By Leon Gettler, Talking Business

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) is everywhere. The challenge for companies, which often operate as a collection of silos, is how to get the different departments to share their AI. How does marketing work with the projections of sales?

Enter Datatiku, the global company with its centralised data platform that moves businesses along their data journey from analytics at scale to enterprise AI.

Grant Case, the regional vice president for Asia-Pacific (APAC) of Dataiku, said AI now made collaboration essential for businesses.

“Data scientists, data analysts, engineers, executives are going to have to come together to build out these AI products themselves,” Mr Case told Talking Business. 

“And that’s really the genesis for Dataiku as an organisation and our mission has been for almost 10 years now, as we have begun to grow, coming from Paris, and now a worldwide organisastion.”

Dataiku has a workforce of 1100 in places like Singapore, Japan, Korea, the Middle East and in Australia in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide.

Dataiku provides the platform for AI products in organisations.

GETTING AI ACROSS DEPARTMENTS

The key, Mr Case said, was to get different departments talking to each other and sharing AI data.

“When it comes to an organisation, finance has to be able to talk to marketing, it has to be able to talk to sales,” he said.

“So what we have done is build a platform that will construct data products and AI capabilities, such as machine learning models, and start to share those across the organisation itself.

“So an analyst who has perhaps no concept of coding but has a little bit of statistics background and knowledge can start to build out their own pipelines with data and start to create their own insights. The flipside of that is that data scientists can start coming together and helping those individuals build out those machine learning models that may be even more complex later on.

“Ultimately what we’re trying to do is ensure whoever is working within your organisation, no matter what their maturity is around analytics and AI, we think they have value as part of that chain of command.”

AI BUILDS COLLABORATIVE CAPABILITY

Mr Case said the “collaborative capability” was the key for Dataiku customers.

“If I am working as a sales manager, I need to understand what my marketing campaigns are,” he said. “If I’m the marketing manager, I need to understand what sort of attribution model that are bringing my sales leads.

“So we, as a platform, help both of these individuals to share those data sets that are accessible to them, make their own comments and commentary, build their insights so that ultimately, we believe, everybody has to be on the field in order to make these new data products, this new AI, come to life within an organisation.”

Mr Case said giving people skills to work with AI is part of the job creation process around AI.

“Part of the upskilling process as we talk to customers is basically bringing these people along,” he said.

Mr Case said there were only few hundred, or a low thousand data scientists in Australia – which meant more were needed to be trained to do that sort of work.

“Part of that is the upskilling process,” Mr Case said.

“We spend a lot of time with customers helping them understand not just AI technology in general but how do you start to upskill those individuals within your organisation that don’t know necessarily anything about AI.”  

www.dataiku.com

www.leongettler.com

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness.

https://play.acast.com/s/talkingbusiness/talking-business25-interview-with-grant-case-from-dataiku

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By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

CREATIVE USE of artificial intelligence (AI) can change every kind of business, from fast moving consumer goods companies to retailers to banks, according to Thoughtworks director of data and AI practice, David Colls.

He said creative AI could be used to generate content, new products and strategic ideas.

“It there’s one thing AI is good at, it’s scaling to big numbers and I think that there’s an opportunity to use the best of people’s creative insights and talent and AI’s ability to search through big spaces and generate novel concepts,” Mr Colls told Talking Business. 

“And there are a lot of drivers for innovation at the moment. Ongoing adoption of new digital technologies, responding to climate change, responding to public health and the COVID pandemic and other economic factors, so the more you can explore these areas of uncertainty, the more opportunity you might unlock.”

As an example, he cited the way the Finnish part of Thoughtworks had transformed the business of Swedish distillery Mackmyra using AI.

The AI team looked at all the decisions that went into making whisky, like the grain, the time, the peat, the selection of the cask and process, and then looked at how consumers perceived different whiskies. Then they created a new whisky to capture the market.

The AI was actually creating a new product by exploring the space that had not occurred to the human distillers.

“You can look at any product in the same way that the team did at Mackmyra as a series of design decisions or design parameters and then you can try and characterise its performance in the market as a test or as a model that can be run,” Mr Colls said

AI can assist supply chains too

He said AI could be particularly useful in the digital space and for supply chains and customer service and the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) space.

This could not only be applied to physical products but to services as well, he said, examining the service characteristics and customer experience. This would be particularly good for retailers. 

“If you look at a retail product catalogue, you can identify areas where there are potentially gaps in the catalogue with these sorts of techniques,” Mr Colls said.

“We might have a range of shoes, there might be another style that’s emerging in another part of the catalogue, say jackets and it might be that the AI able to identify some common thread between two different elements of the product portfolio.”

Mr Colls said AI would also be good for banks and insurers

Using AI to design call centre experiences

Thoughtworks had also worked in the area of designing call centre experiences

Mr Colls said AI could boost employee morale and ensure companies retain workers, where AI is used by staff to do their work.

“In this creative space, it can be like working with another creative partner who has particular abilities in a design space,” Mr Colls said.

“You can use these tools to help you come up with more ideas that you might not have thought of yourself.

“You might use them to help you develop those ideas faster and to improve productivity. You can use it to test ideas, to get fast feedback on ideas that might otherwise take some time to validate,” he said.

“It provides a number of avenues for development and growth and ongoing learning which is very important for people.”

www.thoughtworks.com

www.leongettler.com  

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness

https://play.acast.com/s/talkingbusiness/talking-business17-interview-with-dave-colls-from-thoughtwor

CONNECTING data is one of the biggest barriers to business innovation right now, according to InterSystems regional director, Andrew Aho.

