.”

He also lives on a 160-acre ranch in Colbert where works with horses and raises about 100 head of cattle.

He says such activities complement his entrepreneurial drive.

“Most successful entrepreneurs have something they do that’s completely different. Three things give me stress relief: grandkids, horses, and my wife, Leslie. If I get stressed out, the best thing to do is get the grandkids on a horse—that’s two-fold relief,” he says, adding, however, “It’s hard to get my wife on a horse.”

Both as an entrepreneur, and as a rancher, Brown says he’ll never drop the reins.

“It’s a sickness being an entrepreneur,” he says. “I’ve started 12 companies, and hopefully I have six more in me. I will never retire.”