Racetrack.ai – India’s First AI Innovation Hub for Sales & Support, has raised $5 Million funding from a clutch of national & international investors. The investors include Murali Krishnan [Ex-President & Founding Member, Biocon], Dov Kagan [a renowned USA based investor]. The list also has names of investors from Singapore, Mauritius, and most of its existing investors.
This is really an overwhelming and positive moment for all of us. We are now looking forward and are excited to announce our next overseas operation base in USA, Mauritius and Singapore.
This move will help us delve into newer business verticals like retail, banking and healthcare. This boost in our physical presence will open new doors for us to partner with intercontinental brands and decision makers while helping us to create global footprint in the AI industry.
Being a pioneer in India’s AI sector, this AI startup offers two flagship products: MARVIN & TURING. While MARVIN is world’s first SmartBot for sales & support, TURING on the other hand is world’s smartest online & offline Business Accelerator that helps in better business planning and execution. With these two products, Racetrack.ai is targeting the fast booming $100 Billion AI market. Investors are positive on their recent moves and have high expectations on Racetrack.ai.
Subrat Parida -Founder & CEO, Racetrack.ai
As the global AI market is rocketing up, Racetrack.ai is focussing on business verticals like BFSI, Education, Health, Hospitality, and Real Estate. With the possibilities, capabilities, and scopes getting wider, Racetrack.ai is all set to expand its operation base to USA, Singapore, and Mauritius.
About Racetrack.ai
Racetrack.ai – India’s First AI Innovation Hub, endeavours to empower businesses by igniting meaningful communication with consumers. It helps businesses to understand consumers: analyse their requirements & sentiments, suggest them solutions and ensures smooth on-boarding. Racetrack.ai believes Artificial Intelligence as a handshake between humans and modern-day machines to address the vital needs of consumers. For more information, please visit Racetrack.ai
Netcore, a global Marketing Technology Company that offers solutions for enterprises that redefine Digital Marketing, organized a corporate training programme on Artificial Intelligence [AI] and Machine Learning [ML] for Marketers to get an edge in this new age of technology. Aimed at educating markets about the benefits of deploying these technologies, the initiative covered the essentials on 1. How AI-enabled Marketing can enhance customer Experience and 2. The 4 W’s of AI and beginning the AI journey to increase ROI on your campaigns.
Marketers today have moved from a ‘batch & blast’ approach to a behavior – based approach in their marketing automation strategy. By deploying analytics tools, marketers are able to set smart triggers based on various criteria such as RFM [Recency, Frequency, & Monetary analysis] combined with demographic & category affinity.
With the advent of Artificial Intelligence, these professionals can derive greater value from their strategies with hyper-personalize campaigns aimed at creating 1:1 customer experiences. These technologies also enable a multi-fold increase in the Customer Life Cycle as AI allows one to harness data, and analyze it to generate insights in response to unpredictable situations, and that too in real time.
Commenting on the benefits of deploying AI and ML to marketing campaign, Netcore spokesperson said
Successful brands today have good offerings for the customer backed with a strong technologies and solutions including cloud services. However, a unified view of the customer is possible with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning who are key differentiators in a highly competitive market scenario where brands must continuously and innovatively engage with the customer. The workshop for marketers aimed to demystify several benefits and deployment of new age technologies like AI, ML and deep learning for their marketing campaigns.
The training program provided a framework to evaluate the maturity of an organisation in their Analytics journey and provided fundamentals for Machine Learning techniques and core algorithms. Conducted by experts from the field, the programme included
Learning supervised and unsupervised ML techniques and knowing the right algorithm to choose for a given problem like fraud detection, HR attrition, Churn prediction, Segmentation, Email send time optimization
Showcased case studies from various sectors i.e. Banking to Aviation, to address several challenges and understand how to apply the right algorithm for a given problem like fraud detection, HR attrition, Churn prediction, Segmentation, Email send time optimization
Group activities where participants brainstormed and presented 360 degree view of customer across various industries like e-commerce, Travel, Banking and Automotive
Quiz and open discussions around ML algorithms, techniques and applications in different scenarios for an organisation
About NetCore Solutions
Netcore, a global Marketing Technology Company that offers solutions for enterprises that redefine Digital Marketing. The first and leading Marketing Automation, Analytics and AI/ ML solutions provider in India, Netcore was established in 1997 by Rajesh Jain, an Internet pioneer. Netcore’s Digital Marketing suite also includes Promotional and Transactional Email Marketing and Mobile Marketing. For more information, please visit Netcore
Uniphore Software Systems has been awarded the NASSCOM AI Game Changer Awards for 2018 under Speech Recognition category for its innovative Automated Speech Recognition [ASR] engine for language processing. The award is instituted by NASSCOM’s Centre of Excellence; Data Science and Artificial Intelligence [CoE-DSAI].
