siliconindia | | May 20189By focusing customer acquisition efforts on the customers demonstrating positive signals of intent, businesses will be able to stretch their advertising dollars further and get a much greater return on investment· AI/machine learning-enabled mar-keting automation platforms help sales and marketing teams to reach prospect customers through intelligent insights about a customer's buying pattern. · AR/VR equipped learning & de-velopment platforms coach on-the-field customer service reps as how to handle a customer. · IoT enabled manufacturing plant predicts the load on the supply chain, and thus gives meaningful insights to the shift manager. · AI analytics tools let employees across the company to access the types of reports that would otherwise require various cross-organizational meetings and a significant amount of effort to get to the accurate data points. Thus, the role of IT department in an organization is slowly changing from implementing a few software to introducing set of data-driven, AI en-abled solutions to other business de-partments. This allows the business de-partments to select the right solutions for their needs, design, implement and customize cognitive applications to meet business goals, introduce predic-tive modeling and train users on how to get the most out of these new solutions. These solutions help businesses in improving revenue streams and boost their operational efficiency. This gives it a clear path to improving outcomes across the organization, directly im-pacting both top line and bottom line, and otherwise demonstrating it's posi-tive impacts on the business. It will be impressive to note how data analytics is helping how customers are acquired and retained. e-Commerce industry has been a front runner in embracing the sentiment analysis routines and deter-mining the buying pattern; and then adjusting marketing effort accordingly. Irrespective of industry and size, targeting the right customer at the right time is usually a recipe for sales success. The data science determines the stron-gest signals of prospective customer's intent and with help of this engine, the sales team in an organization will also be able to create predictive models that will help business to consistently target those who are most likely to convert. By focusing customer acquisition ef-forts on the customers demonstrating positive signals of intent, businesses will be able to stretch their advertising dollars further and get a much greater return on investment. Another strong tool which is helping business across multiple domains is predicting custom-er churn; this is an AI/ML and analytics based engine which predicts percent-age of customer who might leave and what are the probable reasons behind that churn. By analyzing certain com-plex data points, the algorithm is able to predict the churn with significant accuracy, this allows the marketing teams to spring into action and change the sentiments of the existing custom-er. a study says, telecom businesses experience churn of about 25 percent and in retail it is 23 percent. Given the high cost of customer acquisition; retaining customers is always of a strategic importance.Yet another transformative trend is AI/ML enabled cybersecurity. No human can effectively track, identify, and defend against the ever-evolving universe of cybersecurity threats in re-al-time. Some predictive platforms use deep learning algorithms to automati-cally identify and block cybersecurity threats with significantly higher detec-tion accuracy. In addition to this, big data analysis gives an opportunity to analyze the logs, determine a pattern, and build a much resilient defense sys-tem to help prevent reoccurrence of a similar attack. In true sense, an adap-tation of cognitive technology-based solutions is changing the way in which IT investments are perceived and it is transforming how IT departments are operating. There will be increased penetration of technology into how we are running and operating the busi-ness and AI/ML/analytics are enabling this change. Santosh Kotnis
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