Stephen Redwood explores the role of AI in today’s media landscape and how, now more than ever, the talk and walk of leaders within organizations is critical in building and sustaining trust. AI AND CHATGPT3 HAVE RUNG THE WARNING BELLS – YOU MAY DELAY, BUT TIME WILL NOT According to analysis by Statista in 2021 the average time spent per day on digital media in the US was eight hours and five minutes. That’s an astonishing third of a day…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Sajeev Cherian with Cherian & Company. Sajeev spent five years as a Principal / Director in the technology strategy practices at BCG and PwC and has been running his own consulting firm focused on strategy and design since 2022. In addition to his management consulting experience, Sajeev has been a scientist, technologist and executive at leading healthcare companies (AbbVie, Abbott Labs). Sajeev has particular experience designing winning digital strategies, aligning business and digital strategies for…

Catch up on the AI trends for 2023 with this company post from David Burnie that explores five trends that are redefining intelligent automation. It is an exciting time to be in the world of intelligent automation. Advances in artificial intelligence and cloud-native capabilities are yielding a growing number of automation options for organizations to leverage. Intelligent automation (IA) combines capabilities that enable organizations to mimic, replicate, or augment human activities. It has evolved beyond robotics process automation (RPA), a…

In this article, Nora Ghaoui explores the ability of AI to write a strategy. Three years ago, I asked if large companies all had the same strategy. Perhaps their strategies all sounded the same because managers picked up the same ideas from MBAs and consultants, or because they hired the same copywriters. Last month, a new source of non-differentiating strategy appeared – strategy written by AI. GPT-3 The AI in question is GPT-3 from OpenAI, which has been getting a…

Ramesh Subramanian shares an article that questions what follows automated machine learning.  Turns out, quite a lot.  This started with the anxiety shared by some co-workers a while ago that the world will end when robots start making robots. And I just happened to hear about auto-ML, the process of automating machine learning. I started to wonder if data scientists were going the way of the ‘web master’? This was somewhat counter to a recent article I read that Deep…

Kaihan Krippendorff shares an article that draws from a Harvard study on the three areas of the brain responsible for creativity and how technology and human creativity will collaborate in the future. In 2018, a famous Harvard study sought to understand which parts of the brain are responsible for creativity. Creativity, as defined in the study, is “the ability to come up with new and useful ideas.” To test it, researchers hooked participants up to fMRI scanners and had them…

Sven Beiker shares a video where he was interviewed by SensorsConverge on smart sensors. People are putting more and more intelligence into sensors – which we call smart sensors. Traditionally, sensors used to be a device to measure exactly one thing. But now much more intelligence is going into it and it’s going to become more and more miniaturized, which is pretty incredible. They are talking about what used to be a system on a chip (SOC) is now a…

As AI becomes more embedded in every facet of business, Jayanth Krishnan explores how it can impact your business and what to consider in a strategy to lessen the impact. The interaction between an economic downturn and technological innovation can produce unpleasant surprises to business. Having a template to think how technology and economy can create a double whammy is worth spending time. Impact of AI on labor and staffing There are three generic forms in which AI is being…

Ramesh Subramanian takes a look forward to a future where machine learning is automated. Turns out, quite a lot.  This started with the anxiety shared by some co-workers a while ago that the world will end when robots start making robots. And I just happened to hear about auto-ML, the process of automating machine learning. I started to wonder if data scientists were going the way of the ‘web master’? This was somewhat counter to a recent article I read…

Sven Beiker shares an article that explains how the biggest challenge facing automated driving is real-world traffic. Nice interview here with SAE International for their monthly magazine “Update“. My piece is titled “Realities of traffic make automated driving a challenge”. It is a conversation around what is missing to bring autonomous vehicles (automated driving to use the right SAE term) to the real world. I am glad that SAE asked as I have been discussing a lot over the years…

Sylvain Milet shares a company blog post that introduces information on making artificial intelligence and precision medicine equitable. Diversity in clinical trials is one of the hottest topics right now. However, there are many things that go into making these clinical trials equitable and diverse that start before the trial even begins. Are you interested in learning more about making both AI and precision medicine equitable? Then this talk is where you should start. On January 12-13, 2022, Real Chemistry…

David Edelman shares insights on segment-of-one marketing and the complexity of marketing in today’s multi-channel, personalized segmentation. A bit over 30 years ago, I published an early manifesto about the need to take Segment-of-One Marketing seriously. It was before the Internet, before smartphones, and just at the start of when advanced analytics were getting applied to consumer data. Yes, it does make me feel old. But while the examples from the article are now dated, the core precepts seem to…

Wojciech Gryc shares a post on how GPT-3 impacts the user experience. A great deal has been written about GPT-3 and its potential impact and hype on AI, machine learning, and data science. This post aims to look at the user experience around GPT-3 instead. Specifically, why do some people see GPT-3 as a magical innovation? What does this tell us about AI-driven products we don’t fully understand? I’ve been exploring GPT-3 for the past few weeks and have been…