Uniphore’s award winning innovation, ASR engine for language processing converts speech to text. This engine is trained to understand the differing accents, pronunciations and vocabulary that are common in the Indian languages as well. This has led to significant improvement in overall customer experience and brand loyalty for the enterprises.
While commenting on this recognition, Umesh Sachdev, CEO – Uniphore Software Solutions said
We are very happy and proud of this recognition from NASSCOM. Speech Recognition is the most complex deep technology space. Uniphore has built three products which unleashes the power of speech for enterprises. Our products help enterprises to mine the big data and help deliver better business out comes and superior customer experience. Today our products can recognize 100 plus global languages, including 17 Indian languages.
NASSCOM has constituted AI Game Changer Awards award to recognize, showcase & publish the most innovative, high impact and high-tech AI solutions that organizations have delivered internally or to their clients. The award that featured 50 innovative ideas in AI included categories like NLP, IoT, computer vision, advanced analytics and robotic process automation apart from speech recognition.
About Uniphore
Uniphore Software Systems is headquartered in IIT Madras Research Park, Chennai. Uniphore was incubated in IIT Chennai, India in 2008 and currently has offices in India, Singapore and U.A.E with about 100 employees spread across all locations. Uniphore’s investors include John Chambers, Kris Gopalakrishnan, IDG Ventures India, India Angel Network, YourNest Angel Fund and Ray Stata. Uniphore has worked with over 70 enterprise customers and served over 4 million end users.
Microsoft India showcased several of its own and third-party solutions that use Microsoft Cognitive Services and bring the power of Artificial Intelligence [AI] to users and organizations through vision, speech, language, knowledge and search scenarios. Over 370 enterprise customers in India already use these cognitive APIs from Microsoft. Microsoft is working with over 650 partners to bring AI solutions to benefit large, medium and small enterprises in the country.
Microsoft Cognitive Services is a collection of intelligent APIs that allow systems to see, hear, speak, understand and interpret human needs using natural methods of communication. Developers can use these APIs to make their applications across platforms more intelligent, engaging and discoverable. Available at www.microsoft.com/cognitive, it includes APIs on
Vision: From faces to feelings, allow apps to understand images and video
Speech: Hear and speak to users by filtering noise, identifying speakers, and understanding intent
Language: Process text and learn how to recognize what users want
Knowledge: Tap into rich knowledge amassed from the web, academia, or your own data
Search: Locate relevant information among billions of web pages, images, videos, and news with the power of Bing APIs
To date, more than a million developers around the world have already discovered and tried Microsoft Cognitive Services.
Microsoft and partner solutions available to Indian customers are many. Here are a few examples.
Vision
Seeing AI – Designed for users with visual impairment, the Microsoft Seeing AI App combines Artificial Intelligence and rich computer vision to describe surrounding people, text, objects, colors, and currencies in real-time to the user, and is available for download on iOS devices. It can now detect Indian currency and narrate the denomination to the user. This includes all the currency notes that are currently in circulation including the new currency bills issued recently. The Seeing AI app now supports five different currencies including the Euro, US & Canadian dollars as well as British Pounds.
The Intelligent Kiosk – The Intelligent Kiosk is a Windows 10 Universal App showcasing workflows and experiences using Microsoft Cognitive Services. The kiosk app is a great example of an intelligent application, one that can analyze the emotions on human faces as well as still photographs and predict their age, gender and emotion. It also allows developers to quickly create and train a model to perform face identification against any pre-determined set of faces.
Transforming remote hiring – Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Company, India’s leading private general insurer, is using an automated video interviewing solution from Microsoft partner Talview to hire from the untapped talent from multiple cities across the country. The cloud-based solution, powered by Microsoft Azure, can be accessed by candidates from any smartphone device and is fully functional even on low speed Internet.
