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“After many years as an investor, my core focus right now is building a company. The focus of our company is very simple: we would like to get rid of what we consider to be data rot, which is lots of old garbage data that’s been hanging around for a long time that companies have not cleaned, whether it’s documents or files or photos or videos or content.
Our job is to clean that data up to make sure that companies can use fewer tokens and get better outcomes. We sell into IT teams and companies who are endeavoring to deploy AI. And our viewpoint is that if you have a cleaner data set, you will have a better result.
I think the promise of AI has been about a productivity uplift for employees and workers – being able to draft a document, being able to create a PowerPoint or automate work. I think there’s a huge opportunity there, and I think people have been wowed by that. I think there’s going to be efficiency gains and productivity gains in specific areas where I think it’s totally valid – where it’s manual, it’s repetitive, it’s cumbersome and nobody wants to do that.
But the problem is there’s a lot of investment that goes into making that happen, and so that’s where sometimes it’s actually very inefficient to become efficient, right? And maybe you’re spending tons and hundreds of thousands of dollars in AI token costs or being able to re-engineer something, which doesn’t actually need to be re-engineered. It’s probably a relatively simple thing, and in some cases, probably shouldn’t be touched, right?
I think discovery and the era of imagination is more real now than before.”
Yousuf kHan
I think discovery and the era of imagination is more real now than before. I think there are people who are motivated and excited by it. What I’m seeing now – both what I saw as an investor, but also what I’m seeing now as a founder – is that people have looked at problems both in their personal lives, in their professional lives and in the industries, and said, ‘I think we could try and solve that in some way, shape, form.’ And so, the promise of AI, what I’m excited about, is the fact that industries that were technologically nascent – and actually ones which did not adopt technology – are now adopting it in a way that we’ve never seen before.
Legal tech, for example. There was no such thing as legal tech up until several years ago. Now there’s several companies who are advertising, and everybody knows about them. If you get a contract document, you’re more likely to put it into ChatGPT or Claude and say, ‘Tell me where the issues are.’ There is so much opportunity with AI at the industry level. Being able to reduce fatalities and improve health outcomes and safety in these places using drones, using computer vision, is definitely super exciting. It wasn’t possible before. I think that’s a good thing.”
Yousuf Khan is co-founder and CEO of the Menlo Park-based startup Clario. Before that, he was a chief information officer and VC investor in several enterprise software companies.
This profile is one of nineteen featured in the “Humans in an age of AI” portrait series. See more profiles here.
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