About

Deon Nicholas is an accomplished CEO and Co-Founder of Forethought, a company dedicated to building AI products that help customer support agents become geniuses at their job. With a focus on AI for customer support, Deon is a recognized leader in his field, having been named to Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Deon's expertise in AI and software engineering has been honed through his work with companies such as Pure Storage and Dropbox. As a software engineer at Pure Storage, Deon was an early member of the team that built FlashBlade, a distributed all-flash file-system for NFS/S3, Data Analytics, and Machine Learning workloads. His contributions included implementing compression algorithms, read/write performance, Garbage Collection, High-Availability, caching, and flash storage algorithms. FlashBlade is now being used by companies such as Mercedes, ServiceNow, the NHL, and Paylocity. At Dropbox, Deon was an early member of the Collaboration team that wrote the Inline Annotations feature. He also contributed code to the Dropbox Badge and other collaboration tools. Deon's education includes a Bachelor of Mathematics (with Distinction) in Honours Computer Science and Combinatorics/Optimization from the University of Waterloo. With 8.20 years of relevant experience, Deon is a highly skilled professional with a deep understanding of AI, software engineering, and machine learning. His work at Forethought is helping to transform the customer support industry by empowering agents with the tools they need to excel.