To be more competitive and agile in today’s dynamic marketplace, Bajaj Allianz needed to tap talent from multiple locations. This otherwise came with huge investments in time and resources from both the recruiter and candidate. Deploying automated video interviewing has saved the company time and resources while vastly improving the recruitment process. Candidates are now remotely participating in interviews via smartphones at their own convenient time and place, and hiring managers have the flexibility to assess and evaluate candidates without the need to travel to different locations. The company is also using Talview Behavioral Insights [TBI] to build behavioral profiles of candidates. These profiles are enabling hiring managers to find the right person for the job backed by data-driven insights.
Language
Real-time language translation – Microsoft has recently brought the power of AI and Deep Neural Networks [DNN] to improve real-time language translation for Hindi, Bengali, and Tamil. With DNN-powered language translation, the results are more accurate and sound more natural. Users can avail the benefits of DNN-enhanced Indian language translation while surfing the internet across any website on the Microsoft Edge browser, on Bing search, Bing Translator website, as well as Microsoft Office 365 products like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Skype.
The Microsoft Translator app in Android and iOS can recognize and translate languages from text, speech and even photos. AI deployed in Microsoft’s language translation technologies is bringing more accurate speech recognition and higher quality machine-powered translations to all 60 languages supported by Microsoft’s translation technologies worldwide.
Knowledge [Conversational User Interfaces]
WittyParrot – WittyParrot is an AI & ML powered knowledge and process automation platform for sales, support and knowledge workers. Key solutions include Voice enabled Chat Bots, Document Automation, Contract Lifecycle, Omni-Channel Communication and Engagement. WittyParrot was part of Bengaluru-based Microsoft Accelerator’s 10th batch where they underwent an intensive six-month coaching and mentoring programme.
They are using Microsoft’s Azure cloud offering and leverage it for technologies like big data, Internet of Things [IoT] and advanced analytics, among others, while being fully integrated with Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office 365, several CRM platforms and various voice enabled chat-bot technologies. WittyParrot solutions are being used by leading IT and ITES organizations such as Oracle, Couchbase, Collabera and Data Endure.
Ruuh – Ruuh, Microsoft’s social AI chatbot created specifically for India, has approximately 1.5 million users. Launched a little over a year and a half ago, Ruuh has exchanged 100 million messages with her users so far. You can engage with her on Facebook in the same way you would interact with a friend.
She is built using the vast social content available on the Internet [with strong checks and balances to protect her from exploitation]. Further, she is well versed with Bollywood and has a good sense of humor too. As an AI chatbot, she is learning increasingly from human interactions to respond emotionally and intelligently, providing a unique viewpoint, with manners and emotional expressions.
Knowledge [Productivity]
AI in Office 365 – Microsoft’s AI infused Office 365 helps organizations and employees get the most out of O365 in the following ways:
Intelligent, personalized search: This personalized experience uses signals from the Microsoft Graph to provide tailored search results across content and people in an organization based on a user’s work patterns. The redesigned results are easier to explore and allow users to preview files with support for over 270+ different file types without ever leaving the search page.
PowerPoint Designer: It is easy to get beautiful designs in minutes for even more types of slides. Designer in PowerPoint now can recommend professional design options for bulleted process lists. This expansion builds upon previous Designer updates to incorporate facial detection, color extraction and more in images. Additional categories of text will be supported in the future, such as timelines.
QuickStarter in PowerPoint and Sway: Powered by the Bing Knowledge Graph, QuickStarter in Sway and PowerPoint provides carefully curated outlines for any topic, including recommendations on information to include, categories to consider and associated images tagged with Creative Commons licenses. This provides a solid starting point to then continue building a presentation.
MyAnalytics: Users can createbetter work habits with the help of Microsoft MyAnalytics. MyAnalytics provides insights to help understand how users spend time at work, across meetings, email, time they designate as ‘focus time’ and after-hours work. This way, they can set productivity goals and monitor progress over time.
Users can also gain visibility into who they collaborate with most. In the future, MyAnalytics will deliver insights to teams and Office 365 Groups to help them establish better ways of working together, uncover hidden inefficiencies and align on priorities.
