Clinc Announces New CEO

On September 23rd, 2020, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, Clinc, a leader in conversational AI research and its application for the enterprise, announced the appointment of Jon Newhard as the AI organization’s new chief executive officer, effective immediately. In his new role at Clinc, Newhard will oversee its growth and customer success strategy and develop and fill out the engineering, marketing, and product teams with both local Ann Arbor and nationwide talent.

“Conversational AI is transforming the financial services industry, helping to personalize and change the customer experience, an essential part of digital transformation. This massive addressable market presents an immense opportunity for Clinc’s world-leading AI technology and its talented people,” said Newhard. “I couldn’t be more excited to join the team during this time.”

Clinc first created Finie, the voice-operated AI virtual assistant explicitly designed for the banking and financial services industry. Finie was built with an intricate and vast financial services vocabulary and knowledge-base. Banking customers can speak with the AI virtual assistant in everyday, natural language, and Finie understands and processes all requests. Finie will even contemplate the time of day and year, simultaneously with other current external forces, to converse with each customer as if there was unquestionably nothing virtual about Finie at all. Clinc’s industry-leading conversational technology puts Finie on par with any real-life business customer service specialist who is ready to take care of all your banking requests.

Finie can review bank statements, initiate new cards, make payments and banking transfers, discover ATMs, and even contact tech support in the little chance that service beyond Finie’s reach is needed. Clinc’s AI virtual assistant will also recommend personalized ways to save money based on a user’s transaction history. This industry-leading conversational AI technology can be programmed in over 80 various languages.

Clinc has already joined its technology with many financial service providers worldwide, including Turkey’s Isbank. Maxi, the conversational AI virtual assistant, built for the bank’s 8.2 million app users, has a five percent monthly user growth rate and interacts with 2.5 million active Isbank customers. When COVID-19 hit Turkey and citizens were forced to stay home, Maxi added 1 million COVID-19 focused queries to its language-based in one week to meet the demand in usage from Isbank customers. Use grew almost 70% during that time, and Maxi handled the language expansion and the jump in usage without missing a beat.

Before joining Clinc, Jon Newhard served as CEO of Trafficware. Here he led efforts around customer success, product innovation, and the financial growth of the company. With over 25 years of experience in the Information Technology industry, Newhard has a successful track record of being a customer-facing executive and helping to scale software businesses. Newhard has held senior leadership positions with Cubic Corporation, Michigan-based New World Systems and Kaplan Compliance Solutions, and more.

Newhard holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor’s in Economics and Engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point.

About Clinc

Clinc is the leading global provider of conversational artificial intelligence technologies. Headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the company was founded in 2015 by world-class AI and systems research professor at the University of Michigan. Utilizing the world’s most sophisticated natural language processing engine and the most advanced scientific discoveries in AI research, Clinc’s AI emulates human intelligence. It understands unstructured, unconstrained speech and can interpret semantics and intent and user queries’ underlying meaning. Learn more at clinc.com.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes