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|In: Guest Blogging|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Networking is important for entrepreneurs and small business owners. One place you can do that is at networking events. Don’t underestimate the power of networking events if you are a soft skills trainer looking to build your company. A strong professional network will help you achieve more than what you can accomplish on your own.

6 Must-Know Tips for Effective Networking

Don’t be Just a ‘Business Owner’

Yes, you are at a networking event to interact with others and talk about your business. But, don’t make it your only agenda.

People will lose interest if you just keep talking about business instead of showing them who you are. Focus on building new relationships with others. Good relationships and contacts will eventually help you get new business.

Be Authentic 

Don’t put a mask and present yourself at the networking events. Be authentic and honest about yourself. You need to be confident and appear as a leader. Authenticity reflects these traits and will cement your reputation as a soft skills trainer.

It also shows that you are comfortable in social situations, which is important for a soft skills trainer.

Maintain Positive Body Language

One effective networking tip is to watch your body language. Even if you speak pleasantly, poor body language may indicate that you are unapproachable. That will work against you and defeat the purpose of a networking event.

Be approachable and show a genuine interest in others. Your body language must exude confidence and warmth. When it shows that you are welcoming, it will help others open up to you. This way, you will make several contacts and share healthy relationships with them.

Offer Help 

It is normal to want to approach people at a networking event with a problem you are facing. There is nothing wrong with it, but change your approach a bit.

When you meet someone, ask questions, and understand how you can provide value to them. When you offer help, people will remember you and this will help you in the long run.

Stay in Touch with Former Connections

Networking events help in making new connections but don’t make the mistake of forgetting old connections. Your former connections can give you new leads and connect you with influential people. However, this won’t happen unless you share a strong relationship with them.

Keep in touch with your old connections, and you may be surprised by what they can bring to the table.

Use Social Media 

Be active on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Engage with your followers and share content relevant to the industry. This will build your credibility as a soft skills trainer and generate inbound networking.

People may reach out to you on social media to seek help. This will help you build your network without relying on just networking events.

Final Words

Keep these networking techniques in mind the next time you go for a networking event. You can meet people who can help you and whom you can help. Either way, it’s a win-win situation.

About the Author

An award-winning Image Management Professional, Suman Agarwal has helped students, home-makers, women on sabbatical as well as people seeking second career alternatives to explore Image Management and Soft Skill Training as a vibrant professional choice. She is also the co-founder of Image Consulting Institute.

She frequently writes blog posts about the urgent need of image consulting professionals and soft skill trainers in the 21st century and loves guiding people in exploring lucrative career. You can find more about Suman Agarwal from here.

|In: Technology|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

The Deloitte Global RPA Survey 2018 provides clear indication regarding the significance of RPA benefits: payback was reported at less than 12 months, with an average 20% of full-time equivalent [FTE] capacity provided by software robots.

Adopters’ expectations have been exceeded with respect to improving compliance [92%], quality and accuracy [90%], or productivity [86%], to mention a few. This is the case cross-industry, but we should not forget that banks are pioneers of digital transformation simply because automation technology serves them so well.

A simple reason for this is that Robotic Process Automation [RPA] can assist in dealing with some of the main current challenges in banking, i.e. the need to improve customer service to live up to the standards of a growing number of tech-savvy clients, who expect very precise and rapid processes.

Some of the effects of delegating the responsibility for mundane processes to bots are faster outcomes, not marred by errors, or optimised advisory services.

Robotic Process Automation can streamline banking operations, making them more efficient and simultaneously lowering costs. According to UiPath, by automating the trade settlement in a global investment bank, the Average Handling Time [AHT] to process trades was reduced from 40 minutes to 3 minutes, with an expected effort benefit of 444 hours per year.

Robotic process automation [RPA] in banking in 2020

Saying that RPA will revolutionise banking in 2020 is a strong statement indeed. What can we expect to happen automation-wise during 2020 in the banking sector?

Orchestrated use of other tools and technologies [e.g. the cloud], more premises for higher-value jobs, improved employee and customer satisfaction, enhanced human-robot collaboration, to name but a few.

