About the Provata AI team

Provata AI brings together a group of leading AI experts and product professionals to deliver real results. We're proud to have delivered AI solutions to businesses across North America.

Our vision for empowering data-driven companies

It seems like every decade, businesses have to reinvent their operating model to adapt to evolutionary changes in technology, operational efficiency, customer engagement, employee satisfaction and profitability.

However the 2020s – and the decades that follow – will prove be the most challenging yet. Operational threats are coming from every aspect of human existence: climatic, environmental, social, political, health, technological and criminal. At no point in time has there ever been a greater need for access to global and local information sources in order to operate your business effectively.

Provata believes that this information shouldn’t be trapped in the hands of governments, health organizations, the military and private conglomerates. We believe that the FAANG companies should not have a stranglehold on the artificial intelligence needed to make sense of this data.

Rather, we believe that empowering businesses with crucial data – from inside and outside of their business – will make everyone safer, more productive and more effective. And we believe that a combination of business intelligence, human intelligence, and artificial intelligence is the fastest way to do this.

Instead of reacting to current threats, we believe businesses should be able to automatically predict, detect and respond to these issues in real time. Instead of waiting for the next crisis, we can help businesses prepare effectively, and leverage our technology to suggest outcomes, and to to automatically build workflows that make every team more efficient.

We believe in empowering businesses of any size with the ability to control their own destiny, with timely, accurate data that is interwoven with their business operations.

Our Leadership Team

Rob Goehring

CEO

Rob is a serial entrepreneur with over 20 years experience founding and running private and public software and hardware companies in telecom, marketing tech, SaaS & financial services. Most recently, Rob was CEO of RewardStream, a leader in referral and loyalty marketing (acquired by Buyapowa Ltd.) Rob was also the Chief Marketing Officer of TIO Networks (TNC.V acquired by PayPal) and the co-founder of Contigo Systems, an award-winning telematics company. (acquired by Vecima Networks).

Rob has an MBA from Simon Fraser University in Marketing and MIS, is an advisor to technology growth companies, and speaks on marketing technology trends. Rob is also the founding director of the AI C-Council for the BC Technology Industry Association.

Winston Ng

CTO

Winston has 20 years of experience building scalable cloud-based services for web and mobile companies. Winston’s first large-scale project began with a fax-to-email and telecommunications service that deployed in hundreds of locations across North America. Winston also co-founded a cloud-based mobile and GPS security monitoring service and co-authored the patented the methods that are now referenced by over 100 other patents in the multi-billion dollar GPS and telematics market.

Winston also served as the senior technical director that led the development of Electronic Art’s massively scalable digital distribution platform (Origin). Since leaving Electronic Arts, Winston has been driving multiple projects in mobile app development, health care and financial services in North America and China.

Alex Chen

CHIEF DATA SCIENTIST

Alex has a 25+ year career in data science, big data cloud solutions, natural language processing and AI.

He is a University of British Columbia Research Fellow (NMR & MRI image processing, data analysis, simulations). Alex won the National Young Scientist Award, ranked as the top student in a province of over 32 million. He holds a Masters in Physics Engineering, from Tsinghua University (“China’s MIT”).

Neil Parker

CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER

Neil Parker is the Chief Product Officer at Think Technologies. Neil has more than 25 years in Product Management and Marketing at companies such as Glenayre, Sierra Wireless, Contigo Systems (sold to Vecima), Contractually (sold to Coupa), and RewardStream (sold to Buyapowa). His background is focussed in bringing customer-ready products to market in a SaaS world, combined with deep experience in wireless and mobility.

He has also spent the last 35+ years as a semi-professional drummer and enjoys playing with a number of acts you’ve never heard of.

Our AI Advisory Team

Dr. Elliot Holtham

AI AND MACHINE LEARNING

Dr. Elliot Holtham was the founder, CEO and COO of Xtract.ai a Machine Learning company, which was acquired by Patriot One Technologies (TSX: PAT) in September 2019. Previously, Elliot has co-founded a number of technology startups and was a senior geophysicist at Computational Geosciences Inc. where he was responsible for projects for many of the world’s largest mining and energy companies. He has a Ph.D. in geophysics from the University of British Columbia (UBC) and was awarded Canada’s most prestigious graduate scholarship, the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship. He has co-authored over a dozen published scientific articles and has been an invited speaker at technical conferences around the world. Elliot also holds an MBA from IE Business School in Madrid where he graduated on the Dean’s List and graduated with Distinction in Engineering Physics from UBC

Kevin O'Neill

CORPORATE STRATEGY

Kevin has an extensive career in finance that began as an investment banker with Merrill Lynch Capital Markets, later as a private investor and advisor to early-stage technology businesses, including a digital communications company acquired by Microsoft; an enterprise network company acquired by Packeteer; a communication company acquired by AOL, a wireless data service provider (IPO), a social network for property professionals (IPO), an enterprise ecommerce company (IPO), a digital entertainment production company (IPO) and an enterprise AI analytics company, among many others. Most recently, Kevin was CEO of Xtract.ai – under his leadership, Xtract was acquired by Patriot One Technologies (TSX: PAT) in September 2019.

Dr. Bethany Edmunds

AI AND MACHINE LEARNING, ETHICS

Dr. Edmunds is the Director of Computer Science and the Associate Dean at Northeastern University in Vancouver. She holds a BSc. in Computer Science (Rowan University) and a Ph.D in Computer Science in Machine Learning (Rutgers). Dr. Edmunds is a recognized leader in the area of Ethical AI and was named one of BC Business’s Most Influential Women in STEM as well as BIV’s Forty Under 40.