Mardi Witzel, CEO of Poly ML, hails from Waterloo, Canada, the "Silicon Valley" of Canada and home to the Perimeter Institute of the University of Waterloo, founded by the original tech geniuses who created BlackBerry many years ago.

PolyML has strong ties to Switzerland, as the proprietary algorithms that generate the solutions for Poly ML were invented by Professor Emeritus Gaston Gonnet of ETH Zurich. The technology is used in the automotive sector, but is equally applicable to all financial services and insurance sectors, as well as other areas of industrial manufacturing.

Key to Mardi's message is that for AI to be effective, it needs to be more than a "black box" that produces results, it needs to be explicable and show how and why it produced the results, this is particularly important in the banking and finance industry. This transparency will build trust in the solutions that are generated. She's a big proponent of understanding not just that there's a black box, but how the black box works to get to a solution.