We believe the most important development is that robotic process automation adoption is set to become mainstream. This should be easier to understand if you consider that some leading RPA service providers will begin to broaden their reach to small and medium-sized businesses too.

What are the benefits of RPA in banking, the gains that you can reasonably expect to enjoy throughout the current year? In the first place, automation doesn’t require significant change in your IT department because implementation is just like adding another low-cost layer to the banking applications already in use.

The launch can be quick, since software robots can be tested in short cycle iterations. Then, employees can be trained to handle the bots themselves, without having to wait for help from the IT team. The significant reduction in AHT cited above is easy to understand if you consider software robots‘ scalability potential and their capacity to work around the clock, 365 days/year. Moreover, bots remove the burden of menial tasks from employees’ workload, thereby increasing the likelihood that they be satisfied with their jobs.

Let’s now see more concretely how Robotic Process Automation is likely to address some challenges the banking industry may face in 2020. Before diving into specific processes, let’s take a look at the general guidelines for selecting high impact application areas.

You should look for repetitive, mature and stable, rule-based, high frequency processes, with a low rate of variable outcomes and with readable inputs. We also recommend to start automating activities with measurable savings, in order to grant objective outcome evaluation and goal achievement. Here are 7 such examples.

1. Credit underwriting

This complex process can be broken down into retail credit assessment, and retail fraud prevention. The problem is that insufficient resources, particularly workforce resources, can weigh heavily on the staff when they have to carry out these tasks.

You’ll better grasp the size of this challenge if you consider the requirement to access multiple internal and external applications in order to bring to completion the two subprocesses of credit underwriting. But software robots’ integrative capacity allows them to access and process data fast and accurately. They can easily check relevant information, including scanning for suspicious activity about the credit applicant across different databases.

Bots can accurately predict the customer risk of fraudulent activity based on analysing these data patterns. They can then gather all the information needed for credit assessment and fraud prevention in a single report to be presented to the human credit analyst. The analyst is thus freed from the painstaking task of carefully tracking bank account and credit card activity, and can make a good decision based on the bot’s assessment.

A case study from UiPath provides an illustration of this scenario, where bots performed these activities in 5 minutes with exceptional accuracy [as opposed to one hour for manual processing].

2. Trade financing

This process calls for collection of documents in various formats, such as purchase orders, bills, or invoices. Software robots can easily parse through this variety of documents in order to capture, classify, and extract the relevant information.

Furthermore, they can also handle the matching and validation tasks. The outcome can then be delivered to the document management systems as a simple Excel spreadsheet.

3. Corporate loan processing

This activity requires, in the first place, collecting application forms and supporting documents from multiple sources, such as fax machines, printers, or email folders. Bots are not at all bothered by the need to check multiple sources. They scan the documents, categorize and extract the needed data, and export it to an Excel spreadsheet, which is part of the document repository.

4. Account opening

A whitepaper from Tata Consultancy Services named ‘Why Banks Must Bank on RPA’ gives the example of a global bank using software robots to pick out information from input forms, and deliver it to various host applications.

By so doing, the bank was able to avoid the daunts of manual processing, such as high rates of error and increased processing time. The outcome was indeed satisfactory: almost a third of processing time, zero error, and cost reduction of $50.000/year.

5. Customer service

RPA can easily handle customers’ low priority queries on its own, while allowing the human minds to concentrate on the high priority ones, which require more complex and intense processing [and offer correspondingly higher job satisfaction].

Software bots can verify faster and more accurately customer details from different sources, and consequently onboard them in a timely manner. The resulting capacity to reduce waiting times contributes significantly to the bank’s improved relations with customers and consequently, to their higher satisfaction with the bank.

6. Know Your Customer [KYC] processes

KYC is an essential compliance process for all banks. It is underpinned by activities such as customer data collection, screening, and validation. Given the software robots’ ability for fast and accurate data processing, they are prime candidates to take over these repetitive tasks.

