I have a confession to make -- Much to my father-in-law's dismay, I have never been a science fiction fan. In fact, I have never been much of a fiction fan in general. Little did I know that was about to change when I decided to join the team here at Sorcero.
Perhaps, I should have been tipped off by the line in the job description that read, "It also doesn’t hurt to be a closet Trekkie, always dreamed of your own Hitchhiker’s Guide, or making dragons come to life," or the sign that read "We are benevolent dragons" on the door as I started my first day in the office, but I truly had no idea how ingrained sci-fi and fantasy was in the heart of the organization.
Yes, the company's name, "Sorcero," does sound an awful lot like "Sorcerer," which is why I preceded to tell everyone at the first networking event I attended on their behalf that we were magicians. After all, the power of artificial intelligence can feel a lot like magic. I returned to the office the next day to tell this to our CEO, wholeheartedly expecting her to agree with me. To my surprise, she argued that we were not magicians at all. Dipanwita then explained the difference between magicians and sorcerers, terms I had been using interchangeably up until this point. A magician is born an ordinary mortal and must learn magic and spells from books, whereas a sorcerer is born a sorcerer and is inherently magical.
When put in this context, I would certainly much rather be a sorcerer and that is when the fantasy world started to make a lot more sense to me. I began to realize how one could draw inspiration from science-fiction and apply it to their approach to business. All of the concepts I had read about in non-fiction professional development books could be explained with metaphors about magic and sorcerers and DRAGONS!
Dragons are certainly a common theme you will see throughout our work here at Sorcero, whether it be how we talk about our platform, our product releases, or our customers. In fact, we even have a service mark for the term Dragon DropSM, which is our low-code environment where applications can be developed, managed, and deployed.
Sorcero continues its sci-fi trajectory with our internal dragon-based naming convention. We realized the need for coming up with better names than "Gen 1A" and "Gen 2A" and loved how each dragon had its own personality. For instance, one of our first releases was named for a dragon known to be incredibly inquisitive and, at that stage in our life cycle, we were relying quite heavily on user input. Our latest dragon is named "Amaru," believed to be capable of transgressing boundaries to and from the spiritual realm of the subterranean world. As you may know, Sorcero recently closed a round of funding, so for us, Amaru represents the transition from Pre-Series A to Post-Series A.
Much like dragons, the industry that we target, life sciences, is dominated by very large, powerful, influential companies sitting on hoards of jewels. Their jewels consist of their expertise and knowledge, much of which is unstructured data that is widely dispersed. It is difficult for these organizations to unlock the value of these jewels. Their customers and stakeholders are expecting a purely digital experience with fluid access to information specific to their needs. This presents a unique challenge because it is not just access to the data itself, but to the governing workflows. The information is used in processes that are often quite manual and very tedious, which is not scalable and potentially ridden with human errors.
Enter Sorcero! Our Language Intelligence Platform is the only way to unlock the jewels. It is designed to augment the expertise of those working with complex scientific content. Sorcero enables life science enterprises to make information more accessible/usable and provides the workflows specific to their use cases in one centralized platform.
Now, if that doesn't read like a fantasy novel, then I don't know what does. However, the fantasy is now a reality.
In a recent interview, our CEO said, "Reading science fiction allows me to be creative and gives me great product ideas." Those far-out, super futuristic innovations depicted in sci-fi and fantasy can actually be achieved with the power of artificial intelligence and is a source of inspiration for our company. So, while I would still not consider myself a Trekkie, I am certainly a fan of dragons and the magic Sorcero is bringing to our customers every day.
