Today artificial intelligence is revolutionizing many business sectors and none will remain untouched. Many people are talking about digital transformation and this is one dimension of it. For me digital transformation does not mean incremental change of business into new direction, it involves radical innovation and utilization of new opportunities, like developing analytics.
Trasformation often involves also distruption. This happens when businesses earlier dominating industries become lackards and are over run by new comers able to reinnovate the business. At starting point all have they assets equipping them to survive the competition: old players have their customer base and new comers agility with intention to break the rules of the game.
So in principle digital transformation threats equal both established companies and their challengers. Due to cloud services the entry barriers created by heavy investments are now gone. So ability to see or predict desired change of business by customers will be the most important asset for companies in the future.
People often think that artificial intelligence is a recent invention. Actually an English mathematician Alan Turing published a paper entitled “ Computing Machinery and Ingelligence” already in 1950. Even I had some courses on this topic already in mid 80’s. So it is old thing. What has changed now is the capability and innovation to utilize it more widely. An excellent example of how artificial intelligence will transform the processes today is AI marketing automation: A continuous and learning dialogue on the individual’s level, with machines taking care of optimal compiling, targeting, and timing of content and choosing the best channel transform marketing into a service. So new way to do it involves reaching individual level with more limited man power need. An old idea implemented in new effective and innovative way.
I believe that 2018 will be the year analytics will make a breakthrough in many new areas, like retail selection and shelf-space optimization, replacing old semimanual procesess. There is an analytics solution that can synchronise datasets to form a selection and optimise shelf space highly efficiently, one shelf module at a time. The results will be visible in both customer satisfaction and the bottom line. Similar phenomenon is reaching new industry verticals with ever increasing speed. So watch out and be prepared, your competition will do that anyhow. You just need to be faster. You might be surprised to notice that often decision making could take more time than actual implementation of the change.
At Houston Analytics we believe that 2018 will be an amazing year. We have prepared ourselves to serve our customers in this big change.
I wish you agility and open minded approach to tackle big changes in 2018.
This post has earlier been published in Houston Analytics blog.