John McKinley has a unique background of running huge technology organization as well as startups.   John has run technology for such companies as General Electric, Merrill Lynch, AOL, and News Corporation.  John has been awarded CTO of the Year, and has received a variety of awards for products he led the development of in the financial services, entertainment, and education sectors.

 

John's work in the area of artificial intelligence goes back 18 years.  His initial work in the AI sector was the delivery of the first robo-advisor solution for Merrill Lynch, which allowed the company to better serve a wider range of consumers.

 

John also has done work in the area of natural language processing.  Powerset was one of the first sophisticated commercial NLP offerings in the market.  It was sold to Microsoft, and its technology became an integral part of the Bing query parsing solution.

 

Most recently, John has been an advisor to companies in the bot space, most notable of these being Conversable, which has delivered AI-based conversational solutions for such clients as Pizza Hut, Sony, Viacom, P&G, and others.

 

The focus on AI runs in John's family.  John's 16 year old son, Liam, won the first International Botathon, sponsored by VentureBeat.  Liam was the only student entered in the contest, and beat over 250 adult contestants from around the globe.  Liam's creation is SkoolBot, an NLP conversational interface for Google Classroom.

Over the last several years, companies in his portfolio have successful exits to such acquirers as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, RealPage, AOL, Zynga and others.

Mr. McKinley is a graduate of the Wharton School.