Quick Bio
Name: Maureen Pajerski
Position: Chief Commercial Officer
Company: IntelliSee
Overtime: In her spare time, Pajerski enjoys hiking, scuba diving, and reading. She also works with Gerry’s Café in Arlington Heights, IL, to help employ adults with special needs and support community inclusion.
SCN: What is your position, and what does it entail? What are your responsibilities?
MAUREEN PAJERSKI: I’m responsible for the customer and commercial side of IntelliSee, building profitable revenue and market share growth by creating successful systems integrator partnerships and ensuring full end user customer satisfaction. The IntelliSee solution will help customers mitigate and eliminate costly safety risks. My goal is to drive win/win partnerships benefiting all parties: customers, channel partners, and our company.
SCN: How long have you been in this position?
MP: I just joined the company in September of this year.
SCN: How has your background prepared you for your role?
MP: I’ve spent most of my career at Rauland-Borg Corp. doing the same thing I will be doing at IntelliSee: driving profitable revenue growth, market share growth, and ensuring customer satisfaction via strong channel partnerships. My last position at Rauland was chief sales and marketing officer, where my teams were responsible for worldwide sales, marketing, and technical support.
I love helping companies grow strong partnerships—and accountability—within the channel. Throughout my tenure at Rauland, we supported a strong, successful bidirectional partnership with the Rauland channel. We did so by ensuring that all decisions were made within a framework of “What is best for our end user customers?” and “What is best for our channel partners?” With this framework, successful growth followed. The Rauland solution and the IntelliSee solution are both better, stronger solutions for the end users when integrated with other solutions. This is why a 100 percent channel go-to-market strategy makes the most sense.
SCN: What are your short- and long-term goals?
MP: I have three short-term goals. First, we will set up appropriate systems integration partners excited to bring IntelliSee to their customers. Next, we’ll support IntelliSee partners to success with all the necessary tools, and listen and act on the feedback provided. Finally, we will ensure we are appointing partners who share our vision of making the world safer and improving customers’ businesses.
Once we have successfully launched into the United States, we will set up international partnerships with the same goals as a part of our long-term strategy.
SCN: What is the greatest challenge you face?
MP: IntelliSee is not yet a proven solution/technology—our initial customer site has only recently gone live—and we don’t yet have any brand recognition. So starting from zero revenue, zero partners, and zero customers is a fairly big challenge.
Additionally, the security market has experienced a lot of aggressive promises with regard to how artificial intelligence (AI) will function and integrators are justifiably cautious.
Lastly, systems integrators have had a lot of challenging experiences with new market entrants trying to piggyback off of their success without a true partnership. At IntelliSee, we want to go to market in a controlled manner to ensure that each customer and each systems integrator partner is 100 percent satisfied with the solution so they can strongly recommend the IntelliSee solution.
SCN: Where do you see the AI market heading?
MP: Can I say I hope we don’t reach singularity? AI is like every other technology and invention: it can be used for good or it can be used for bad. IntelliSee has chosen not to implement facial recognition. There are many great applications, but there are also so many ways it can be abused.
As processing power gets cheaper and as AI algorithms get more advanced with deeper neural networks, we will see AI providing assistance in a growing number of areas, with fewer mistakes (false positives or negatives). This will allow people to do what they are good at, while machines can do the boring, repetitive, large data-crunching tasks. To me, the AI revolution is very similar to the industrial revolution. Jobs and business will change dramatically as monotonous duties, like watching security cameras, are eliminated and people are better utilized for things like responding to risks the machines detect.
SCN: Are there new initiatives we are likely to see from IntelliSee?
MP: Absolutely. IntelliSee is a risk identification/mitigation platform. Our initial release intelligently identifies trespassing, missing people or no-shows, fallen persons, drawn guns, or slip risks like spills. We will continue to add capabilities pending systems integrator feedback. Our next generation adds motion to identify loitering, fights, crowd formation, an angry individual, or other markers of aggression.
IntelliSee is a well-capitalized company with deep ties to the University of Iowa Technology Institute, where much of our intellectual property was initially created. The Iowa Technology Institute has a multi-decade relationship with the U.S. Department of Defense doing AI, computer vision, and virtual reality development.
SCN: How can systems contractors better position themselves to profit from products and/or services you have to offer?
MP: IntelliSee is looking for strong partnerships with systems contractors who see value in launching the solution to all of their customers. IntelliSee overlays the existing video surveillance system and makes that infrastructure more powerful at a fraction of the cost of the initial purchase. This ability to extend the power of the existing CCTV system will be important—particularly now, when capital budgets are likely to be very tight due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
While all integrators are interested in recurring revenue, the majority of systems contractors are still project-based and their sales force is accustomed to selling hardware. IntelliSee provides a natural bridge to recurring revenue with ongoing benefit to customers as we enhance the platform. Because IntelliSee is going to market with a limited distribution model, each integrator will need to determine which markets and geographies are key to their organization and be willing to walk from those that are more opportunistic. Each integrator should be prepared to do the necessary due diligence to ensure IntelliSee is a solution that fits with their other strategic suppliers and, most importantly, with their customers.
As a last item, look at your organization to see how well it is set up to support add-on sales (versus an entirely new platform) and recurring revenue streams with customer touch points post the initial sale to see what can be strengthened.
