Mighty AI Provides the ‘Ground Truth’ for Self-Driving Cars

To fulfill the promise of self-driving cars, the systems that run them must be able to tell the difference between a car and a dumpster, a dotted yellow line from a straight line and thousands of other objects. That’s where the rubber meets the road for Seattle-based Mighty AI.

The 4-year-old software and services company has a global community of more than 400,000 citizen annotators that provide the labor-intensive data work automakers need, via a mobile game that has them identifying pedestrians, cars, tractor trailers, construction, signage, bicyclists and many other data points.

That “ground truth” data is gathered, reviewed and validated by the Mighty AI team. It’s then made available to autonomous vehicle developers to help train self-driving vehicles to think and act like a safe human driver. Mighty AI works with more than a dozen companies developing autonomous vehicle vision systems.

Recently, Mighty AI announced a collaboration with Mcity, a public-private consortium at the University of Michigan backed by nearly 60 companies including Ford, GM, Honda, Toyota, Intel, LG and State Farm. Mighty AI’s training datasets will be used in autonomous vehicle machine learning models developed at Mcity, which includes an R&D center and real-world testing facilities.

“We’ve seen a great deal of traction in delivering the huge amounts of annotated data needed to train machine learning models,” said Teresa A. Kotwis, Mighty AI CFO. “The level of data quality, accuracy and precision is enormously high, which works very well with the tooling we have.”

Readiness for Global Growth

With customers in North America as well as Europe and Asia, Mighty AI selected NetSuite OneWorld over Sage Intacct to prepare for international expansion and the launch of global subsidiaries. NetSuite Professional Services led the implementation, with pricing well within their budget.

Time was of the essence. After signing the contract in October 2017, the company had roughly 75 days to go live to make its planned January 1 cutover date from QuickBooks to NetSuite OneWorld. That’s a “super fast” timeline, Kotwis said, especially as implementation would proceed through the Thanksgiving and late December holidays.

Led by a three-person team from the NetSuite Global Delivery Center, the implementation was the most efficient she’s experienced, said Kotwis who has past experience with deployments of Sage MAS 90, Sage Intacct, Microsoft Dynamics and other ERP platforms.

“I have converted more accounting systems than I can count in my 30-plus years of experience, and this was by far the easiest and most efficient implementation thanks to the dedication of the NetSuite Professional Services team,” Kotwis said.

Expert-Led Implementation

The implementation was made easier by a structured process with clear milestones, weekly meetings, online data exchange and accountability for all stakeholders. The NetSuite team was “super flexible” and readily accommodated time zone differences between Manila and Seattle, according to Kotwis.

“Our NetSuite Professional Services implementation process was very smooth and super fast,” she said. “Working with the Global Delivery Center team was just excellent — it was seamless from end to end, as if they were side by side with us in our office. Location had no impact on the ability to communicate, get things done and understand where we were in the process.”

With OneWorld in place, Mighty AI has new visibility into key metrics, and can report on budget vs. actuals across the business. Once it’s ready to open global subsidiaries, Mighty AI is equipped with capabilities for multi-currency transactions and global financial consolidation to help fuel its continued growth. And as it builds out its software-as-a-service offerings, NetSuite Revenue Recognition will play a valuable role.

“The reporting and trend analysis in NetSuite is definitely giving us better information and lets us ask better questions,” Kotwis said. “As we move from a tech-enabled services company to more of a software platform, we’ll be able to put billing and rev rec in NetSuite to use.”

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