Scott Downes is something of a “Johnny Appleseed” of Artificial Intelligence.
He’s spent the bulk of his career building startups from the ground up, using AI technology as a catalyst for the success of these companies.
“I love the idea of seeding new businesses from the start with the power that we have in modern AI,” said Downes, founder and CEO of startup Supernal AI. “Startups are the sort of place where you can wear lots of hats, and I’m that kind of person, I’ve got a large hat collection.”
His comments came during an episode of CH-AI Brews, the student-led podcast from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, in which Downes discussed the importance of tech startups and the support they need.
He described a hypothetical opportunity for start-ups to use currently evolving technology such as AI and machine learning to create value for organizations in large cities where buildings with hundreds of offices are filled with people all doing the same thing for different organizations.
“You’ve got 20, 60, 80 floors of finance and accounting departments, and IT teams, and all of them are kind of trying to solve the same problems,” he said. “If you can figure out ways to generalize that problem space and be able to apply AI and machine-learning technology to create the right matches, you can solve a ton of problems.”
Solving these problems in the modern AI sphere can involve the concept of “retrieval augmented generation,” or RAG, an AI framework that combines information retrieval with large language models. With RAG, Downes said, “You can pass a bunch of data that’s specific to your problem space and use the benefits of these super-powerful large language models from companies like OpenAI, and before you know it, you’re talking to your data like you’re talking to your neighbor.”
During his time as a senior advisor for Invisible Technologies, a company that uses its refined AI models to help its client companies grow, Downes and his team saw a prime opportunity for the business about two years ago.
“We started to think, ‘Maybe there’s an opportunity for us to spin off different types of businesses from the core of Invisible,’ and we started about a year ago a new way of approaching that and we called it the ‘The Infinity Constellation.’ Infinity is a company that serves as an incubator for AI-powered startups,” Downes said. “So while we were building that expertise, we thought it would be great to take that expertise and solve other types of problems out in the world and do it from a build-it-from-scratch kind of approach.”
Downes described a unique aspect of Invisible that has provided the company with an edge in the competitive world of technology.
“We love working with folks who have big problems, giant ambitions, and they’re growing really fast,” he said. “If there’s an option between a casual stroll in the park or a few laps around a raceway, you can guess which way we go.”
For some businesses, Downes said, AI can be an extension of the workforce, and “not just a bot that you talk to.”
After serving as the chief technology officer for Chattanooga-based moving company Bellhops, Downes worked with Invisible for about five years. He switched to the incubator side of Invisible in 2024 becoming the CTO of Infinity Constellation. Downes works with nine different founders of companies that Infinity has brought into its ecosystem.
“Don’t be afraid of technology,” he said, “and don’t be afraid to start your own thing.”
Downes, who is based in Chattanooga, has a bachelor’s degree in English from Duke University and studied 20th century English Literature at Oxford University in England.
CHAI Brews: Infusing Conversations About AI is a UTC student-led podcast exploring the impact of AI on university classrooms and campuses; the career fields students are pursuing and the workplaces that await them; the city of Chattanooga, the state of Tennessee and the people who live there.
Excerpts of the podcast air on Mondays on WUTC-FM 88.1 and can be found online at wutc.org. CH-AI Brews is also available on Spotify and Apple podcasts. Listen to the entire Scott Downes interview HERE.