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Posts from the ‘AI for Human Resources Management’ Category

Apr 24

FinancialForce’s Spring 2021 Release Shows Why Being Customer-Centric Pays

FinancialForce's Spring 2021 Release Shows Why Being Customer-Centric Pays

Bottom Line: Customer revenue lifecycles are the lifeblood of any services business, making FinancialForce’s Spring 2021 release timely given the services-first revenue renaissance happening today.

The essence of an excellent services business is that it can consistently create expectations clients trust and the business regularly exceeds. Orchestrating the best people for a given project at the right time, tracking costs, revenue, and margin across all services revenue, including those associated with a client’s assets, is very challenging. Customer revenue lifecycles are in the data, yet no one can get to them because they’re hidden across multiple systems that aren’t integrated. Knowing how efficient a services business is at turning customer engagement into cash is what everyone needs to know, but no one can find. The challenge is equally as daunting for long-established services providers and those rushing into new services businesses to redefine themselves in the hope of profits that are more consistent and fewer price wars.

How Much Is Customer Engagement Is Worth?

Services businesses face the paradox of exceeding client expectations with every engagement but not knowing if extra time, resources, and staff invested are paying off with more revenue and profit. FinancialForce’s Spring 2021 release looks to solve this problem. What galvanizes the ERP, PSA, and platform announcements is a fresh intensity on customer centricity, both for the services business adopting the Spring 2021 release and the customers it’s intended to serve.

Knowing if and by how much a given customer engagement and its revenue lifecycle generate cash, and its potential is one of the core focus areas of the Spring 2021 release. It’s badly needed as many services are flying blind today, overcommitting resources for little return and too often losing control of client engagement and paying the price in lost margin and profits. FinancialForce sees that pain and wants to alleviate it with better financial visibility on all aspects of customer services revenue. FinancialForce aims to provide customer-centric financial reporting down to the revenue stream and costing measure level.  

FinancialForce's Spring 2021 Release Shows Why Being Customer-Centric Pays
Knowing every customer’s impact on revenue and profitability from all revenue streams will make managing services engagements much more accurate, easier to manage, and more profitable. 

Key Takeaways From The Spring 2021 Release

Customer centricity seen through a financial lens is the cornerstone of FinancialForce’s latest release. One of the primary goals of this release is to update more applications to Salesforce Lightning to provide FinancialForce users with a more consistent user experience across all applications.  Salesforce has been doubling down for years on Lightning and its user experience technologies, with FinancialForce reaping the benefits for over a decade. FinancialForce is transitioning their core Professional Services Automation (PSA), Billing, Accounting & Finance and Procurement, Order and Inventory Management to Lightning in this release in response to their customers wanting a consistent user experience across the entire FinancialForce suite of applications.  The Spring 2021 release reflects how FinancialForce strives to provide a real-time understanding of customer lifetime value for their ERP and PSA customers.  

Additional key takeaways include the following:

