Martin Rand Podcast Transcript
Martin Rand joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Martin Rand. Martin Rand is co-founder and CEO of Pactum AI, which leverages AI and chatbots to create highly detailed autonomous negotiations and safe leading global fortune 500 supply chain and logistic companies, millions with experience as commercial lead for Europe at the climate corporation.
And having co-founded Vita fields, which was acquired by Monsanto. Rand has helped Pactum AI negotiate with industry leaders. As a Harvard trained negotiator and graduate of Stanford’s negotiation mastery program with a master’s degree in IT management. Rand is a driving force behind Pactum AI’s mission to revolutionize productivity and profitability. He also enjoys flying and is a licensed IFR pilot.
Well, good afternoon, Martin. Welcome to the show!
Martin Rand: Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me. It’s great to be on the show.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. I appreciate you jumping on, making the time hailing out of the great state of North Carolina. I know we do traverse the U. S., but we also traverse the globe quite a bit as well.
And so, making the time is always challenging, but love to do it. And this is what gets me out of bed every single day. So, Martin, jumping into your questions here, your journey from co-founding Vital Fields to leading Pactum AI is quite remarkable. Can you share what inspired you to transition from agricultural technology with fight a fields to focusing on a driven negotiations with Pactum AI?
Martin Rand: Yeah. So, I was a product manager at Skype when I started my career. I then set up my first company vital fields. It was an agricultural farm management system. And ended up. But scaling that internationally to seven countries and selling it to Monsanto’s Climate Corporation.
And in Monsanto and the Climate Corporation, I became commercial lead for Europe. And that’s where I had to negotiate deals. And that’s where the idea of negotiations and solving negotiations for global enterprises got started.
Brian Thomas: Thank you for sharing the story. It’s interesting how we go down a path, right?
And then we’re doing one thing and. Something, whether the job or a situation requires us to kind of pivot or switch gears leads us down another path. And that’s always inspiring in a lot of cases. So, I appreciate the story and Martin having been trained in negotiation at Harvard and completing the negotiation mastery program at Stanford.
How do you apply these academic insights to the practical challenge of developing AI negotiation technologies?
Martin Rand: We, we have built the company on these principles and by the way, I wanted to add to the last point that doing things leads you to new ideas. So, so I’m, I can now say that I’m a serial entrepreneur and some people ask, well, how do you, how do you.
Come up with such ideas with new business ideas, especially when there’s something so obscure like negotiations and large enterprises. And what I always say that you don’t come up with them. You come up with them by doing things by putting yourself into these situations. And so same with Harvard negotiation training. I got some painful negotiation experiences and then started looking into negotiations and turned out there’s a whole science behind negotiations that have been developed for 40 years in Harvard. And so that’s an endless source of value.
We started this company on the principles of Harvard program on negotiation, all of the strategies and tactics that can be used in negotiations for creating value for both sides. But it’s a gift that keeps on giving. So, now we go further, we go into negotiation. Orchestration, which is preparing for good negotiations, and that’s all being described in those principles. We’re simply using what’s already there.
Brian Thomas: Thank you and I appreciate you diving into kind of, you know, the ideas ideation of things come about based on again when we Have to make that pivot because we need to incorporate something else into our daily business, our job, whatever that is. And of course, Harvard’s negotiation training is, is phenomenal.
I’ve heard much about it throughout the years. And, of course, even on the 2nd time of. I heard about it on this podcast. So, thank you for sharing and Martin at Pactum AI. You’re pioneering the use of AI and chatbots in autonomous negotiations. How do you see AI transforming negotiation strategies for fortune 500 companies, especially in supply chain and logistics?
Martin Rand: Yeah, so I love this question. That’s a great question because what people usually think about is how can we get savings? How, how can the, the, both sides get a better deal out of this negotiation, which we have at hand, but actually you bring out a good point. The strategic element of this is much more important.
So, if you think about it. Having a machine that can negotiate tens of thousands of negotiations parallelly and very fast means that a fortune 500 could pivot the strategy much faster than, than their competitors. So, such new technologies, which are based on autonomous agents conducting business.
Can be used knowingly to adjust for shifts in the global economy if another disruption comes in, you know, we’ve had so many disruptions now starting from COVID. And now we see all these issues with, with supply chain in the Red Sea. We see the cost of capital changing. We see inflation.
Once those disruptions come in, an enterprise using autonomous agents to conduct their business can shift much more rapidly than their competitors. And as a result, be more efficient and create value for everyone.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. You’re absolutely right last I was going to tell you the last year just, it seemed to every podcast I had had some sort of a story around AI and the shift and how AI is making things way more efficient as far as some of those lower level tasks are now being completely automated and we’re seeing some advanced AI doing some advanced work where humans Are actually being shifted or moved into other roles due to some of the changes.
So, thank you for sharing and Martin last question of the day looking forward. What advancements in believe are necessary to further enhance autonomous negotiations and. Are there any particular challenges or ethical considerations that need addressing?
Martin Rand: So, so that’s, that’s another great question. And of course, everyone was excited about large language models and chat GPT when they first saw those and now we see kind of an AI fatigue, uh, but actually The real advancements in AI are, are just coming along now people just don’t talk about them so much anymore because it’s, it’s, we’re just in this cycle of, of the in this phase of the hype cycle.
I could bring out a couple of examples. So, Google’s DeepMind has created a system which operates kind of like a human brain, having the creative and the logical part. So, so far, the problem has been that Large language models have been amazing and creative, but they have also, you know, they hallucinate and you can’t really trust them.
Um, so, what they have now done with two systems, one, one is called alpha geometry and, and the other is called fun search functional search. Um, uh, they have, Solved math problems, which were previously unsolved, and they, they performed a math Olympiad on a gold medalist level. And the system does not just brought a, a brute force through these challenges.
It kind of solves problems like a human being creative, but at the same time structured. So, this is amazing that they were able to marry a logical and a structured system like that. And so, the developments in this space are just starting. Yeah, in terms of ethical considerations. You know, we have bias, we have misinformation all of these things, I think we as a society need to learn and mitigate and for some things also, we need to get used to, like, you can’t trust the video anymore or you can’t trust somebody’s voice anymore because it can be it can be generated.
But we have gotten used to this before, for instance, with altering images. Amazing.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And I appreciate you highlighting some of that. You know, we do show some examples through these podcasts of some of the technology has come out, but absolutely some of the, the technology has come out around large language models, you know, GPT models, right?
They’ve done so much to advance where we’ve seen AI just in the past 3 to 4 years so I appreciate the examples there Martin.
And Martin it was such a pleasure having you on today and i look forward to speaking with you real soon!
Martin Rand: thanks for having me on the show Brian.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Martin Rand Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