7. Processing credit card applications

RPA software streamlines document gathering, making credit and background checks, and finally, deciding customer eligibility for credit card based on clearly set parameters. This results in substantial reduction of waiting times for credit card applications, thereby addressing an important challenge in banking.

Conclusion

Competition in the banking sector is fierce. Banks must use all resources to meet customer expectations, optimize costs, and react appropriately to FinTech players’ counter competition. They must do so in conditions of rising workforce costs and scarcity of skilled resources.

Simultaneously, the competitive atmosphere demands increased productivity. As you may notice, there are a lot of imperatives involved. They all call for leveraging robotic process automation in banking in order to successfully attain business targets such as cost effectively transforming the backend, decreased processing times, increased accuracy, overall efficiency, and quicker time-to-market.

It comes as no surprise then that RPA in the banking sector provides a good example of why automation is a noteworthy competitive advantage.

About the author

Daniel Pullen is General Manager at CiGen, one of the first dedicated Robotic Process Automation companies based in Australia. He is passionate about intelligent automation, robotics automation consulting and bringing the benefits of digital robotics into the workplace. You can find more about him here.

|In: Business|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

The surge of mergers and acquisitions in India has helped propel organisations to achieve significant competitive advantage in the industry, whether it is across IT, telecom, BFSI or healthcare. Organisations world over concur that M&A is the fastest tactical preference for global players as well as for start-ups to rapidly scale up.

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A recent report by Thomson Reuters states that Indian M&A’s peaked at an all-time high in 2018 with deals worth $125 billion, which presents a positive narrative. However, it’s believed that nearly 75-80% of these mergers are unsuccessful, and one of the major reasons for it is the lacuna in the area of human resource management.

HR integration forms the greatest challenge in any M&A transaction. At the core of any merger and acquisition, a major contributor to its long-term success is the ‘People dynamics‘. It’s important for organisations to take cognizance of the fact that not all employees would be open and favourable to the transition initially. This is where the human resources department can play a pivotal role, by ensuring seamless integration of employees of the merging organisations.

Some of the key areas where HR can play an important role during a merger and acquisition [M&A] include

Cultural integration – Cultural integration is not just a leading cause of an M&A failure, but it’s also an indirect driver for a significant number of other causes, such as stalled integration, retention of key employees, productivity or talent attraction. Failure to do so may even adversely affect the primary objectives behind the merger or acquisition in the first place.

Leadership management – While it isn’t plausible in an M&A deal to ensure that the demands of each and every member of top management of the merged organisations are met; adequate care must be taken in order to ensure the key talent is retained and other aspects including changing roles and downsizing must be handled promptly, efficiently but with caution.

Handling redundancies – Mergers and acquisitions might result in employee dissatisfaction is some cases, as organisations that come together often have very different working roles, compensation packages etc. The onus lies with the HR to handle redundancies due to similar work profiles and successfully retain talented employees who would be an asset to the organisation.

Compensation and benefit programs – The HR should evaluate the compensation and benefit mechanisms that’s currently in place, in order to explore the possibility of a strain on the financial resources of the organisation due to pre-existing pension or medical insurance plans. They should also study the long-term consequences of continuing these policies for the organisation. It is suggested that a new employee benefits scheme be created and details of the same be shared with employees in order to dispel fears and doubts in their minds.

Active communication – Human resources department of the organisation must attempt to raise the morale of employees, as adapting to a new work environment is generally stressful and may even lead to a reduction in productivity levels. The concerns that the employees have must be promptly addressed by the HR in order to provide reassurance and maximum clarity.

Poor communication can lead to a lack of trust and uncertainty regarding their job security, resulting in higher attrition rates and lowering the overall productivity levels within the organisation. Transparency in the decision-making process and regular communication during the ambiguous period is integral to maintaining employee confidence and satisfaction.

Monitor progress post-merger – The progress made by the company, post the merger must be routinely evaluated. This may include factors such as revenue, productivity levels, employee performance etc. Seeking third party assistance to handle M&A deals is often advisable as it saves crucial business time and resources and eases the transition process for all parties involved.