  • FinancialForce sees reducing days to close as one of the highest priorities they need to address today. The majority of new feature announcements center on how the days to close cycles can be streamlined, especially across multi-company and multisite locations across geographic and currency-specific regions of the world. Multi-company currency revaluation will help FinancialForce customers who operate across multiple geographies that operate in different currencies and will be especially useful for those clients creating new global channels and considering foreign acquisitions. Further showing the high priority they are putting on reducing days to close, the Spring 2021 release also includes automated eliminations, multi-company period close for software closes, which are designed to temporarily close out a financial report and revenue schedules that can provide a future view in revenues – a key factor in knowing customer revenue lifecycles.
  • New features and a new Lightning interface for Accounting, Billing Central, and Inventory Management simplifies complex transactions for users. FinancialForce has one of the most customer-driven product management teams in enterprise software. The depth of features they have added to inventory management, transactional and reconciliation processes for accounting, drop-ship use cases, and enhancements for adding products to billing contracts show how much FinancialForce is listening to customers.
  • AI-enhanced financial reporting that works with any Einstein data set. FinancialForce leads the Salesforce partner ecosystem when it comes to integrating Tableau CRM (formerly known as Einstein Analytics) into its platform. Now thirteen releases in, FinancialForce’s Spring 2021 release reflects the intuitive, adaptive intelligence that the product management team aims to achieve by integrating Einstein into their financial reporting workflows. 
  • Professional Services Automation (PSA) Applications Including Resource Management, Project Management, and Time & Expense upgraded to Lightning.  Transitioning three of the core PSA applications to Lightning will help broaden adoption and make them easier to upsell and cross-sell across the FinancialForce customer base. It will also help existing customers using these applications get new employees up to speed faster on them, given how much more streamlined Lightning is as an interface compared to previous versions.
  • Intelligent Staffing solves the complex challenges resource managers face when assigning the best possible associates to a given project. Designed to filter and intelligently rank potential resources based on region, practice, group skill sets, and availability, Intelligent Staffing is designed to get resource managers as close to an ideal match as possible for a given project’s requirements. This is a much-welcomed new feature by FinancialForce customers who are large-scale services providers as they’re facing the challenges of assigning the right person to the right project at the right time to ensure project success.    
  • Integration of Salesforce AI’s Next Best Action (NBA) will raise the level of project expertise at scale across customers.  Part of the customer centricity focus in Spring 2021 is focused on providing customers with new technologies and applications to share expertise and knowledge at scale. Next Best Action provides prescriptive guidance for the project manager and will see heavy use in new associate onboarding across services businesses and achieve greater corporate-wide learning at scale. This is consistent with the focus in the Spring 2021 release on bringing greater space and speed to mid-size and larger services customers.

Conclusion

FinancialForce defines customer engagement and centricity from a financial standpoint in the Spring 2021 release. Too often, services businesses commit to large-scale projects without a clear idea of the customer revenue lifecycle. With FinancialForce, they can stop and ask if the level of customer engagement they’re committing to is worth it or not – and if it isn’t, what needs to be done. FinancialForce is doubling down on user experience and accelerating time-to-close, two areas their customers want innovation to and look to them to deliver. Look for FinancialForce to scale out with more MuleSoft and Tableau integration scenarios, all aimed at capitalizing on their expertise developing on the Salesforce platform. There’s a bigger challenge to customer engagement on the horizon, and that’s providing a real-time view of financials across all customers with all available data across a business, making MuleSoft integration key to FinancialForce’s future growth.

Mar 18

How To Digitally Transform Talent Management For The Better

How To Digitally Transform Talent Management For The Better

Bottom Line:  CHROs and the HR teams they lead need to commit to keep learning and adopting digital technologies that help improve how they hire, engage and retain talent if they’re going to stay competitive.

Driven by the urgency to keep connected with employees, customers and suppliers, McKinsey’s recent Covid-19 survey finds global organizations are now seven years ahead of schedule on digital transformation initiatives. HR’s role is proving indispensable in enabling the fast pace of digital adoption today. By providing Business Continuity Planning (BCP), HR’s contributions to digital transformation separate the organizations that thrive despite crises versus those left behind, according to McLean & Company’s 2021 HR Trends Report. The graphic below from the report shows how effective HR has been in supporting the rapid changes needed to keep employees communicating and engaged.

The McLean and Company Trends Report also shows that talent management’s major gaps need attention now before they grow wider. These areas include analyzing the employee skills gap (24%), developing employees on new competencies (24%), and training new employees in specific new skills (21%). Improving talent acquisition, retention, diversity and inclusion, and employee experiences by digitally transforming them with greater personalization at scale and visibility is key.  CHROs and the HR teams they lead need to close these gaps now.

How To Digitally Transform Talent Management For The Better

 

How To Get Started Digitally Transforming Talent Management

Start with the gaps in talent management you see in your organization. The largest gaps are often in the following four areas: recruiting and talent acquisition; retention of top talent and diverse talent; lack of visibility into employee capabilities; and workforce strategies not aligned to business strategies. Key challenges that need to drive digital transformation in these four areas include the following:

  • Legacy recruiting and Applicant Tracking Systems prioritize HR’s needs to capture thousands of resumes instead of delivering an excellent candidate experience. Attracting and recruiting the most qualified candidates in a virtual-first world is a daunting task. Organizations who are leaders in digital transformation quickly realized this and relied on automating the applicant experience so much it began to resemble the Amazon 1-Click Ordering experience. McKinsey’s recent Covid survey found that 75% of organizations digitally transforming their operations, including HR, were able to fill tech talent gaps during the crisis:

