SUMMER 2023

32
THE DISTRIBUTOR’S LINK
Joe Dysart
Joe Dysart is an Internet speaker and business consultant based in Thousand Oaks,
California. A journalist for 20 years, his articles have appeared in more than 40
publications, including The New York Times and The Financial Times of London.
During the past decade, his work has focused exclusively on ecommerce.
Telephone: 631-256-6602; web: www.joedysart.com; email: joe@dysartnewsfeatures.com
USING AI TO HAVE A CONVERSATION
WITH YOUR DATABASE
Early adopters are using AI to have daily conversations
with their databases to mine business insights -- freeing
them up from keyboards forevermore.
The capability -- for workers at a fastener distributor
to talk with their company database each morning to
glean insights on how to further maximize business
profits each day -- may seem like sci-fi to some.
But for those in the know, chatting daily with their
databases -- as if they’re talking with Siri, Alexa, Google
Assistant, or a similar voice interface system -- has
become second nature.
“As consumers, we’ve grown accustomed to simply
asking our smart speakers or mobile assistants to
authoritatively resolve any factual questions or trivia
disputes, because it’s that much faster,” says Chen
Zhang, chief technology officer, RAIN, a voice tech
company.
“Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri have grown
incredibly robust in the knowledge graphs they consult
to perform these tricks of effortless data access -- and
clever in how they return results that balance brevity with
some helpful context.
“This affordance of voice tech as a rapid, convenient
gateway to knowledge can be even more transformational
for employees, for whom knowledge access is not a
trivial matter of exploring a curiosity, but a fundamental
part of doing their jobs.
“This is especially true for members of the deskless
workforce, employees whose hands and eyes are
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLE
EARLY ADOPTERS ARE USING AI TO HAVE CONVERSATIONS
WITH THEIR DATABASES
frequently tied up with their work.”
Abhishek Shanbhag, AI and automation practice
head at Acuvate, agrees: “A few years back, voice
search and voice-based assistants were more a novelty
than common parlance.
“With the advent of more powerful AI, natural language
processing and speech recognition technologies, AI-based
voice search and voice support have come to the forefront
in various industrial use cases.”
In practice, such voice-enabled systems allow
fastener distributor workers to grab a quick, business
data insight before, during, or after a meeting.
And they also enable workers to converse with
their databases on a specific facet of their business
-- enabling them drill-down with follow-up questions
and what-ifs to retrieve specific solutions for specific
challenges.
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