Absolutdata products and services deliver scalable business impact across the enterprise by combining cutting edge AI and ML with its heritage in analytical frameworks, business understanding and technology. Absolutdata’s NAVIK AI Platform has pre-built solutions, customizable solutions, and enabling services to get an enterprise AI-ready. The growing set of AI-powered SaaS solutions include NAVIK SalesAI, NAVIK MarketingAI, NAVIK ResearchAI and NAVIK MicroMods. The services teams build custom solutions based on NAVIK AI.

In an interaction with The Tech Pod, Sudeshna Datta, EVP and Co-Founder, Absolutdata speaks about the AI-led COVID-19 Toolkit and how it is helping the businesses survive. Read more!

Tell us something about yourself and what Absolutdata does?

Absolutdata products and services deliver scalable business impact across the enterprise by combining cutting edge AI and ML with its heritage in analytical frameworks, business understanding and technology. Absolutdata’s NAVIK AI Platform for the enterprise blends AI, technology, data, and analytics to serve as the intelligence layer for forward-thinking companies. To quickly get clients AI empowered, the NAVIK AI Platform has a suite of pre-built AI solutions, or it can be licensed and customized using Absolutdata’s deep bench of data scientists and engineers.

We have been able to leverage its almost two-decade long experience to help businesses turn the digital leaf in the most impactful way, ‘impact’ is the keyword here. A majority of analytics service providers today only focus on helping the enterprises make the transition. However, our deep bench of data scientists, engineers and analytics experts bring along state-of-the-art skillsets to future-proof the client’s analytics applications.

AI-powered projects impact the business greatly. By what means is it true?

Most companies already have some experience with automation and basic data analytics. Deploying AI into this system enables machines to solve problems and take actions with minimum or no human intervention. This makes the entire process cost and time-effective helping businesses save massively on ROI. Not only this, the smart resolutions are backed by logical insights that in the past could only be achieved by humans. Hence, AI-led technology is reducing the workload of teams. The most successful use cases are those that seamlessly combine AI with human judgment and experience.

Our focus is enterprise class AI for scalable business impact, and we have had several success stories in this direction –

AI-based Sales Guidance Nets Chemical Company 8.5% More Annual Revenue: AI helps company spot missed sales, predict effective cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
Trade Promotion Intelligence Drive 4-7% Sales Uplift: By optimizing trade promotions with AI, this leading food manufacturer opened the door to increased revenue, fewer lost sales, and more accurate modeling.
AI-driven Hyper Personalized Campaign Increases Hotel Revenue by $13 Million: A Global hospitality leader solves the age-old challenge of the elusive one-and-done guest
AI-Powered Hyperpersonalization increases ROI, improves customer retention by 30%: A Gas and oil leader revitalizes retail outlets’ performance with AI-based guidance.
AI Spots a 3% uptick in incremental revenue and 2-3% uptick in incidence rates: A customized AI solution helped this Fortune 100 beverage leader realize significant growth in the difficult-to-balance Foodservice sector
AI-Based operations scheduler optimizes maintenance, saves $200M: AI enables this mining company to mitigate false alarms, make intelligent recommendations from a mountain of sensor data, and end an inefficient haul cycle.
Tell us something about the COVID-19 toolkit launched by Absolutdata and how is it going to help businesses in this pandemic situation?

Every business is experiencing an unprecedented situation, but we also have unparalleled tools like AI and Machine Learning that can help us navigate the uncertainty. So, we came up with an ensemble of solutions packed in a COVID-19 Toolkit, dedicated to enabling businesses act swiftly in the current as well as future scenarios.

The COVID-19 Toolkit includes three solutions: ASK NAVIK, an AI-powered virtual assistant that provide instantaneous answers to critical business questions by pulling information from your dashboards, databases and documents; NAVIK SIGNALS, which helps answer questions on how your consumers will think, feel and act after the COVID-19 crisis is over; and COVID-19 SWAT Team, to quickly develop dashboards and custom models for the current COVID impacted environment.

Workforces are scattered under stay-at-home orders, making it hard to access business information. ASK NAVIK can solve that problem. Previous assumptions used in data are irrelevant today. Updated dashboards and models can generate valid insights. The growing consensus is that the post-COVID-19 era won’t be a return to ‘normal’ — we’ll be a dealing with a ‘new normal,’ and NAVIK SIGNALS can help businesses make better decisions so they can compete in the post-COVID-19 era.