In summary, while M&A deals are integral to the long-term growth of an organisation, failure to involve the HR early on could be detrimental. Hence, early involvement would enable the HR team to strategize better and plan out specific objectives and decisions regarding merging companies.

About the Author

CM Appaya is the Head – HR, Synergy Property Development Services, a leading Project Management Consultancy firm. You can find more about him here.

|In: SEO|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Since most of the consumers are online, it is important for brands and businesses to have a presence online. And for that, many brands are establishing their own websites and blogs. But just starting them is not enough. If you want good traffic, more clicks, better ranking, and high ROI you have to work on it, and that is where SEO comes in.

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Make SEO an essential part of your marketing strategy and keep track of its trends. It is important to keep a track on it, because every year new SEO trends come and you don’t want to be left behind.

In this blog, we will talk about some of the newest SEO trends that you must look out for in 2019.

  1. Optimize for more than Google search engine

Since years, Search engine optimization was done keeping Google in mind, but in 2019 this trend is changing. People nowadays search on various things about products, and you have to optimize for that too and not just your website if you want to get more business.

Currently, people search on Amazon for things they have to buy or on the app store for a particular app. Thus, it is crucial that you learn how to drive traffic from other things too.

In simple terms, 2019 is asking you to be on top of everything, whether it be Amazon, or app store, or a podcast channel, anything where people can search for your brand.

  1. Content should be exceptional and of high quality

As usual content will always be the king, many trends will come and go, but this won’t. If you want your content to come in the top three Google searches, use exceptional and quality content. Especially, since 2018, as Google has updated its algorithm to intensely focus on evaluating the quality of a blog or sites content.

The websites that will have exceptional content with depth will have great rankings and enough organic traffic.

It is crucial that you publish good content, something that is relevant to the consumers and informs them about your brand too. Make sure your content strategy is not just about getting more users, but also about engaging them. You should also insert the relevant images, so that your content look good. You can use Canva to make amazing blog images.

  1. Include Microformats to your website

In terms of coding, microformats are HTML patterns that provide information about your website to Google.  It helps search engine to know what exactly is your website about and then rank you appropriately.

If you provide honest microformats, Google will reward you with better rankings. Also, it makes your content more engaging for the consumers and encouraging them to click on it. As we all know, more clicks mean more traffic and better revenue.

  1. Voice search

A study has shown that by 2020, 50% of the searches will be voice searches. Voice-enabled devices like Alexa and Google home will perform most of the voice searches on behalf of consumers without making use of a screen.

Voice searches are long, so SEO for that is completely different. You will have to find 7-9 words phrases as your keyword including a question that people might say while voice searching for your brand.

Consumers usually ask what, where, how, and when questions so optimize your website for that.

  1. Focusing on technical SEO is important

In 2019, you will have to focus on the technical SEO of your website, because every year numerous sites are coming up and their complexities keep increasing too. Focus on these areas as part of your technical SEO:

Speed – You will have to work on your site’s speed, and make it fast and simple. Google will rank your site better if it loads quickly.

JavaScript – Most websites even now use JavaScript and its frameworks to create their website. That is why you have to be a little familiar with JavaScript so that you can understand how a search engine works with such sites.

PWA – Progressive web apps are the future, and you have to figure out a way to make sure that your website has a future as PWAs.

These are some of the trends that you need to implement in your SEO marketing strategy. To know about more trends, keep watching this space.

About the Author

Kavita Paliwal is an Outreach Specialist cum Content writer at ViralChilly. When not glued to her laptop, she can be found making travel plans that rarely happen :). Connect with Kavita on Twitter @dreamerkavita

|In: Technology|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

The global key trends for 2018 brought about some significant changes in innovation and technology. With the start of 2019, Shailesh Kumar Dave, Vice President, ManageEngine a division of Zoho Corp. and a technology veteran expects technology trends to disrupt, shift and change the way you do business.

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Below are 5 key exponential technology trends to watch out for in 2019.

