Dell Technologies, along with their partner Circular Board, have created an artificial intelligence-driven version of American home services website Angie’s List for female entrepreneurs called Alice.
Hello Alice.com, which enables people to sign up as either an expert or as an entrepreneur, was co-developed by Dell and Pivotal. The goal of Alice is to provide more resources to help female entrepreneurs succeed. Alice is not specific to just the high-tech field.
According to Dell stats, women-owned businesses employ just under eight million workers in the U.S. alone. This group generates more than $1 billion in revenue. However, only a measly two per cent of women entrepreneurs have surpassed $1 million in revenue.
Elizabeth Gore, the entrepreneur-in-residence at Dell Technologies, said Alice will try to flip that around to 98 per cent.
“When we started looking at what was out there before creating Alice, the resources available were just trying to be pink. Alice has been built from a gender lens from the first second they started coding. That’s why I think it will be revolutionary,” Gore said.
Alice intends to be a female entrepreneur’s online mentor as well as a consultant. Alice has the ability to filter millions of resources from legal to branding and present them in a personalized way. Carolyn Rodz, the founder and CEO of Circular Board, said Alice will feature verified content that can help women in business scale no matter the geography.
“We decided that Alice needed to be in this world,” Rodz said.
She approached Dell with the idea of a platform that could scale and continue to evolve to solve future problems in various languages.
The evolution of Alice will be driven by data analytics and can connect women entrepreneurs to subject matter experts in real time. Alice content will be populated by machine learning technology. Rodz said this was key because Alice will be able to predict what women entrepreneurs need for referrals, events, mentors, access to capital financing, channel partners and other supply chain requirements.
Currently, Alice offers experts in financing, legal, marketing and technology. There is a personalized dashboard with real time modules based on user activity.
Access to capital financing remains the No. 1 priority for women entrepreneurs and its also the Circular Board’s biggest challenge. Rodz told CDN, her plan is to focus on the user and look for alternative sources of funding.
“The mindset in silicon valley needs to shift. It’s a slow process and it will take time. We plan to look at crowd funding, funding from private families and we are open to a strategic partnership with Dell. But we need to look outside the box,” Rodz said.
