50 Best Companies to Watch 2023
The Silicon Review
“The most attractive aspect of targa.ai is how it leverages a combination of cutting-edge technology to not only auto-sync team activities and operating data but also automate many of the low-value tasks that teams perform on a daily basis.”
Targatek Inc is an early-stage software company. Its flagship SaaS product, Targa.ai, offers a workplace singularity platform that enables auto-sync planning through execution, consolidating resources, predicting performance problems, and automating low-value work. The company serves clients worldwide.
Targatek was founded in 2017.
The Silicon Review reached out to Bill Adams, Chairman and CEO of Targatek Inc, and here’s what he had to say.
Interview Highlights
Q. Targa.ai is positioned as an executive/leadership tool, but its effectiveness depends on its deployment and use at all organizational levels. Would you like to elaborate on this a bit more?
As a leadership platform, our target audience is senior executives (including the board of directors) down to mid-level managers and individual contributors who are responsible for the execution of a company’s corporate objectives and need a platform purpose-built to help them become more effective leaders.
Entry into a company will come at various levels in the organization from the C-suite to mid-level management depending on the size and type of company. Once onboarded, leaders use their discretion as to how broad, deep, and pace they want to deploy targa.ai in their organization. Leaders will have several options to roll out targa.ai across a particular function, department, division, business unit, and eventually across the entire organization.
This top-down land-and-expand approach has proven successful in our beta sites. One example is the Children's Hospital of Orange County (CHOC) where the research division was using 15 licenses, and a director of a second larger division witnessed targa.ai’s power and signed up for 30 licenses.
Q. Describe targa.ai's compelling features and functionality. What will specifically motivate CEOs to subscribe to and embrace this technology?
The most attractive aspect of targa.ai is how it leverages a combination of cutting-edge technology to not only auto-sync team activities and operating data but also automate many of the low-value tasks that teams perform on a daily basis.
Leaders see this capability coupled with the ability to manage organizational performance voice-activated on any mobile device as the ultimate ‘wow’ factor. This reaction has been expressed by over 15 leaders from various industries who received a ‘sneak peek’ of the platform and were impressed at its capability to foster ‘hyper collaboration’.
The platform provides total transparency across a function, department, division, or entire enterprise. It enables leaders to see the big picture of everything in flight ‘at a glance’ so they can do their part to deliver on critical company goals and contribute to the successful attainment of company goals. More specifically:
Q. What potential areas of growth exist for targa.ai outside of execution management?
Beyond the base model launched June 1st, targa.ai expansion opportunities include but are not limited to improving the annual business and financial planning process and enabling a rolling forecast process that removes the annual ‘crunch time review’ experienced every year by busy executives to build out new plans from scratch.
Furthermore, performance reviews are also a big pain point for busy executives.Critical information necessary to review the performance of subordinate leaders is difficult to assemble, and many times subjective in nature. With targa.ai performance history, leaders can be assured they are recognizing and rewarding their best performers objectively and building targeted coaching and improvement programs to improve their B and C players.
Targa.ai is a leadership platform that is not intended to address general business operations areas outside of leader execution management. There are plenty of other productivity and efficiency tools in the marketplace specifically geared toward front-line service and staff operations like call centers, data centers, facilities, and outsourcers who need heavy transactional information to manage their staff and customer service on an hourly and daily basis.
However, leaders may decide to go deeper into the general workforce to help them connect the dots between their efforts and that of the executive team. This is a large land-and-expand opportunity and as our beta sites reflected, it could penetrate functional areas of a company such as call centers and data centers facilities where improving line leader execution is needed.
Explain the use of AI in the development of the offering and specifically where it drives features and functionality.
Targa.ai employs two basic types of AI in its services — Machine Learning Algorithms (MLA) and AI Algorithms (AIA) — working in combination with voice-activated technology.
MLA is primarily used to power our Predictive Analytics feature. As mentioned earlier, we launched the ‘base model’ that captures and archives data on all team and individual activities such as On-time Due Dates, Missed Due Dates, and Reassigned Owners to help predict future performance.
By enhancing this capability in the second half of 2023 with the addition of Assignee Performance data, Degree of Difficulty ranking, Change History data, Business Metric data, and Post-Completion Assignee ranking, the platform will enable leaders to make decisions more quickly and accurately. We anticipate this enhanced feature will transform how leaders lead today and they will see improved execution results.
AIA will be principally deployed in our voice-activated command and inquiry services accessed by mobile devices and desktop/laptop computers. We have partnered with Alan AI who is recognized as one of the leaders in the field of Actionable AI to build out our capabilities in allowing leaders to access, create, and update their targa.ai activities and data as if they had a Chief of Staff.
Q. What is your intellectual property strategy?
We plan to file a patent application once the predictive analytics feature is fully developed and connected to the base model. At this point, the law firm of Fish & Richardson PC will represent our firm. The aim is to patent the underlying algorithms that power our ‘Performance Automation Platform.’ This may include ‘surround patents’ such as the features for managing business operations hands-free on any device using MLA and AIA.
Our projected timeline for completing a ‘provisional patent’ is the end of 2023 or the beginning of 2024.
About | Bill Adams
Bill Adams, chairman, serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Targatek Inc. Bill is responsible for strategic planning and development and oversees all aspects of operations. As a thought leader in hyper collaboration, he is a member of the ForbesBooks family whose book, OUTFOCUS!, was released in October 2021.