Smart Industry 1/2020

Smart Business Title Story: Smart Companies
source ©: Medium Corporation
globally. For example, it supports
a Care Manager function that can
sift through both structured and
unstructured data to help tailor care
programs in conjunction with human
medical professionals. Watson
has also been applied to the hunt
for new therapeutic drugs and in
optimizing cancer treatment and
care using historic data and patient
information to fine-tune regimens
to the needs of the individual.
Dreamstime is a European stock photography
company which has started
to use AI to improve the experience
of its website users, for instance during
the photo-vetting process. Horia
Beschea, an AI specialist working
with the company from Bucharest,
Romania, explains: “Before photos
are posted onto the website, AI is
used to sort through them. That allows
us to distribute content to our
users at a much faster rate than ever
before. Our AI models recognize hu-
18
Watching Out for
Subtle Signals
AI can be trained to
detect and interpret
the social signals in
human communication,
thus offering
in-call guidance to
call center agents
for every phone
conversation.
AI is a huge
win for an
industry that
relies on
heavy
reporting.
Oscar Macia
ForceManager
AI allows us
to distribute
content to our
users much
faster than ever
before.
Horia Beschea
AI specialist,
Dreamstime
Conversation Starters
LivePerson has access to data that
helps inform the brand–consumer
relationship and interaction, he explains.
This data can be leveraged to
reveal within each product category
and subcategory why people are
reaching out to customer care. The
system is built on 24 years of customer
call center data. According to
Fischaleck, more than 18,000 companies
currently use LivePerson.
Finally, Stephane Rion, senior deeplearning
scientist for Teradata in
France, says his company is delivering
AI customized solutions “built
from the ground up” and based
on the client’s requirements, using
a blend of the latest open-source
technologies and Teradata’s Vantage
analytics platform.
“We deliver fraud detection solutions
based on deep recurrent neural
networks, financial products recommendation
systems, and document
processing and automatic validation
for the back office,” Rion says.
Teradata is currently working with
Abanca and other major banks in
Spain on the implementation of a
solution to accelerate the loan acceptance
process for bank customers.
The product is up and running
and enables the validation of hundreds
of loan requests per day, Rion
claims. It processes and classifies
necessary client documents (proof
of address, pay slips, etc.) for a loan
request using natural language processing
techniques and machine
learning. It also extracts and validates
specific information such as
national insurance numbers and signatures
from the documents using
optical character recognition and
deep-learning models.
Beyond those adoption stories and
the range of views on AI’s progman
models in images, image type,
and content that should be filtered
[e.g. adult/health/violence] and run
on all new images at once.”
Applying AI allows Dreamstime to
get an automated understanding
of the image content and its potential
value as stock photography.
Freed from the onerous and timeconsuming
tasks of sorting images,
editors can focus on quality issues.
In Barcelona, ForceManager, which
specializes in mobile CRM, says it
is the first in Europe to incorporate
machine learning and conversational
AI technology (along the lines of Siri
and Alexa) to help field sales representatives
working away from the
office. The system delivers insights
on upcoming deals, recalls data from
previous visits, and even recommends
certain products or services
for promotion to specific customers.
“We’re seeing many of the consumer
AI trends carry over to business to cut
out menial tasks and drive efficiency,”
says ForceManager’s cofounder
and CEO Oscar Macia. One of the
company’s creations is a virtual, AIbased
sales assistant called Dana.
On average, according to Macia, field
sales reps spend 63 percent of their
time on non-selling activities. With
Dana’s help, they can use their commuting
time to report on a meeting
in real time and stay up to date on
their pipeline. “It’s a huge win for
an industry that relies on a heavy
reporting funnel to survive,” he says.
AI-enabled artificial assistants are in
many ways similar to what’s on of-
source ©: ForceManager
fer from LivePerson, a provider of
conversational commerce software
that can work semi-autonomously
or in concert with employees. “We
are changing the very nature of
brand–customer interaction,” says
Moritz Fischaleck, a product evangelist
at LivePerson in Berlin.