  It’s always interesting to take a look back while stepping forward. In this older post from Supriya Prakash Sen, the use of AI technology in the workplace was explored. How does it compare to today’s outlook? The news has been awash with provocative articles about the future of jobs in our society. The exponentially advancing nature of Artificially Intelligent machines, after AlphaGo turned out to be a better Go player than any human – combined with the power of…

  The future of work, agriculture, education, and even relationships are all areas facing change thanks to AI technology. David Edelman extols the benefits of AI in this post. The digital explosion, accelerated by Covid, has not made life on the front lines of sales and customer service any easier. In fact, when customers are able to do more research on their own, salespeople face tougher unanswered questions, and more of an inquisition about competitive differences, granular product details, or…

  David Burnie shares a post from his company blog on how automation in the first step of claims processing can help streamline the process.  The First Notice of Loss (FNOL) – the first step in claims processing – is one of the most crucial customer touchpoints for an insurer. Yet, for most carriers, FNOL continues to be a lengthy, manual, call centre-based service requiring extensive data gathering. This process translates to high operational costs and cycle time and a…

  David Edelman explains how having an AI strategy can provide a wide range of new variables that can be personalized to the customer journey, helping to speed and scale and make the concept of agile a reality. Champion versus challenger has been the basis for finding lift and proving marketing value for decades. But we are way past the slower, high-cost operations needed to test direct mail pieces or even direct response TV.  To find the right offer, message,…

  Tobias Baer draws attention to the danger of selective perception becoming the norm as the use of AI in online information and marketing limits the amount of information delivered.  There is a famous psychological experiment where participants intently watch a basketball game – but when asked afterwards about the gorilla that had danced around amidst the players, nobody has seen it. It’s the literal textbook example of selective perception – in this experiment, participants were tasked with counting the…

  Christophe De Greift explains why now is the time to plan your analytics transformation, why you should, and the first step to take. Artificial intelligence is a relatively young discipline in companies and in constant evolution. However, the experience of pioneering companies in various sectors and continents confirms their high value generation when accompanied by a true transformation of the company. Those who have not yet internalized their analytical transformation plan should start now to be able to arrive…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Abhinav Chandra.  Abhinav is a seasoned Senior Leader with deep expertise in Retail/Consumer and Technology across a wide range of functional areas. Abhinav was an Associate Partner in McKinsey’s Retail and Operations practices where he served multiple clients on topics including omni-channel supply chain strategy, marketing and growth strategy, store operations and private label design and sourcing to name a few. Post McKinsey, Abhinav was at Amazon, where he was Head of Customer Experience, Worldwide…

  Nora Ghaoui examines the limitations of artificial intelligence as it pertains to building a business strategy. If company strategies risk sounding the same when written by people, what happens when they get written by AI? In this post I examine an AI-generated strategy statement for what it says about the abilities of AI and creating strategies. Three years ago, I asked if large companies all had the same strategy. Perhaps their strategies all sounded the same because managers picked…

  Davide Gronchi provides two simple tools that can help collect answers to powerful questions. Advanced analytics and machine learning are some of the ready-to-use technologies that help discover correlations and drive conclusions out of complex data sets that often describe our business and production processes. This is very helpful to take decisions aiming to prevent something unwanted to happen e.g., set process parameter to X in order to obtain product spec within tolerance. There are many other opportunities to…

  This article from Karthik Rajagopalan’s company blog introduces a type of machine learning that may provide solutions for some traditional optimization problems such as inventory optimization and supply chain optimization. The field of artificial intelligence is slowly beginning to permeate our lives. Computers and other machines are being endowed with intelligence through a process called machine learning. One particular type of machine learning that is of interest to us here in Paramis Digital is Reinforcement Learning (RL), which has…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Justin Lechner with Bonsai Growth. Justin Lechner is an ex-Bain consultant based in Brooklyn, NY. After leaving Bain, Justin has split his time between ventures in the enterprise AI space and independent consulting work (innovation and technology projects). Justin’s particularly passionate about applications of data science within the Consumer, Healthcare, and PE spaces. Justin is excited to collaborate on projects with a data focus…

  Ben Dattner co wrote this article for Harvard Business Review on the issue of building ethical AI for talent management.  Artificial intelligence has disrupted every area of our lives — from the curated shopping experiences we’ve come to expect from companies like Amazon and Alibaba to the personalized recommendations that channels like YouTube and Netflix use to market their latest content. But, when it comes to the workplace, in many ways, AI is still in its infancy. This is…

  Tobias Baer provides clear and concise examples of how Google uses the acquisition of select data to create bias, which leads to the dissemination of inaccurate information.     I’m an avid user of the navigation function of Google Maps. Every time I reach my destination, Google asks me for feedback on the navigation instructions. What could possibly be wrong with that? Well, I bet that the data and any analytics derived from that feedback often – and, vastly! –…

Karthik Rajagopalan’s company blog explains how machine learning models can facilitate a deeper understanding of the drivers of churn, leading to better solutions that can help customer retention for subscription businesses. Subscriptions have been around for a very long time. Having come a long way from the hire-for-purchase model introduced by the Singer sewing machine company, the past few decades saw the emergence of memberships in retail, health clubs, and monthly subscriptions to services like telephone and cable television. More…