CIO Influence Interview with Mark Hanson, VP of Technology and Business Innovation at Sony Semiconductor Solutions of America

“AITRIOS focuses on providing you the metadata that you need to make decisions—taking the guesswork out of data management for decision-makers.”

Hi, Mark, welcome to the Interview Series. Please tell us about your journey in the technology industry. What inspired you to begin at Sony?

Thanks for the invite! The thing with tech is everyone’s entry point looks different. I officially started my career with Sony in 1998.

And to your question, I was inspired by the culture at Sony. And by this, I don’t necessarily mean as a Japanese company, but rather Sony’s attention to detail, business innovation, and how they lay trust in their people to fuel the legacy and evolution of such a strong brand.

When I first joined Sony as a director, it was to launch and build the VAIO notebook line—a first of its kind in so many ways— then I left for a bit in 2010, spent some time at HP, and a SaaS Security startup but returned in 2013 to build the Sony Mobile Smartphone business, then joined the Sony Semiconductor team, all in part of the culture of collaboration and my desire to build something new, like I did with VAIO.

Now we’re here in 2023, continuing to imagine the future and bring products to life—like AITRIOS!

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What’s Sony’s semiconductor technology roadmap for the next 2 years? 

There’s a lot we have going on in the next couple of years—continuing to play to our strengths as a semiconductor business and explore new avenues for innovation.

For our part of the business, Sony Semiconductor Solutions America, and the AITRIOS team, our focus in the next couple of years revolves around application development for the platform and making AITRIOS as accessible as possible to those who want to use it. We want to get people excited about the opportunities that lie in AITRIOS and our IMX500 sensor, which also means exploring deeply impactful partnerships like we have with the City of Rome and more, using AITRIOS as tech for good to better enrich peoples’ lives.

What are the biggest challenges you solve for your customers with your business innovation and new product development strategies?

AITRIOS is a powerhouse, let me tell you. It offers a breadth of AI capabilities, running on the edge, and really sets out to democratize Visual AI. Our thought is, let’s put Visual AI in the hands of customers and partners who need it to make informed decisions for their business.

People set out to deploy visual AI, for example, and are hit with a return of too much data—and there can be such a thing—where it becomes unmanageable, requires loads of storage space. Instead, AITRIOS focuses on providing you the metadata that you need to make decisions—taking the guesswork out of data management for decision-makers. But also, models on AITRIOS are easy to train, retrain, deploy, so the complete process is made a breeze compared to services on the market today.

Could you tell us more about your AITRIOS and IoT-enabled technology platforms that you have developed at Sony?  

As I mentioned, there’s so much you can do with AI nowadays, and so much you can do with vision, too. But the headscratcher across the technology industry is how we can simplify the entry for AI—not just the cost-to-entry but the sheer time-to-entry it takes to get a solution deployed, not to mention maintenance. AITRIOS is scalable AI, not the traditional, moon-shot methods for deploying visual AI that we of know today.

AITRIOS tackles this, serving as a platform for individuals to shop for an AI model that aligns with their business need, easily train the model with existing data, deploy, and manage their AITRIOS-enabled devices, like the IMX500 sensor with our camera partner, LUCID, run updates, all of that.

There’s no reason that vision AI needs to be so complex or expensive that enterprise and commercial customers can’t use it. Not when we have AI in so many accessible forms nowadays, like DALL·E or ChatGPT.

We’re putting AI in the hands of industries who can use it to improve the experience for their products, goods, services. Maybe that’s gap detection in retail or defect identification in warehouses.

If AI means making sure your favorite-but-popular choice of bread is stocked, or the product you ordered isn’t defective, requiring time and energy to exchange it, those are the experiences and optimizations we want to empower. Even city lights being able to auto-flash when someone is about to cross the street by sensing them to reduce traffic injuries… that is what AITRIOS sets out to achieve.

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There is so much happening with generative AI and edge computing. Could you tell us about your vision for AI capabilities at Sony?

Vision for AI capabilities equals vision AI for me.

This is at the forefront of my mind and the work we’re doing. And I mentioned this a bit earlier around how visual AI can be used across really any industry to help create improvements—small or large—in peoples’ everyday lives.

Right now, in fact, we have a Hackathon going on in partnership with tinyML for the City of San Jose. I’m a born-and-raised, l******* resident of San Jose, and in our decision to collaborate with tinyML for this event, which ends in October for Pedestrian Safety Month, I had my own vision of how we could address the rising number of pedestrian injuries and deaths in the city, not only as a way to put AITRIOS to the test, but to also support our local community, where we have a Sony office. So, this is part of the vision—making the world a better, safer, place, and seeing AITRIOS encourage the improvements we need across industries. That ability would be invaluable.

