I'm a long term APX shareholder. Keen to get a feel for your thoughts on a couple things:
1. The medium to long term necessity for large volumes of annotated data required by major AI players (Google/FB/Microsoft/Tesla, Amazon, etc)? Ie, how far off do you feel we are from seeing developments in automated annotation supersede Appen's services and impact revenues in a meaningful way? Also, developments in AI and ML such as Auto ML-Zero are rapidly paving the way for development of learning algorithms without the need or use of significant data sets - do you see this being a factor that may impact your revenue forecasts over the medium to longer term (3-5 years).
2. If you compare Appen, especially to a business like Xero or Amazon or Microsoft, (all which have exceptionally low marginal costs for each customer added), do you feel that there's anything the business can or should be trying to do (or is currently doing) to reduce it's cost base (average marginal cost) per project? I'm not suggesting Appen's business model is bad by any means (I'm long after all), but to me, it's always seemed like more of a niche recruitment operation than a true "tech" business. Keen to get your comments/thoughts around that.
Cheers!
APX Price at posting:
$25.01 Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
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