Digital process automation will accelerate

Enterprise adoption of process automation technologies will continue with the same vigor as the technologies are expected to make the enterprises nimble, data-centric and quick to make decisions across geographies. More importantly, process automation will also help enterprises to go beyond the simple operational and efficiency gains made with basic automation to tap new revenue opportunities.

For example, a bank embracing fintech can use digital process automation to improve real-time visibility into its customers’ data and factor the improved view into real-time risk assessment of the customers.  To elucidate further, a bank could provide its customers with digital tools related to accounting, receivables, payables, and all other back office functions. The customers can give permission to the bank to use selective data to have good visibility on the velocity of their businesses. This could enable the bank to provide financial services at a faster clip to the customer and at lower cost, not only due to automation but also do due to better risk visibility of the customer.

OCR/NLP/Voice/Video/Image processing will aid productivity gains

The main nemesis of process automation is any web form customers, employees, or partners must fill out when an organization wants to capture their data.  Every one dreads screens with forms.

AI/machine learning technologies are mature enough to process voice, video, text, and images reliably. Using these mature technologies, the natural activities of making a phone call, taking a video, or taking a picture could be used to fill out data-enriched forms automatically. Hence both objectives will be met – collecting adequate data and filling out fewer forms – and these technologies will continue their march into the enterprise.

Privacy concerns will hold center stage

With GDPR becoming a reality and hosts of other countries passing similar privacy laws, data usage will be closely monitored. Data will be tagged so that its origin will be known at the point of usage. Tools related to data tagging and master data management will become crucial. Privacy concerns and related legal ramifications could slow down decision making in enterprises. In response, new generation messaging, audio/video web conferencing tools will be used by enterprises to achieve the twin objectives of privacy compliance and rapid decision making.

Data locality will increase diversity

Lots of countries mandate that data needs to reside within geographical boundaries. Enterprises using SAAS or PAAs will end up using country-specific public clouds or even private clouds. As a result, critical data and applications that need to be monitored will be spread across geographies. Monitoring tools and technologies that help consolidate the view of these applications and data will see larger enterprise adoption.

This increase in data locality will also require federated Identity and Access Management [IAM] with Zero Trust security considerations. Single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and enterprise mobility management will also become common place in the enterprises.

New kinds of hardware in the data center

Data workloads in the data center are increasing, and the demise of Moore’s law is not helping the CPU to keep pace. Newer hardware like GPU, FPGA, ASICs will become commonplace in the data center.  Enterprise IT teams will have to be knowledgable about these technologies and use the right applications and tools to ensure that money is wisely spent on the newer hardware.

About the Author

Shailesh Dave is the Vice President, ManageEngine, a division of Zoho Corp. You can know more about him here.

|In: Technology|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

In an era where advancements around technology have leapfrogged exponentially, the year ahead will see the Indian IT industry charter new frontiers, driven by innovation, speed and accuracy. The IT industry would see enterprises move towards Industry 4.0, the convergence of Internet of Things [IoT], cloud computing among others will enable them to be future-ready.

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Driven by technological advancements and data security at the core, we foresee all sectors in the Indian industry in for exciting times and the Banking, Financial Services, Insurance [BFSI] and Healthcare segments will be no exception. Complexity brews herein, fueled by regulatory challenges, uncertain economic cycles, risks, partnerships and alliances, talent management and above all ever-increasing customer expectations.

With this backdrop, the top technology trends to watch out in 2019 would be

Intelligent Digital Mesh

Intelligent digital mesh, the combination of humans, devices, content, and services is going to emerge as one of the major trends of the year 2019. Businesses have already started adapting this innovative technology to convey advanced results, where technology is embedded in almost every facet.

Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning

With AI and ML already playing a critical role in the assessment and treatment of business KPIs, the IT operations are further set to undergo transformation. In 2019, there will be continued progress toward the integration of AI, ML and deep learning in business applications. AI and ML will enable working with large swathes of data and help converge isolated or distributed data for more informed decisions. There will be a further push to implement machine learning and artificial intelligence into smart devices.