And as a plug, the Hackathon is open globally, not just San Jose. The application of AITRIOS isn’t just limited to the U.S., so many of these challenges are challenges around the world, so we really encourage people from everywhere to take part, keeping in mind the communities they’re a part of, just as much as the community, I—and our Sony San Jose team—are part of.

Please tell us more about your technology partnership ecosystem and how it holds the key to building the future with the semiconductors industry?

Well, we’re really fortunate to be partnered with some incredible technology and cloud providers, ISVs, SIs, etc. We have LUCID as our camera partner, which I mentioned earlier, Edmund Optics as our primary distributor right now, and are partnered with Microsoft throughout the launch and development of AITRIOS, as our strategic cloud provider with Azure, but also with Microsoft’s AI Innovation Lab, where we collaborate on the technology in a dedicated space to play around with various industry PoCs and demo development.

In fact, we have a space with them, one in Redmond, one in Sony’s San Diego U.S. headquarters, called the Retail AI Labs where interested parties can come see a retail application of AITRIOS in real life— “shop” in the simulated store, and see how AITRIOS works. We highly encourage folks to reach out to our team and set up a visit to the space. It’s pretty cool.

But as we look to the future, we’re eager to start forming more of those bonds and building out our AITRIOS ecosystem. Since the platform also serves as a place where application developers can commercialize their solutions, we really see AITRIOS as a community of all the aforementioned groups, plus the individuals who will be building and deploying these solutions, to associate and get what they need in a centralized place.

And we’re already doing this, already. We’ve been working alongside various groups as we build out AITRIOS, update its offerings, UX/UI, etc., to make sure we’re considering exactly what’s needed in the platform, by the folks who will ultimately be using it—and it’s shown us just how valuable this two-way communication and partner ecosystem can be when you open those doors to collaboration.

Lighter notes:

• Burn the midnight candle or soak in the sun?
• • Midnight candle, no doubt. I’m more of a night owl!
• Coffee, or Tea?
• • A solid cappuccino can’t be beat, in my book. I even roast my own beans—but that’s a story for another time.
• Your favorite Sony AI / Semiconductor feature you want everyone to try out?
• • I might be a bit partial here, but AITRIOS and IMX500, of course!

But for consumer purchases, I personally really love the Link Bud S ear pods with their adaptive noise cancelling. It keeps you safe wherever you listen to music—out walking, on public transit—without sacrificing sound quality. Plus, they’re super comfortable.

First memorable experience in your career as a technology leader?

One of my first memorable experiences at Sony was during my interviews. Sony Executive Bob Ishida had pulled out a very (and I mean very) small 505 notebook—and it was one of the most unique, interesting things I’d seen. It was visually striking, about the thickness of a Nat Geo issue in these bold magnesium and purple colorways.

And he asked me, “how do you think this would do in the U.S.?”

I remember responding that it’d be like bringing a Ferrari or Porsche into the board room for those senior executives who wanted something couth that reflected their rank in leadership.

But moreover, it became evident to me how sophisticated and forward-thinking Sony is, and their capabilities and refinement in their devices. Plus, what later became VAIO, was highly practical for users as well—it felt very visionary of Sony in that way. It reminds me a lot of what we’re doing with Sony’s IMX500 sensor. We’re rethinking what a chip can do, and how small we can realistically make it.

So, once VAIO hit the market, competitors were comparing it to the thinness of their notebooks. It even became #2 in the marketplace and the highest selling price of any Windows notebook. Sudden, people were asking, “why shouldn’t our notebooks look as good as they run?” That calculated risk in creating a notebook all its own category ended up being exactly what people wanted. And it created a new standard of what could expect from our devices.

Ultimately, all of this taught me how important it is to create a paradigm shift and disrupt the market and what they think it is that they want or need. And I carry that notion with me throughout all my work—in fact, I think AITRIOS has the same potential to disrupt. It’s not just for the geeky tech folks out there, but the app developers, system integrators, etc., too. It’s AI on the edge, and it’s for everyone.

• One thing you remember about your employee(s):
• • It might sound corny, but their strengths, especially hidden strengths.

I like tapping into what people enjoy and know they’re good at, but also encourage and push them towards the areas they might not recognize yet as their strengths, but are.

• Most useful app that you currently use:
• • I’m a musician and play with guys that aren’t in my local area, so we use apps like Elk and Jam Link—technologies that enable us to do high-quality jamming with remote individuals.

In that same vein, I also use this software from a French company, named Arturia, where they’ve essentially virtualized a bunch of elusive, high-price instruments (like the Minimoog, or Prophet 5) for a comparatively low cost. And it simulates an authentic sound.

But if we’re talking virtual apps, you can’t beat WAZE, it’s a must in the Bay Area. And I’m still a devoted Napster user today—I have my whole family on a plan, actually.

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Thank you, Mark! That was fun and we hope to see you back on cioinfluence.com soon.