Some useful resources for getting started with Microsoft’s Cognitive Services and How app developers can infuse Language & Speech capabilities into their apps can be found below:
Getting started with Microsoft Cognitive Services
Language with Microsoft Cognitive Services: Infusing language and speech capabilities into your app
AI and Microsoft
Microsoft has an ambitious goal to make AI accessible and valuable to every individual and organization, amplifying human ingenuity with intelligent technology.
Microsoft is infusing intelligence across all its products and services to extend individuals’ and organizations’ capabilities and make them more productive; providing a powerful platform of AI services and tools that makes innovation by developers and partners faster and more accessible; and helping transform business by enabling breakthroughs to current approaches and entirely new scenarios that leverage the power of intelligent technology.
In its work to deploy AI everywhere, Microsoft is taking a thoughtful and trusted approach – designing AI innovations that extend and empower human capabilities in all aspects of life, while keeping people in control. Microsoft’s approach to AI puts users in control, with intelligence that is transparent and secure, and sets the highest bar for protecting privacy, while also being inclusive and respectful to all.
3i Infotech Limited, a global Information Technology company unveiled its latest service offering, Conversational Banking at the recently concluded American Banker event in Colorado Springs, US. Voice & Chat which are central to conversational banking and advanced analytics such as channel interaction analytics and voice mining are integrated in this solution to increase cross-selling and minimize channel attrition leading to a friction-less omnichannel experience. Conversational Banking is a part of Altiray’s Omnichannel Solution – Conversational Services and ispowered by Artificial Intelligence. The solution provides a 360 degree and holistic approach to converse with customers and enhance their experience.
The voice-led omnichannel solution finds easy application across various industries like banking, insurance and healthcare. It demonstrates how a customer initiates simple or complex transactions, like applying for a loan, applying for insurance, checking account balance or renewing policies etc., using voice interaction and if necessary continue through other digital channels like bot, mobile and portal. It converses with customers, understands requirements, captures requisite data and pre-populates forms where possible, and uses social media like LinkedIn or bank aggregators as source.
Speaking on their Next-gen offering, Mohua Sengupta, EVP and Global Head of Services, 3i Infotech said
Following the recent rebranding of our services business unit to Altiray, we are pleased to announce one more innovative offering from our stable, which is poised to be a game-changer in the industry. This further reinforces our commitment to help enterprises in their digital transformation journey. What this service provides, essentially, is to allow banks to have seamless interactions with their customers. We have also forayed into Conversational Insurance and Healthcare to extend these benefits to insurers and healthcare providers.
In an environment where Voice is the next UI of choice, we want to be the leaders driving the change. There are reports that by 2022 almost 40% of consumers will use voice assistants, compared to 24% today and another 31% will use a voice device instead of visiting a branch or store, compared to 20% today; hence this is a market that’s burgeoning and waiting to be tapped.
The key features of Omnichannel Conversational Services include Security, Dialoguing, Persistence and Open API. Here, there is no device dependency. The approach to the conversational services, is to use Q&A to answer generic queries; use cognitive services to answer intelligently; interface with the right back-end system through APIs to get responses; create NLP based responses and present to chat client; and hand-off to human interactions at appropriate time during conversations.
Guest Articles by Ms Mohua Sengupta can be found here and here.
Avaamo, the AI-driven company specializing in conversational interfaces to solve specific high impact problems in the enterprise, has raised a $14.2 million Series A financing round led by Intel Capital with additional investment from Ericsson Ventures, Mahindra Partners, Wipro Ventures and WI Harper. This funding brings the company’s total investment to $23.5 million to date. Avaamo will use the latest funding to expand its sales and marketing to meet demand in the enterprise for conversational AI solutions in the growing global market.
The Avaamo platform enables enterprises to deploy omnichannel intelligent assistants in the areas of supply chain, HR, sales support, claims processing and insurance advisory. Operating quietly under the radar for the past three years, Avaamo has built fundamentally new AI technology that automates judgment-intensive, multi-turn responses to complex, domain-specific customer queries with a very high degree of accuracy – even with sparse training data.
Avaamo’s conversational intelligent assistants are already deployed globally in more than 40 countries and even greater global expansion is on the horizon as enterprises seek an AI-based conversational computing solution to improve last mile automation.