As per a recent industry report, AI will boost India’s annual growth rate by 1.3% by 2035. Some of the major growth drivers of AI/ML in 2019 would be – specialized chip optimized for speeding up the execution of AI-enabled applications and Industrial IoT, making it the biggest driver of artificial intelligence in any enterprise.

Internet of Things [IOT]

IoT is no longer viewed as a wonder but an enabler. The year 2019 will see incremental use cases of IoT in the Insurance space. Telematics, wearables, voice assistants and home control devices will mature further and will be increasingly adopted. There will be a continued rise in the demand for wearable devices and IoT.

The convergence of IoT and AI will create new opportunities for insurers and better and more customized premiums for the insured. It will enhance process transparency and service delivery.

Robotic Process Automation

The Robotic Process Automation [RPA] is seeing traction in the IT industry. The robots have been modernizing our way of administering business processes, IT support, workflow, remote infrastructure and back-office work.

In the upcoming year, the improvised RPA models will show some dramatic progress in accuracy, cycle-time and increased productivity in transaction processing. RPA will be efficient enough in providing answers to the queries in a natural language which will be a superior way to conserve resources for large call centres and for customer interactions. We will see the further adoption of tools like chatbots, straight through processing and robotic process automation for routine repetitive processes. Chabot will be integral to websites and mobile apps.

Big data and analytics

Data and analytics have become daily aspects of organisations today across industries, which improvises business processes and optimizes operations. Presently, it is estimated to be $2.71 billion annually in revenues, which is growing at a healthy rate of 33.5% CAGR in India, as per a recent report. However, 2019 will bring a modern version of big data analytics which has evolved through adopting modern and breakthrough technologies. Speed and efficiency are the major benefits that big data analytics will bring to the industry.

Data and data value management is something that is going to dominate our industries over the next few decades at least. Estimates peg that the analytics, data science and big data industry in India is expected to reach $20 billion, by 2025. Prescriptive analytics driving proactive decision making, cognitive technologies reiterating businesses, increasing adoption of cloud-based platforms for big data analytics by major enterprise and start-ups are some of the future trends that we can look forward to, in 2019.

Blockchain

In 2019, blockchain will bring some enterprise applications into the main stream. The most innovative corporations will start using blockchain to improve collaboration. Blockchain will also see itself out of cryptocurrency transactions and will become an integral part of the business platform. Blockchain enables transactional transparency across a variety of business functions. Blockchain will also be present at the core of business innovation in many industries.

According to a recent report, an approximate of 56% of Indian businesses will be making the blockchain technology a part of their core business. Blockchain adoption will depend on regulatory concerns being addressed. The government and the regulators should take an active role in making this happen. In certain countries, we are already seeing action in this space, whereas most are yet to take their step forward.

About the Author

Mr. Padmanabhan Iyer is the Managing Director & Global CEO, 3i Infotech. You can find more about him here.

|In: Technology|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

An efficient and effective hiring process is one of the main pillars of a successful company. The recruitment team has a difficult job on their hands as they’re responsible for sourcing the future employees of a company. If this process is flawed and they take too much time to find the right candidates, it can incur a substantial cost to the company. You might also lose out on good candidates while your competitors might end up hiring them.

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Qualified candidates are always in demand and research has found that they’re usually available for 10 days only. So, your hiring process needs to be quick and effective.

Here are some awesome strategies that will help you speed up your time-to-hire in the best possible ways.

Create a Structured Hiring Process

Not having a structured hiring process can lead to mismanagement and confusion. Candidates won’t get to know what the next step in the hiring process is. This will result in a poor candidate experience which can drive away many qualified candidates.

A documented and streamlined hiring process will help you minimize your time-to-hire as you will know what to do next. Your hiring team needs to be knowledgeable and experienced enough to set up an efficient recruiting process.

Build a Strong Employer Brand

Passive candidates are those who aren’t actively searching for other opportunities but wouldn’t mind considering suitable opportunities if they come up.

Building a strong employer brand can help you attract these passive candidates who constitute 85% of the workforce. This can help you tap into a wider pool of experienced and knowledgeable candidates.

