Leader Highlight: When Experience Turns to Passion

Monday, August 22, 2022

In 2012, Bernard Boodea, Australian startup entrepreneur, went through a turbulent phase in his personal life and professional career. Just having migrated to Australia and going through a difficult time in almost every aspect of his life, he created a personal app to help himself from falling through.

Bernard has decided that if the tool was able to help him get through the most difficult time of his life, then it needs to be shared.

This featured article with CXO Outlook shares Bernard's journey and what he has accomplished almost a decade after that revelatory experience.

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From starting his own IT consulting firm at the age of 24 to leading teams towards winning awards as an Agile Coach to founding his own AI/ML-driven company, Bernard Boodeea’s (Founder & CEO, Life Intelligence Group) professional journey is a testament to his passion, commitment, aspiration, and hard work.

Taking the First Step Towards Entrepreneurship

Bernard is a Scaled Agile Program Consultant who has an extensive experience in training leaders, change agents, consultants, and team members to drive a Lean-Agile transformation at an enterprise scale. During one of his sessions, Bernard’s students wanted to apply the mindset of agile transformation to their personal lives. However, when the students were told to use the same tools they practice at work in a day-to-day context, they found it time-consuming and complex. Bernard noted their issues and dug deep to find out that 20% of people who have goals stick to them for more than a month, but only 8% achieve their goals.

In 2012, Bernard was going through a turbulent phase on the personal front while immigrating to Australia. “To help me stay on track, I built a tool called Lifetime PA (Lifetime Personal Assistant) to take care of my personal life, a new career in Australia, finances impacted by the relocation, and both mental and physical health,” says Bernard. The aim of this tool was to help him cope with all these challenges and have a personal assistant to maintain his focus using the Agile mindset. After showing this tool to his students, Bernard received boosting feedback from them, who showed a preference for using it in their personal lives themselves.

“This is where I decided to refresh Lifetime PA with the latest technology, which is now TaskSpur and Ari under the Life Intelligence Group umbrella,” adds the spirited Agile Programmer, Bernard. In 2018, Life Intelligence Group was established with a mission to provide an Artificial Intelligence Assistant that will learn and understand users to motivate them to stay on track in life, save time and money, and reduce stress.

How does TaskSpur & Ari help clients Improve Personal Success?

Life Intelligence Group uses the power of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to help individuals, teams, and businesses optimize their capacity for success and wellness. Users get a secure platform, TaskSpur, where they can add their goals and tasks and have an Intelligent Assistant, Ari to help them go through their day. Below expound TaskSpur & Ari work.

TaskSpur: It is an easy-to-use goal management app that combines Agile practices and a unique AI solution for a personalized user experience. Users get to create a goal or task in less than 1 minute and plan their entire day in 5 mins. In this way, clients can achieve goals and strike a delicate balance in all aspects of life: personal, work, health, and finance. Moreover, TaskSpur has an inbuilt text and voice-activated AI designed to help users build the habit of getting things done every day.

Ari: It is a unique AI tool with ML designed to collect data to continuously improve the user experience and be the ultimate digital assistant. Currently housed within TaskSpur, Ari can also be licensed and customized for clients’ businesses providing ML & AI integration, military-grade data security with de-identified user data, and enhanced customer experience on users’ mobile or web app.

What makes Life Intelligence Group unique in the AI-ML Market?

“Most start-ups focus on solving one problem in people’s lives. However, Life Intelligence Group is taking a big risk in building a platform that addresses a mindset change impacting multiple parts of their lives,” says Founder & CEO.

Right now, Life Intelligence Group’s biggest challenge is to make people understand how technology can simplify their lives and amplify their productivity. On an optimistic note, Bernard and his team are up for this challenge of making people change their mindset to focus on what is important in their lives and make technology work for them. “It always takes time to adapt and stick to new habits, but the outcome is rewarding. This is where I believe we are unique,” Bernard continues.

Lessons Learned from the Past

As an Agile Coach, Bernard believes that anyone can be trained, except each individual has a different pattern and pace of learning. “But if you are an entrepreneur, this can destroy your business as funding is limited, and you cannot afford to delay releases.” At the end of the day, leaders must be able to distinguish between loyal and job-hopping employees. It is also imperative to have a team that will stick with the company during its good and bad times. Therefore, one of the most crucial takeaway lessons that Bernard has learned is to ‘hire slow and fire fast.’

Today, with over 20 years of building world-first applications and leading projects, Bernard has mastered the art of building high-performing teams. As the Founder & CEO of Life Intelligence Group, he is technically proficient in guiding, helping, and motivating his employees to create unique products.

Celebrating the Milestones

Bernard has garnered praise and recognition throughout his professional journey in the software development industry. To name some of his personal achievements, Bernard completed his MBA Degree Program in Entrepreneurship, followed by the Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program, and Newchip Accelerator Program.

Furthermore, Life Intelligence Group has created a buzz in the marketplace with its disruptive AI-based applications, viz TaskSpur® and Ari. In December 2021, Corporate Vision awarded Ari the Most Innovative Artificial Intelligence Engine, while TaskSpur won the Best Success Planning Solution award. This year, Life Intelligence Group reached the milepost of 500 active users and also successfully implemented the first version of its rewards program.

A Sneak-Peak into the Life of a CEO

Bernard’s typical day at work is jam-packed with work reviews, team updates, communications, and meetings with prospective customers, advisors, and partners. He also has TaskSpur and Ari to help him navigate the tasks as per priority.

To strike a healthy work-life balance, Bernard takes time from his busy schedule to exercise and plan future strategies for his company. “I love to DJ during the weekends, read books, play soccer & basketball, and travel to catch up with my family members,” says Bernard. But, he doesn’t mind working round the clock for 365 days as he really enjoys work and is passionate about his projects.

Current Projects & Future Goals

Presently, Bernard and his team are aiming toward some exciting goals for Life Intelligence Group. Some of them include implementing goal templates to help their users plan their life milestones easily and quicker, providing relevant products and services to their users based on their goals, personalizing Ari to provide a better onboarding experience, agile mindset training, and smarter guidance, and implementing their token and blockchain technology to reward their users and collect meaningful data. Moreover, the Life Intelligence Group team led by Bernard is also looking at raising funds to focus 100% on their vision and mission with TaskSpur and Ari for the users. In June 2022, Life Intelligence Group plans to launch its calendar and shop module MVP.

In addition, as the Founder & CEO of Life Intelligence Group, Bernard’s long-term vision is to provide the users with a place they trust and their first go-to place to get guidance and recommendation to stay productive in life.

A Piece of Advice

Bernard opines that AI is still a growing technology, so aspiring entrepreneurs need to be passionate and patient while implementing AI into their products. There might be a possibility that their algorithms may not work in one go. One needs clean data to provide an excellent and trustworthy AI experience for successful implementation. Moreover, new venturers must devise a big data strategy to translate their stored data relevant to their service & product offerings.

“If you are a B2C product, then make sure that you collect enough data to understand your users’ behavior and not quickly categorize the user,” asserts Bernard. Furthermore, he also recommends aspirants to have a strategy for abnormal behaviors and to avoid skewing their data until they understand the abnormality.

This article was originally published on the CXO Outlook website. Link to the original story here