Avaamo’s full stack conversational AI platform with a specific focus on vertical machine learning, has enabled the company to acquire customers in the finance, mutual funds, telco, retail and healthcare industries, while providing measurable ROI to enterprises driven by high volumes, intense regulatory oversight and stringent security guidelines. Intelligent assistants in these industries require deep domain machine learning, as well as integration to proprietary data residing in legacy systems with support for security, encryption and addressing GDPR and HIPAA requirements.
Fiaz Mohamed, head of Industry Solutions, Artificial Intelligence Products Group at Intel Corporation, said
Intelligent agents are an emerging area that’s already impacting how consumers interact with enterprises, while reducing costs and improving workforce productivity. Because Avaamo’s secure architecture allows for easy integration with existing enterprise systems, combining its emerging conversational technology with Intel’s platform focus on AI has the potential to provide a disruptive platform for large enterprises.
Additionally, Intel is excited to add Avaamo as a member of the recently launched AI Builders program, opening up new channels for marketing and sales enablement for Avaamo.
Ericsson has time and again proven instrumental in enabling new ecosystems. Conversational AI technologies is one such ecosystem that we believe is expected to experience rapid growth. We are very excited to partner with other strategic investors in supporting Avaamo’s revolutionary journey going forward, as it continues to disrupt large existing markets while creating a differentiated technology stack.
We took an early position in Avaamo after being impressed with their technology. Since then, we have achieved significant joint customer traction in the Finance, Telco and Retail verticals worldwide. We continue to be excited about Avaamo’s technology and customer traction and pleased to support in expanding their footprint.
Parag Shah, Managing Partner of Mahindra Partners, the $1 billion private equity arm of the Mahindra Group, said
Mahindra Partners enjoys helping entrepreneurs to build great companies. We were impressed with Avaamo’s strong focus on execution, the partnerships and emerging ecosystem Avaamo is building in the conversational AI market for large enterprises and are excited to partner with them to support further expansion.
Director Arun Chetty led the investment for Intel Capital and will join Avaamo’s board. RRam Menon and Sriram Chakravarthy founded Avaamo and previously worked together at TIBCO. They have assembled a team with over 150+ years of experience in enterprise software.
About Avaamo
Avaamo is a deep-learning software company that specializes in conversational interfaces to solve specific high impact problems in the enterprise. Avaamo is building fundamental AI technology across a broad area of neural networks, speech synthesis and deep learning to make conversational computing for the enterprise a reality. For more information, please visit Avaamo
Although artificial intelligence may have once been thought of as nothing more than a sci-fi trope, it’s actually a legitimate technology that’s already changing how companies across a wide range of industries do business. Any professional who could benefit from enhanced data analysis and pattern recognition could theoretically take advantage of this technology.
Digital marketers are no exception. AI has the potential to revolutionize sales tactics through techniques like chatbot marketing automation. That said, many people still don’t fully understand this technology, or what it can do. That is why it’s important to learn more about it. By familiarizing yourself with AI’s capabilities, you are more likely to see how the tech can be used to improve your marketing strategy.
Introducing Machine Learning
Many AI programs rely on machine learning to function. Essentially, machine learning refers to an AI’s ability to develop specific problem-solving skills by referring to established data points.
For example, machine learning allows AI to analyze previous data sets from the stock market. As the AI learns thorough reviewing past trends, it’s able to make more accurate predictions about the stock market on its own.
This means AI is likely to make more and more key business decisions in the near future. Marketers can leverage this power to boost the success rates of campaigns.
Machine Learning & Customer Behavior
Again, machine learning involves analyzing data sets to learn a skill or generate insights. That’s why it can play a major role in any task that involves learning from consumer behavior.
There are currently many different channels that could potentially provide consumer behavior data. Social media conduct, search history, purchase history; all may offer information that can help an AI develop more accurate customer profiles.
This is very significant from a marketer’s perspective. According to a 2016 survey, 80% of marketers agreed that customers were more responsive to personalized content. Consumers want marketing content to be tailored to their specific needs and preferences.
Thanks to AI, offering that kind of individualized experience is easier than ever. AI can analyze customer behavior data much more efficiently – and thoroughly – than a human. Marketers will use it to more effectively segment their customers into separate groups and profiles, allowing them to target those clients with the most relevant content possible.
AI Content Curation
Stronger list segmentation isn’t the only benefit AI offers marketers. The technology also has the capacity to analyze reporting on topics ranging from sports and pop culture to science and politics.