Candidates are likely to be impressed and apply for positions at your company when you have a strong employer brand. You can build a strong employer brand by regularly responding to your online reviews and sharing updates about your work environment and culture.

When you build a strong employer brand, you might become an employer of choice for many applicants. This is likely to bring a steady source of quality candidates to your job openings.

Building consistent and loyal employee is also a great way to attract new talent which enhances the sound work culture in the organization. Time to hire will speed up automatically and you will get what you want for work.

Audit Existing Talent

You need to keep yourself updated about the status of existing candidates in your recruitment database. Internal auditing will save you time and can help you keep better track of candidates who might be looking for jobs. You can even fill out some of your vacant job positions by carefully auditing this talent pool.

If you want to learn more about how can you reduce your time-to-hire, check out the infographic given below

Infographic Source

About the Author

Ray O’Donnell is the Founder & CEO of TotalRewards Software, Inc. and Candidate Rewards. He has been helping companies to find, retain, and engage top talent by bridging the gap between the two. TotalRewards Software, Inc. is available on on LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube.

|In: DataScience|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

According to a recent Indian jobs study, data science is one of the topmost and fastest growing field in India and its relevance is increasing in almost every sector. Reports from NASSCOM suggests that India’s data industry would reach $16 billion by 2025 from the present level of $2 billion. At the core of it, data science is the science of examining raw data and applying statistical techniques for the purpose of drawing business related conclusions and predicting business outcomes. In every organization, there are opportunities to implement data science and transform the way business is carried out.

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Leading analysts like Gartner and Forrester have quoted 2018 as a milestone year for organizations, with over 70% of them expected to leverage data science for Business Optimization.  It is one of the most talked about topics in the CxO community.

In today’s era, all small and large corporates are sitting on a gold mine of data, however, the biggest challenge they are facing is to use these data to get business insights which they can implement to make effective business decisions and optimize their business. In the Indian context, below are the industries adapting data science to gain the competitive advantage

  • Financial institutions are optimizing price, improving customer satisfactions, predicting risk of defaults, optimizing underwriting process
  • Hospitals are increasing diagnoses accuracy, providing physicians with accurate sickness’s causes for individual patients, preventing patient readmissions, predicting risk of infections
  • Retail chains are increasing occasional and loyal customer satisfaction, optimizing campaigns, offering the right price for products, preventing inventory shortage
  • Manufacturing organizations are predicting machine failures, providing predictive safety alerts, building accurate pro-active maintenance plan

However, applying traditional data science methods to real-world business problems is time-consuming, resource-intensive, and challenging. It also requires experts in the several disciplines, including data scientists.

Enterprises leveraging Automated Data Science to achieve efficiencies

Automated data Science represents a fundamental shift in the way organizations of all sizes approach machine learning and data science. Automated data science platforms are bringing the advanced AI techniques into reach for the mainstream. Organizations are finding that with automated data science they can make progress in AI without hiring new data scientists or embarking on expensive, time-consuming training for their employees. Instead, almost anyone with domain experience and a familiarity with data can build predictive models without writing a single line of code or having deep knowledge of machine learning algorithms.

With automated data science, AI innovation is not just exclusively in the realm of the data scientists, but can now be shared with those that best understand the business needs. The main obstacle to AI success is no longer capability, but rather a refusal to embrace new methods and new approaches. Automated data science platforms removes many of these obstacles, and with a sound data science strategy will accelerate your success.

Automated data science saves up to 80% of time in model building, cuts 90% of the learning curve time, delivers 20~40% more accurate and stable models and lastly zero preparation time for production deployment of models, thereby giving the utmost advantage to organizations to adapt data science.

The world is being disrupted by visionaries. Combining the power of AI and automated data science with a sound strategy is helping build a future that is smarter, more efficient, and fairer for everyone. The companies that take advantage of automated data science will succeed and prosper. Those that don’t will be left behind.

About the Author

Srinivasan Rengarajan is the VP & Global Head – Data Science and Analytics at 3i Infotech. You can know more about him here.