Andrew Demchenko

Gargoyle is an artificial intelligence development company that helps businesses around the globe to stay ahead of the innovation revolution and appear at the top positions near the industry leaders.It achieves this by implementing technologies such as machine learning, computer vision, neural networks, natural language processing, and data science best practices. Over the years, the company has positioned itself astrusted experts in business analysis, product improvement, and workflow automation by participating in various projects, programs, and initiatives, aimed at the development ofagriculture, finance, healthcare, marketing, retail, security, and other industries.

A Dynamic Leader Balancing Business and Innovation

As the companyFounder and CEO, Andrew Demchenko's main emphasis is on developing and implementingthe company's strategy at the global level. Andrew finds it imperative to foster a culture of high-level innovation as Gargoyle aims to advance in terms of industrial growth. To achieve this, he has developed and tested various approaches while working with clients and partners of the company to create a unique level of service delivery. Over the span of past years, he and his team have implemented about 19 different features that have significantly simplified the work of each employee. This ranges from the sales and development department to financial and legal functions. Thus, resulting in growth by 6 times in terms of annual revenue and doubling the workforce.

Converging AI Solutions to Meet Challenges 

Andrew asserts that Gargoyle is actively involved in the development of commercial and non-commercial systems based on artificial intelligence in several countries. One of the recent projects undertaken by the companyinvolved fighting against the coronavirus pandemic, whereit developed computer vision algorithms in combination with neural networks to determine coronavirus infections from computed tomography images with an accuracy of 97%. This significantly accelerated the receipt of test results by patients. Prior to this project, Gargoyle also took part in the development of natural language processing and artificial intelligence algorithms to find new ways to combat diabetes and obesity for the Ministry of Health.

Besides, the company is currently engaged in several critical commercial business projects from various industries. According to Andrew, all projects from this category are related to the automation of work in different departments. At present, work is in progress to create an integrated system for automating contextual advertising campaigns. Further, a neural network was implemented within the framework of this initiative. Andrew claims theneural network is capable of generating advertising titles and descriptions, as well as optimizing advertising in accordance with the set goals.

"Generally speaking, the artificial intelligence systems we create can improve various KPIs, namely: increase monthly profit by 41%, reduce operating expenses by 63%, and also reduce task completion time by 94%. Naturally, all of the above indicators reflect the arithmetic average for all clients of the company," says Andrew.This empowered the client to receive a lot of appraisal and awards owing to the innovative approaches the Gargoyle team built for them.

Factors Shaping the Leader of Tomorrow

Speaking about his journey so far, Andrew finds it difficult to pick his favorite experience. He continues, "It's actually very difficult to answer this question. I am young enough that there was some event that divided my life into before and after."He believes that working in other companies created a huge impact on his life and him. Before starting Gargoyle, he worked for a long time in the field of artificial intelligence as a developer, which broaden his understanding of how everything works under the hood. After that, Andrewcapped many management roles, which gave him insider insightsinto business processes in various companies. He thinks that this combination of skills and knowledge presented a great opportunity to be an innovative partner for his clients. He finds it immensely helpful when he lends his ears to understand bottlenecks in a business and how artificial intelligence can help solve them.

Overcoming Challenges

Looking back, Andrew finds sales management as the main hurdle at the beginning of his journey.  He says, "Artificial intelligence is a new technology in business that has been heard about a lot, but few have used it. Most of the Founders and CEOs simply did not understand how artificial intelligence could help their company reach the next level and become an order of magnitude better than its competitors."

This is why he spent all the time negotiating and explaining the benefits of artificial intelligence solutions. Thanks to his determination and hard work, Gargoyle gained immense expertise that it can show a real use case and request a reference from clients, to the extent that all their queries are resolved.

Hallmarks of an Innovative Leader

A company's innovation potential is the Founder and CEO's ability to be open-minded. Andrew strongly supports this notion. He cites that while people are young, they always experiment in everything and often invent new approaches to solve new problems. They are open to everything new and are not afraid to try to do something in their way. Unfortunately, this enthusiasm fades away over the years. This is because people are locked into the experience they acquired earlier and did not accept anything that does not fit into their business vision. This shift in thinking inspired Andrew to sport an open-minded mentality. He says that it is one of the most important features of an innovative leader.

Striving for Client Satisfactory Solutions

Gargoyle generally concentrates on creating unique value-based solutions. Its team conducts a series of strategic consultations, during which experts examine the client's business completely and identify areas that can be optimized. Once this is done, the team starts brainstorming to generate potentially viable ideas with the ability to solve a specific problem. Among all the proposed options, a string of most optimal solutions is selected and presented to the client. After discovering the idea that shall yield maximum value to the client's business, the team startsworking on it. Usually, the idea is finalized on the grounds of how quickly it shall be ready and bring value to the client. And when the client observes the result, the teamstarts devising an innovative and proactive strategy for the client's company, which the companyconsiders as an innovative partnership.

Augmenting Technical Footprint

Andrew stresses the fact that technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, automation, cloud computing, and big data hold enormous potential to accelerate the development of innovations in the world. He points out that today we are capable of bringing ideas to life that seemed impossible a couple of years ago. He finds the development of technology to be proceeding at an incredible pace with artificial intelligence being applied in completely unexpected areas. "It would seem that such super complicated and incomprehensible technologies should attract only scientists, but no," he adds.According to him, today's entrepreneurs are focused on how to simplify their business, and artificial intelligence is the right answer for many of them.

A Roadmap to Future

Andrew is confident that artificial intelligence will only gain popularity every year and will eventually become more than just a technology for giant companies. He envisions that this growth in popularity will lead to a number of studies aimed at developing new models and architectures of neural networks. Thus, consequently increasing the "intelligence" of algorithms and widening the scope of their applications.

Advice to Next Leaders

To tap the most of the opportunities that may come knocking, his advice to the emerging business leaders and executives is to be open-minded, maintain a sense of humor, learn to apply tough decisions, and never give up.