Combine this quality with AI’s ability to generate detailed customers profiles, and it’s easy to imagine that marketers will soon rely on AI to provide customers with the information that’s most relevant to their interests. This helps automate one of the more essential components of any digital marketing campaign.
Chatbots
AI-enhanced chatbots offer many potential benefits to digital marketers. Along with taking over customer support duties, chatbots can reach out directly to customers via existing platforms like Facebook Messenger, alerting them to relevant promotions, new product announcements, and more.
Because AI has the ability to learn from customer behavior, a chatbot would know exactly when to reach out to a given customer for the best possible results. It will also know precisely what type of content it should provide.
Looking to the Future
In all likelihood, we have only just begun to scratch the surface of what AI can do for digital marketers. What is clear, however, is that it’s poised to offer major benefits. The marketers who embrace its potential early will stand out from the competition, offering their customers the kind of marketing experience that would be impossible without AI.
About the Author
Rae Steinbach is the Freelance Editor at Snaps, a mobile messaging platform connecting brands to millennials. You can find more about Rae here
India currently has around 3 million developers and has the second largest Android developer community in the world after the US. As per a study from Deloitte, India will have the largest base of developers by 2019. Developers will be drivers of customers’ adoption of cloud and cognitive solutions. About 60% of the developers in India have been experimenting with AI [Artificial Intelligence] and machine learning, compared to 39% in the rest of the world. This shows developers in India are receptive towards AI, Cognitive and data science technologies.
AI, Machine Learning, Cognitive computing, Data analytics, etc. are some of the emerging technology trends and they are now observing widespread adoption. Today, IBM stands at the forefront of a worldwide industry to lead the next phase of change revolutionizing the way in which businesses work and grow. With rapid changes in the technology landscape and open source movement, top-down approach is no longer being followed in organizations and developers are now playing role in the entire technology eco-system. Cloud related technologies are a boon for the developers and the barrier to entry has become limited.
IBM, as a part of the ‘Developer Relations Group‘ works with clients, students, developers, startups amd support them in understanding technology, helping them and get their job done effectively. Seema Kumar leads the IBM Developer Relations group which is a part of the IBM Digital Business group. We had a chat with Seems Kumar about IBM’s eco-system efforts, its involvement with startups, role of Watson in shaping up AI industry, etc. So, let’s get started with the Q&A…
Every organization is involved with top tier institutes, what are some of the steps that IBM Evangelism team is taking in order to connect with the student community in lesser known institutes ?
Every student is important to us, irrespective of whether the student is from IIT/IIM or from colleges that are located in tier-2/tier-3 cities. This is mainly because lot of innovation is happening from universities that do not carry the IIT/IIM tag. Students from these colleges are continually learning and the credit goes to the low barrier to entry. IBM has a developer platform called OnTheHubwhereany university can enroll, students get IBM Credits and they can also use IBM tools for software development.
In some colleges, we also have some development courses as a part of the curriculum where we train faculty members on Watson, Chatbots, AI, etc. and most of the association is with tier-2 institutes.
What are some of the initiatives that IBM is taking to connect with the startup and the entreprenurial community in India [be it TiE, NASSCOM, etc.] ?
Startup eco-system in India is very vibrant. IBM works directly with startups as well as with other partners. IBM has partnered with TiE, NASSCOM 10000, etc. where in some cases, IBM participates in community events.
In case of NASSCOM 10K, IBM works with startups where we monitor and mentor them. Our programme is called as Global Entrepreneur Programme [GEG], there are different plans namely Standard, Basic and Premium Plan. IBM has been actively involved in mentoring startups across different sectors like EdTech, HealthCare, etc. from technology, business expansion, market readiness, etc. point of view.
More than 200 startups are working with IBM in the technology space. In fact, lot of startups are using Watson API’s for building meaningful apps around Chatbots. For example, a startup that we are mentoring built a chatbot named ValleyBotto identify fake news and they are getting good amount of traction.
There are lot of cloud solutions available in the market, what are some of the major advantages for moving to the IBM cloud [both from the developer as well as enterprise perspective] ?
