Microsoft Veteran Rich Ciapala Joins Kasisto as Senior Vice President of Engineering

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Apr 16, 2018, 09:00 ET

NEW YORK, April 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Kasisto, creators of KAI, the leading conversational AI platform for finance, today announced that Rich Ciapala has joined the company as senior vice president of engineering. Ciapala will lead Kasisto's platform engineering team, comprised of software engineers and architects, artificial intelligence and machine learning experts, and data scientists, from its headquarters in New York. He will manage the efforts underway to enhance and grow the KAI platform and continue Kasisto's aggressive growth in conversational AI and bank adoption with leading financial institutions around the world.

"Rich is joining us at a critical point in our growth. Financial services companies around the globe, from retail and commercial banks to wealth management firms, are looking for opportunities to use conversational AI to increase customer engagement and retention, and bolster their bottom line," said Zor Gorelov, CEO and co-founder of Kasisto. "With KAI, we're leading the charge as the top conversational AI brain deployed at banks, with a proven track record of engaging millions of customers and delivering measurable business results. Rich's experience in building enterprise-grade solutions with cutting-edge emerging technologies designed to scale within customer organizations will help us enhance the KAI platform to continue the aggressive growth we are experiencing."

Prior to joining Kasisto, Ciapala worked at Microsoft for 25 years, where he helped design and develop products, including Azure IoT Hub, Bing, Microsoft HPC Server, and Visual Studio. While at Microsoft, Ciapala led engineering teams responsible for architectural specifications, feature design, implementation and testing in myriad environments to create complex systems that meet the demands of enterprise customers spanning industries, languages and geographies. He was part of Microsoft's financial services practice and brings a wealth of knowledge about the financial services industry, working with some of the top banks.

"I am excited for the challenge of building an AI platform that allows enterprises to add a conversational experience to engage and do business with their customers in a secure and scalable way. These institutions can serve their customers even better by making each one of those conversations more proactive," said Ciapala. "As a platform, we need to empower financial institutions to design, deploy and improve their own conversational experiences and consumer journeys to meet their specific business needs within their own ecosystems and brands. Kasisto is already at the forefront of this technology, and I look forward to help take its solid foundation to the next level."

KAI enables financial institutions to acquire new customers, as well as engage, support and generate additional revenue from existing customers via human-like, intelligent conversations with smart-bots and virtual assistants, anytime, anywhere. Built with the deepest AI portfolio in the industry, KAI is an agile platform with self-service tools to customize and continually improve consumer experiences and seamlessly add new features. Ciapala will be focused on platform development to meet the increasing demand for Kasisto's products in existing and new markets – continually improving the KAI platform to include new AI-powered features and enhance the deep learning tools to collect, train, customize and integrate data so the KAI-powered bot and assistant is accurate and productive from day one. These efforts will accelerate customers' time to market, and once deployed in production, streamline the process for adding new features, markets and languages.

ABOUT KASISTO
Founded in 2013, Kasisto is on a mission to enable companies to attract, engage, support, and transact with their customers via human-like, intelligent conversations, anytime, anywhere. Kasisto's conversational AI platform, KAI, powers omni-channel bots and virtual assistants with deep domain expertise across mobile apps, web, messaging platforms, wearables, and IoT devices. With contextual and personalized conversations, they fulfill requests, solve problems, and predict needs as well as help companies support and market their products and services. Built with the deepest AI portfolio in the industry, KAI is an agile platform with self-service tools to customize and continually improve consumer experiences and seamlessly add new features. Marquee customers include DBS Bank, Mastercard, Standard Chartered, TD Bank, and Wells Fargo. As an SRI International spin-off, Kasisto leverages decades of artificial intelligence research and IP to create a full-stack, scalable, enterprise-ready platform. For more information visit www.kasisto.com. Follow Kasisto on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

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SOURCE Kasisto