How useful is big data in overseeing immense measure of customers?

Big Data relates to large volumes of data – both structured and unstructured – that inundates a business regularly. These massive volumes of data can be instrumental in addressing business problems provided organizations know how to use this data.

Big data can be used to make better decisions and strategic business moves. This can be attained by analyzing and extracting useful, relevant insights that aptly serve both customers and business. It’s an entire discovery process that requires experienced analysts, business users, and executives who ask the right questions, recognize patterns, make informed assumptions, and predict behavior.

Knowing customers and their preferences are crucial for any business to thrive. Hence, big data is trained to deal with the immense rate of growing customer data to gain competitive edge. It enables businesses to gather data from social media, web visits, call logs, and other sources to improve the interaction experience and maximize the value delivered. Thus, it helps organizations to deliver personalized offers, reduce customer churn, and handle issues proactively.

Tell us about your AI-powered SaaS solutions?

The growing suite of AI-powered SaaS solutions that run on the NAVIK AI Platform include:

NAVIK SalesAI | AI guidance that leads the whole sales team to perform at a higher level.
NAVIK MarketingAI | Customer driven marketing that gets the most ROI from every marketing dollar.
NAVIK ResearchAI | AI enabled algorithmic platform that advances market research into the 21st
century.
NAVIK TradeAI | The World’s First Trade Promotion Intelligence Solution
NAVIK MicroMods | Plug-n-play machine learning algorithms built for specific analytical needs
Our mission is to transform how the world makes decisions. Since 2001 we’ve connected data to business results for global brands. During this time, we have amassed a powerful suite of AI-based products and advanced analytics services that give clients a competitive edge.

With AR/VR innovation what would the fate of the IT industry look like?

Though the lockdowns are unprecedented, their timing is fortuitous. Thankfully, technologies are affordable and readily available today. Work in the field of AR/VR/MR allows people to shop, talk, and socialize using these immersive platforms. The pandemic has majorly contributed to the adoption of such technologies in disguise.

Day one of the new normal will be flooded with opportunities that extended reality platforms have to offer. Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality and other similar new-age technologies are increasingly in demand as business continuity takes priority while simultaneously generating need for the advanced tools for remote collaboration. The technologies have finely paved their way in reaching out to various sectors including education, healthcare, transport, manufacturing, retail, security, and others. AR/VR are the most advanced of all tech-innovations that currently surrounds us. It is the current hotbed of innovation promising a surge of exponential growth in the tech and IT industry soon.

How are virtual assistants like ASK NAVIK helping businesses cope with the work from home scenario?

Many of us are already feeling the workplace pressures that come along with the spread of COVID-19, especially with the workforce scattered and forced to work from their respective homes. Under such circumstances, understanding the importance of sharing data, developing faster decision processes, and utilizing data & uncovering insights is highly critical. During such disasters, there is always a sense of urgency, businesses need to act promptly, and chart out action plans before it’s too late. Faster decision making and quick insight discovery is important than ever.

Acting quickly is difficult especially when workforces are working remotely, and data resides across various dashboards and in different formats. The internal insight-gathering process can let teams down, it can take weeks to locate the right information and transform it into consumable reports. Often there is dependency on data analysts to run queries to find the right report or piece of knowledge, but needs to be done in seconds, not days.

We’ve been exploring how easy and fast we can make insight delivery for business users and found out that NLP and NLG can close the delivery gap. This eventually led us to develop ASK NAVIK, an NLP-enabled chatbot that understands users’ spoken or written questions in their natural language. This chatbot interfaces with an AI search engine, which delivers the raw information to the user. More impressively, the chatbot also uses human-like Natural Language Generation to provide a succinct reply.

In other words, ASK NAVIK is an AI virtual assistant quickly finding and delivering insights while leaving the data analytics team free to handle more complicated queries, letting the users find hidden data that makes critical decision-making easy and fast in the current changing world. Perfect for employees who are working from home or anywhere, ASK NAVIK doesn’t require any training and understands industry and corporate terms. It’s personalized for each user based on roles, access privileges and preferences.

Virtual assistants do more than just scheduling meetings and sending reminders throughout the day. The more advanced virtual assistant programs out there can take a load of busy work off your plate. Think important yet repetitive tasks such as producing email marketing campaigns, optimizing your site’s SEO, creating invoices, inputting data, or researching potential clients. Virtual Assistants may be just what you need during this difficult time.