Mr Aho has special insights into the value of what he calls ‘data democratisation’ having seen it in action through InterSystems experience in the field. InterSystems is a creative data technology provider dedicated to helping customers solve the most critical scalability, interoperability, and speed problems.

InterSystems has found that while the finance industry is now using data management technologies to break down siloes, improve data quality, and deliver more meaningful insights across their organisations, there is also a need to democratise this data. This is achieved by making it much easier to share knowledge and letting users interpret and capitalise on insights regardless of their technical skillset. 

“The secret to creating an efficient organisation that delivers relevant insights to its teams and great service to its clients is all in the data,” Mr Aho said. “Employing a data management platform that supports the democratisation of data is critical for businesses looking to keep their staff well informed across all departments.”
The implementation of advanced architecture, such as smart data fabrics, makes enterprise data available across many roles in an organisation, whether the user is technical or non-technical. This ensures that team members can produce relevant, trusted insights and ultimately make better business decisions.

Data democratisation brings about several key benefits for future-focused organisations including:

Addressing the customer data management challenge

Recent research showed that, while 95 percent of CEOs surveyed across Australia believed their organisations’ long-term success and durability would rest upon better use of customer and client data, just seven percent believed their customer data was sufficiently comprehensive to enable this.(1)  
Data management continues to be a key concern for organisations globally who are looking to create a 360-degree view of their customers’ habits and needs. Democratising this information through the implementation of the right technology will immediately begin to address these concerns internally and provide business leaders with a more solid understanding of their customer data.

Unlocking legacy siloes

Data siloes remain an issue across industries for many reasons. An organisation that wants to evolve from existing legacy systems can risk leaving data behind, or team members may house documents in private servers or in emails instead of public spaces, creating impenetrable siloes. Incorporating data management technology based on a cloud platform means data can be updated in real time and accessible at a moment’s notice, ensuring that all members of the team, regardless of their technical abilities, can access critical organisational information.

Driving innovation

Democratised data empowers team members to use the most relevant information in their day-to-day activities, inspiring ideas to innovate and unlock new organisational capabilities. This helps business leaders more effectively keep pace with market changes, as well as identify and capitalise on untapped opportunities for the business.  

In a market where financial service organisations are searching for a competitive edge, being able to access all elements of customer data through management architectures like smart data fabrics can be seen as a silver bullet to success.

“Smart data fabrics can amylase, transform and harmonise data from multiple sources on demand to make it usable and actionable,” Mr Aho said. “These systems work to keep organisations compliant, as well as improve efficiency by allowing data to be accessed freely by internal parties, while maintaining data security and integrity across the organisation.

“As technology continues to develop, it will be critical for organisations to evolve and embrace these changes to better establish a digital foothold in the future of the financial industry”.

Reference:
(1) https://www.pwc.com.au/ceo-agenda/ceo-survey/data-management-trust-and-growth.html  

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By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

HOW DOES one improve governance at Australian companies? Ben Nowlan, the co-founder and CEO Shaparency, an online ecosystem that automates and digitises the process of board meetings and shareholder management, believes it can all be automated and done with blockchain.

“We take everything from a board meeting … the minutes, voting resolution, right through to shareholder management, communications and reports and we’ve digitised that into our platform,” Mr Nowlan told Talking Business.

“The key part for Shaparency, where the paying points are and why this is such a growing market, is that less than 15 percent of boards globally use any kind of board technology. So we focus on them becoming digital first and governance will be the outcome.”

Mr Nowlan said blockchain becomes another layer of security by making certain elements of the proceedings tamper proof and immutable.

 “Document signature, digital notices, voting and proxy voting, that’s where the blockchain really comes into play,” he said.

“Blockchain provides an extra ledger beyond the data base. The data will be transcribed into the ledger … if documents were edited, it would record the versions of those documents. If a signature was done by someone else, we would know in the platform because we have the ID of who that person is. And we also make it easier to vote and proxy vote.” 

Mr Nowlan said boards were still fundamentally paper-based. Part of this also reflects the make-up of Australia’s directors.

“The average age of a board member in Australia is a 61 year old white male,” he said.

“Less than 50 percent of board members in Australia have any idea of the technology disruption in their own space. These are the sorts of people that are coming to board meetings and printing off reams of paper, reluctant to change.”

Mr Nowlan said technology existed to allow board meetings to be more digitally enhanced and COVID had “put a rocket fuel” under the system.

“Australia is actually one of the first countries in the world, when COVID hit, they quickly updated the Corporations Act to include digital notices and meetings could be run virtually. That’s a world first,” Mr Nowlan said.

He said a company’s messaging tools enhanced communications of board proceedings with shareholders.

Mr Nowlan said one of the big challenges for boards in adopting any kind of technology was the generational fear of technology and an inherent comfort with printing paper.

“Blockchain technology can take all of that away once there is a real understanding of how it will work when it comes to board technology,” he said.

“We’ve got our work cut out for us when it comes to educating people to use technology in the boardrooms and, when it comes to blockchain, there is an extra layer complexity.”

Mr Nowlan said he built and funded Shaparency during the lockdown in 2020.  He had been in France during that time and had seen the impact there.

Mr Nowlan had, at the time, stepped down from running a small retail tech company and he decided to build Shaparency as he suspected these digital platform would be needed when so much of Australia was in lockdown.

He and his team raised capital and he had a small team operating to create it.

“We hadn’t seen each other in four months,” Mr Nowlan said.

They built partnerships and signed up customers in seven different countries.

www.shaparency.com

www.leongettler.com

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness.

https://play.acast.com/s/talkingbusiness/talking-business46-interview-with-ben-nowlan-ceo-of-shaparen

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