The next level of Innovation
An interview with Vasilis Tsolis, Founder of Cognitiv+

Michael Higgs Bristol - 19/11/2018

CEO has spoken to Vasilis Tsolis, Founder of Cognitiv+. He tells us how pursuing both engineering and law has led him to the creation of Cognitiv+, and how his constant energy and passion is reflected in his work every day. 

​Could you please briefly tell us about Cognitiv+? 
Cognitiv+ is an AI platform that provides corporates, consultancies and legal firms with legal and regulatory analytics.
This way they are able to really understand and also act upon their compliance obligations.
When I first founded Cognitiv+ it was mainly about understanding contracts. Now it's about accelerating document review.
Typically, this is a very repetitive and boring task, where, however, there is a lot of risk involved.
How is Cognitiv+ going beyond human auditing?
AI definitely accelerates audit reviews saving a lot of time and energy that otherwise would be put into a repetitive and quite standardized task. However, I must point out that some documents are more complicated than others and professional expertise is always necessary in these cases. Subjective aspects, for example, are best solved by humans.
AI has gotten to a point, where it can help people, without completely substituting them.

How do you think you've been able to improve the UK economy through Cognitiv+?
With everything going on in the UK, surely legal and financial services are looking to improve their efficiency by selecting the most valuable and important assignments and day-to-day exercises. 
Through AI we help them achieve this by allowing them to automate the low-value operations to focus on the high-value work instead. Consultancies and practices that are still quite conservative in terms of technology are viewed by us as a great opportunity to work together and improve their services.

What is next for your company? What are you looking for in terms of goals and achievements?
We aim to expand to Europe and the US and we want to grow further by the end of next year. We believe that our product will have a significant impact on how documents are read in the corporate sphere.
Being active and positive are also two fundamental daily propositions we always keep in the back of our minds.

How have you overcome and are planning to overcome difficulties, while achieving your goals?
Having a new company is rollercoaster. Having strong support from partners, my team and generally the people that surround me makes it work.
Also, relying on people from different backgrounds of knowledge and expertise is what I think constitutes the next level of innovation. Having two distinct backgrounds of interest myself, I always believe that having people crossing verticals and sectors helps them and myself have a multidimensional understanding to problems and challenges. Something, which I believe, should be applied globally.

Other Viewers have also read​:

AI and customer care

Disruption meets collaboration

AI Opportunities