Automate to alleviate: making data analytics easy with Coactive AI

“By automating the tedious tasks, we’re freeing up data analysts to spend more time on the exciting, exploratory analyses that fuel business innovation.” Meet Juan Henao (aka Camilo). He’s an engineer at Coactive AI with three key passions: automation, rainforest trekking, and soccer. He’s really good at two of them. Luckily for us, coding is one of them. Let’s find out how his career led to Coactive AI, and why he’s so bad at soccer.

Hola, Camilo! Greetings from California to Colombia. Can you tell our readers how you came across our start-up?

My journey with Coactive AI began when I met Will Gaviria Rojas through a mutual friend. Will is the co-founder of Coactive AI, a fellow computer engineer, and a fellow Colombian by birth. We hit it off right away. My background is in systems engineering, machine learning, data engineering, and embedded systems. I also have an MSc in data science and analytics from EAFIT University in Medellín. It was great timing for us to meet because Coactive AI was scaling up and I, thankfully, had the skills they were looking for.

The mission behind Coactive AI also resonated with me. I really like the idea motivating Coactive’s core product because I enjoy working with visual data. The idea of analyzing a bunch of unstructured images/videos to see what insights are hiding in there is something I’d thought about a lot in the past. Coactive AI is taking that idea to the next level.

[Camilo (top center) on a call with other members of the team at Coactive AI. Way to rock the logo, Camilo!]

Speaking of levels, you’re a man of many talents. You have a further passion we didn’t mention in the intro! Can you tell us about your ultimate frisbee career?

I recently made the cut for the world club championships in ultimate frisbee! Unfortunately, visa complications prevented me from traveling with the team professionally, but it was a cool ride until then. On the upside, I love engineering just as much, so I’m happy to be focusing on my coding career again. I still play ultimate frisbee as a hobby.

From spinning discs to spinning plates… What’s it like working at Coactive AI?

I’m really impressed at the level of organization. Coactive is a young startup, but everything is very well planned and executed, largely because Cody and Will work hard to keep things on track for the rest of the team.

I was a little apprehensive about us being based in different countries, but the time difference is only two hours, so it’s really easy to collaborate. I just need to put my English-speaking head on before I join the meetings!

I also love the mission. The Coactive AI platform is helping businesses across industries – we’re making the everyday jobs of data analysts around the world easier and more interesting. Automating the dull stuff means people have more time and energy to spend on what humans do best, which is creative and critical thinking. It’s a win for everyone.

[Camilo took this video on a recent rainforest trek. Winning at life!]

Do you get a kick out of automation?

Hell yeah. I love transforming manual or onerous processes into automated pipelines. If I can find a way to reduce the human burden in a given task, then I’m happy to do it!

How about a kick out of soccer balls?

Okay, so I used to play a lot, and I wasn’t that bad! But I also wasn’t that good… They used to call me messigüaín (half good, half terrible) because I would get past all the defenders but never score. These days I’m more into Latin dancing like salsa and bachata – I’m not necessarily good at it, but I enjoy it! Colombia has a vibrant culture of music and dance.

We’re always down to boogie. Culture is super important to us too, and as you know, our first act as a company was to publish our culture statement on GitHub. Do you see our culture principles in action?

Oh yeah, for sure. #7 is a great example – that’s “having the hard conversations upfront”. When we have our bi-weekly check-ins we can be candid about how we are feeling and how everything is going. We have very interesting discussions about specific details of the product every week, and everyone is always looking to improve.

[Camilo (far right) hiking in Colombia]

Thanks for sharing your experiences, Camilo. Keep up the great automation work, and we’ll see you on the dance floor!

Adiós!

Our culture is our number one product. We pride ourselves on having a truly collaborative, diverse, and ever-learning team. We’re also the industry leaders for analyzing unstructured image data. Are you ready to join the next revolution in machine learning? Join our team.