IBM has various solutions for different audiences. IBM’s cloud offering is a combination of Public, Private and Hybrid cloud. As a matter of fact, lot of apps available in the existing data centers are not cloud ready i.e. Even if they are migrated to the cloud, they cannot capitalize on the benefits of virtualization, effective resource utilization, etc. Cloud solutions from IBM helps you build cloud native applications. Developers are always on the look-out for their own choice of technologies.
IBM Cloud is a Platform As a Service [PAAS] offering that has various API’s for different programming languages. Choice, flexibility to use what developers want and the way they want are some of the key differentiators. Most of the apps of the future would have some sort of cognitive capabilities built into it and Natural Language Processing [NLP], visual recognition features to build conversation interfaces would be some of the basic building blocks to build a cognitive application. These features are available in the Watson APIs and using these APIs, apps are enterprise ready from day one of development!
To summarize, choice of catalogue, breadth of services, flexibility to choose between Public/Private/Hybrid cloud and ability to build secure, cognitive, enterprise ready software on the cloud are some of the inherent advantages.
Can you comment on Chatbots and what are some of the core ingredients of a Chatbot kind of application ?
Context of conversation and Intent are very important ingredients in building a Chatbot and hence, training & design of the oervall interface are very important factors when building a Chatbot. Watson APIs are very powerful and are specifically designed by keeping these important factors in mind. With every interaction, learning happens and it gets better with more data.
There is buzz about Blockchain, what according to you are some of the ideal use-cases where Blockchain might be useful for a ‘Digitally Growing’ like India ?
Blockchain as a technology is constantly evolving and it is definitely here to stay. Blockchain offers powerful Usecases for any usecase that involves multiple parties and multiple transactions. In a nutshell, it is nothing but a distributed ledger. Initial usecases have obvisouly evolved in the Finance sector but Blockchain would be relevant in other sectors as well.
Blockchain when used in conjunction with IoT, lot of powerful usecases would eveolve. For example, IBM recently worked with the Mahindra Group to build a Blockchain solution for supply chain finance across India. This solution improved the transparency of overall operations. IBM also announced a Trade Finance platform using the IBM Blockchain platform that can be used by banks. Blockchain can also be extended across other sectors like Healthcare, Insurance, etc.
Your comments on Digital India and how IBM’s involvement in the overall journey ?
There is definitely a robust infrastructure in place with Aadhar API’s, eKYC, India Stack, UPI, etc. have led to a huge thrust in digital payments in India. As far as IBM is concerned, we work closely with iSpirtwhere we also participate as an eco-system partner.
India is a country with rich amount of data and this is where the aspect of Data Science becomes very critical as we need to draw valuable insights from the data. IBM has also tied-up with NASSCOM and Government Of Karnataka to build Center Of Excellence [COE] in Data Science where IBM will be the core technology partner. IBM will not only groom talent in data science but will also work on Proof Of Concept [POC] and support startups in that category.
What are some of the certifications that a student/professional can opt for, in order to gain expertise/know-how in Cognitive Computing, Machine Learning, Cloud Computing, IBM BlueMix, etc. ?
IBM has partnered with an EdTech partner where we launched Cognitive Class previously called as Big Data University. IBM has also tied-up with JigSaw Academywhere they use IBM’s Big data expertise for all their courses. In the area of certification, IBM has partnered with Global Knowledgethat offers on Cloud computing, DevOps, AI, etc.
There has been lot of scepticism that AI, Robotics & other ‘Automation/Machine related technologies’ would wipe off many jobs in future, what are your thoughts on the same and how can AI [and other technologies] go hand-in-hand with human jobs ?
Ginni Rometty, IBM CEO believes in three principles that are applicable in the cognitive era – Purpose, Transparency and Skills. The purpose of a cognitive app is to augment human intelligence and not to replace humans. Products and Services from IBM are built with this principle in mind and human intelligence is a key aspect.
IBM is helping human beings being more productive, realize their potential and focus on more important jobs rather than working on mundane & repetitive jobs. You must be clear as you build AI platforms how they are trained, and what data was used in training. When we talk about transparency, IBM has always been cognizant of data. AI platforms must be built with people in the industry and companies must prepare to train human workers on how to use these tools to their advantage.
We thank Seema Kumar for sharing her insights with our readers and walking us through the awesome work done by IBM for shaping up the developer ecosystem. If you have any questions for Seema about Watson, Chatbots, how solutions from IBM can accelerate your development, etc. please share them via a comment to this article.
