Deon Nicholas, CEO and Co-Founder of Forethought: Amplifying Diversity through Celebrity Investments and Startup Growth

HIS STORY
In high school, Deon built an artificial intelligence-based learning tool that read and understood his history notes and quizzed him before tests. While in college, again and again, he kept coming back to the idea that if he could help himself study with AI, he could use similar technology to help others. After reading more about Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Deon became interested in how these could be used together to help with knowledge management. Now, the man who pioneered NLP sits on the advisory board of Deon’s company.

COMPANY STORY
Forethought, the AI and Machine Learning Platform for the enterprise began with its focus on customer support. The company’s AI can learn from internal documents, email, chat, and even old support tickets to automatically resolve auto-route tickets correctly, and quickly surface the most relevant institutional knowledge. In 2018, Forethought debuted Agatha, an AI-powered support agent, that has reduced support resolution times by up to 30 percent and increased the company’s revenue by 46x.

Today, Forethought develops AI solutions tackling the most challenging areas in enterprise, and Deon is bringing a unique perspective to the industry and changing the face of leaders in the enterprise. On this episode of The Grit Daily Podcast, Deon spoke about Forethought recently announcing its Series C funding round, and its previous rounds include a star-studded list of investors including Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures, Sean “Diddy” Combs, LL COOL  J, and Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith.

Deon Nicholas, Co-Founder and CEO, Forethought
Deon Nicholas is the CEO and Co-Founder of Forethought, the AI company whose mission is to transform customer experiences with human-centered AI. Forethought has raised $100M in venture capital, was listed in the Next Billion-Dollar Startups in 2021, and won TechCrunch Disrupt in 2018. Before starting Forethought, Deon built products and infrastructure at Facebook, Palantir, Dropbox, and Pure Storage.