Fred Brown, a serial entrepreneur and early innovator in the artificial intelligence arena, is taking his newest AI venture to market and expects to ramp up quickly. 

The venture is Omniscia Health Inc., which does business as Omniscia AI. The startup has launched a proprietary AI platform that's designed to provide consumer-facing interactions for businesses, often in highly regulated industries. 

"On the mission side of things, it's, 'Can you use human emulation to make the world a better place?'" Brown says. "That's a big part of our mission. We think it ties directly together. We want to do the right thing. We're not just going out there looking for dollars."

Brown says the company has been focused on research and product development through its first few years and has raised a total of about $450,000 in investment capital so far. 

With its first few customers secured, the company is generating revenue, he says, and it expects to grow to $1 million in annual recurring sales within 24 months. 

To drive that growth, Omniscia has hired veteran Inland Northwest tech executive Brandon Tanner as the company's CEO. Tanner, who most recently was the executive vice president of business development at Vega Cloud, joined the company at the beginning of this year.

Including Brown and Tanner, Omniscia now has seven employees, six of whom are in the Inland Northwest. The company's employees work remotely, though Tanner says the company expects to move into office space, likely downtown, in the coming months. 

Early clients include health care and tech clients outside of the Spokane area, as well as Aequus Sports LLC, which does business as USL Spokane and owns the Spokane Velocity professional men's soccer team and the Spokane Zephyr professional women's soccer team. 

Ryan Harnetiaux, managing partner of Aequus Sports, says the company has signed a letter of intent to finalize a multiyear engagement between its soccer teams and Omniscia. He says Aequus "will focus on leveraging their AI platform for initiatives centered around community engagement, as well as adding value to the club’s growing focus on serving the community in several areas, including youth development and mental health in athletes."

Tanner says one of the tools Omniscia AI is developing for Aequus is an interface through which fans can ask questions of virtual versions of players and receive accurate answers. Such a system will rely on approved information, rather than data pulled from outside sources. That system intendeds to counteract what are called in AI circles "mirages," where AI technology produces statements that have no basis in reality. 

In addition to content control, other characteristics of Omniscia's technology that are in place to ensure accuracy include what the company refers to as a rules engine, which is intended to place guardrails on generative AI, and a testing harness, which is intended to ensure consistency and conversational accuracy. 

Brown says he started Omniscia focused on the health care market, with an old idea of his to develop a "health coach in your pocket." He says the company still is working on making inroads into the health care market, including exploring behavioral health markets, but it began exploring additional vertical markets, including banking, financial technology, education, sports, and the name, image, and likeness environments that enable collegiate athletes to generate revenue. 

"At the highest level, we're looking for a problem that we can solve that drives revenue with AI. And we're looking in places where being right matters," Brown says. 

He says that in just the vertical markets the company is currently working on, the market potential is $500 million. 

While that number might sound lofty, Tanner points to Fortune Business Insights data that places the global AI market value, as of November, at $747 billion and a Bloomberg report that estimates a $3.2 trillion generative AI market by 2032. 

Brown says, "That's why Brandon and I are so excited about it. We call it greenfield. We don't have to replace something. We're giving them something new to drive revenue in a micro market that's part of a much bigger market."

Tanner also points to a survey in which 7% of those polled say they have the right skills in the AI realm.

"Everyone has got to have an AI story right now. If only 7% are saying that they're confident they've got the skill sets and the competencies, it's a huge problem," Tanner says. "So, the folks we're talking to are thrilled, because we bring them an actual real AI solution that's actually accurate and works."

Human emulation

The key for Omniscia, Brown says, is its focus on human emulation, rather than data analytics. 

It's an area in which Brown has extensive experience through his previous startup, Next IT Corp. Founded in 2002, Next IT formed after Brown acquired a small AI company and began developing automated chat features for organizations' websites. 

Next IT's early customers included Alaska Airlines, for which the Spokane tech company developed a virtual assistance feature known as Ask Jenn, through which customers could ask common travel questions and book flights. The company also received national media coverage when it developed Sgt. STAR  as a conversational, online recruiting tool for the U.S. Army. 

Verint Systems Inc., a publicly traded New York company, acquired Next IT and an affiliate for $30 million in 2017. 

Brown says some of the underlying principles that made Next IT successful are relevant in Omniscia AI, though the technology is more advanced and complex. 

The most important distinction isn't in the specifics of the technology but in the scalability of the products, he says. 

At Next IT, each product was a custom build that would cost north of $500,000 to complete, he say. 

Now, he says, "We can build something for way less than that, 5% maybe. Therefore, we can go down market, and we don't have to bang heads with the big tech staffs of Fortune 100 or Fortune 500 companies. We can take the very same platform that we've spent two or three years building and apply it to different customers."

A long history

Brown and Tanner first met during the early Next IT days, just over 20 years ago. 

While in college at Whitworth University, Tanner and fellow classmate Sam Fleming founded A Perfect Web Inc., which built websites, a system for taking payment through those sites, and what essentially was a content-management system. Looking for more guidance with the young company, Tanner connected with Brown at a LaunchPad Inland Northwest event, and after Brown learned more about A Perfect Web, Next IT acquired it. The technology from A Perfect Web became one of the original engines to control Next IT's AI technology.

Tanner and Fleming, who is now chief technology officer at Spokane-based AI software company Moat Metrics Inc., worked at Next IT for years before Tanner decided to move on, taking roles at Isothermal Systems Research Inc., which developed the SprayCool electronics cooling system, and data backup/disaster recovery company IT-Lifeline Inc. before moving on to Vega Cloud. 

Through the years, though, the two tech veterans' paths continually crossed, and Brown says that when he decided he wanted a CEO for Omniscia AI, he thought of Tanner. 

For Tanner, 50, the move gives him an opportunity to lead an organization in a way he hadn't done since the Perfect Web days. 

"This gives me a chance to do some of the things the way I would do them," he says. "It doesn't mean it's not collaborative. It just means I'm in that seat, and I'm going to go about things the way that I see and the way I want to go to market."

Brown had served as CEO of his previous two ventures. Before Next IT, he had started LineSoft Corp., a utility software company that eventually was acquired by Liberty Lake-based utility-tech giant Itron Inc. for $42 million. 

This time, he has taken the titles of president and chief technology officer so he can focus on the parts of the business he most enjoys. 

"When you get old, you get grumpy and what you want to do is what you want to do," says Brown, 64. "I want to do the thing that I'm really good at, which is technology. All that (stuff) I don't like doing, he's great at."