Temese Szalai
CEO & Founder, Subtextive
Meet our CEO & Founder
Organizations kept coming to Temese with the same problem: they were investing in building and using AI but the results and outcomes were falling short because context and human expertise weren’t built into how their teams were working with it.
She founded Subtextive in 2019 to fix that.
Today, she continues to help organizations build the shared understanding, frameworks, and semantic foundations they need to implement and use AI effectively and innovatively in ways they can trust and defend.
Temese has over 25 years of experience encoding meaning in ways that capture human perspective and business needs to create semantic infrastructure that scales operationally and technologically.
She holds an M.A. from UCLA Linguistics, where she completed her coursework for her Ph.D., with specialization in Computational Linguistics and the syntax-semantics interface.
After leaving her Ph.D. program to take a job developing ontologies at a semantically-driven search company, she knew she had found her passion: humanizing interactions between people and machines.
Recognized as a collaborative and inspiring leader, she has received two service excellence awards from the IAB Tech Lab for her contributions to the “Taxonomy & Mapping” working group. She’s also been a speaker at many events and conferences throughout her career, including two years back-to-back at TAO Ignite, the IHA Health Literacy Annual Research Conference 2024, and the “Brand Safety” Panel at IAB Tech Lab’s 2024 Annual Summit.
Because her approach is grounded in knowledge architecture, ontologies, and semantic foundations, the frameworks and artifacts she develops hold up where surface level AI consulting doesn’t.
And, that's what clients notice: Subtextive’s work is defensible, technically sound, and innovative. It’s rigorous enough to sustain and practical enough to use while providing strategic competitive differentiation for them.
Raised by scientists, she brings discipline and curiosity to her problem solving along with a sense of humor and humility.
Here’s what people have said about her:
“A breath of fresh air.”
“A thorough professional with an extremely deep knowledge of semantic foundations and AI who could be counted on for leadership and A+ communication skills.”
“Outstanding leadership, mentorship, and expertise in Natural Language Processing & Machine Learning.”
“Temese helped guide us through what we didn't know about our journey to applying AI.”
“Subtextive’s embedded AI leadership work has been truly transformational!”
When she’s not working with clients, building ontologies, or running Subtextive, you’ll quite often find her hunkered down in her cookbook library, in the kitchen putting together an inspired meal for friends and family from locally sourced ingredients, or enjoying a quiet meal with her husband over a glass of Oregon Pinot.
She also enjoys gardening, sewing, her three cats, and traveling, especially if there’s a foreign language involved, but also in the Pacific Northwest. She speaks Hungarian and some Dutch, has studied French, Spanish, German, Japanese and Turkish, and, at one point, self-learned a little Italian, Portuguese, and Icelandic and could order a drink in Catalan and Basque.
Working with Subtextive usually starts with a conversation about where you are and where you want to be. Since Temese doesn’t like sales calls, we try to keep things low pressure, low pitch. We listen closely and offer an honest assessment of how and where we might help with our expertise and offerings.