How To Digitally Transform Talent Management For The Better

Source: McKinsey & Company, 2020, How Covid-19 has pushed companies over the technology tipping point—and transformed business forever

 

  • Top talent retention is more of a problem than many organizations realize, with top performers receiving between five and ten recruiter calls a month or more. The average tenure of employees at companies has been decreasing for nearly two decades. And a primary driver is not for lack of opportunity, but because employees can’t find a career path internally as easily as they can find a growth opportunity at another company. It’s possible to retain the top talent by guiding employees to what’s next in their careers. Of the many approaches to providing employees a self-service option for personalized coaching guidance at scale, Eightfold’s Talent Intelligence Platform is delivering results at such notable companies as Air Asia, Micron, NetApp, and others. Eightfold found that 47% of top talent leave within two years, but most would happily stay if given the right opportunity. The following video explains how Eightfold helps its customers retain talent:

 

 

  • Employees often lack visibility into new internal opportunities, and both HR and business leaders lack visibility into employees’ unique capabilities. There’s often a 360-degree lack of visibility into new internal career positions from the employee’s side and a lack of awareness on the employer’s side of their employee’s innate capabilities. The lack of visibility from the employer side limits their ability to benchmark talent, create programmatic, scalable, and flexible career development opportunities and ultimately redeploy talent in an agile way that serves business strategies that are evolving rapidly in response to the impacts of the global pandemic.
  • Workforce strategies that don’t align and support business strategies waste opportunities to improve morale, productivity, and employees’ professional growth. While organizations have invested heavily in valuable infrastructure, including Learning Management Systems (LMS) and other employee experience and development tools, they often lack a unified platform to help deliver the right growth opportunities to the right person at the right time.

Achieving Greater Automation, Visibility And Personalization At Scale

Talent management is core to any digital business and the competitive outcomes each can produce today and in the future. To make greater contributions, Talent Management needs to deliver the following by relying on a unified platform:

  • Talent Management platforms need to combine ongoing business insights based on operations data, technology management data, and business transformation apps and tools to create new digitally-driven employee experiences quickly.
  • A key design goal of any Talent Management platform has to be delivering personalized candidate or prospect experiences at scale through every communications channel an organization relies on, both digital and human.
  • The best Talent Management platforms provide the apps, data, and contextual intelligence to drive task and mission ownership deep into an organization and reinforce accountability. What’s noteworthy about Eightfold’s Talent Intelligence Platform is that it has designed-in empathy and the ability to deliver quick, effective decisions that further reinforce team inclusion. Eightfold’s many customer wins in Talent Management illustrate how combining empathy, inclusion, and accountability in a platform’s design pays off.

As McLean & Company’s 2021 HR Trends Report shows, taking a band-aid approach to solving Talent Management’s many challenges is effective in the short-term. Turning Talent Management into a solid contributor to business strategies for the long-term needs to start at the platform level, however. Eightfold’s approach to combining their Talent Management, Talent Insights and Talent Acquisition modules, all supported by their Talent Intelligence Platform, enables their customers to define their digital transformation goals and strategies and get results.

Source: McKinsey & Company, 2020, How Covid-19 has pushed companies over the technology tipping point—and transformed business forever

Conclusion

The Talent Management goal many organizations aspire to today is to digitally transform candidate or prospect experiences so well that people have an immediate affinity for the company they apply to, and the self-service options are so intuitive they rival Amazon’s 1-Click Ordering Experience. Across any industry, digital transformation succeeds when customers’ expectations are exceeded so far that a new category gets created. Uber’s contextual intelligence, rating system, and ability to optimize ride requests is an example. UberEats provides the same real-time visibility into every step of each order, creating greater trust. Domino’s Pizza Tracker app keeps customers informed of every phase of their orders. What’s common across all these examples is personalization at scale, real-time automation across service providers, and real-time visibility. Those same core values need to be at the center of any Talent Management digital transformation effort today.

Jan 23

Top 10 Tech Job Skills Predicted To Grow The Fastest In 2021

Top 10 Tech Job Skills Predicted To Grow The Fastest In 2021
  • According to Burning Glass Technologies, the two tech job skills paying the highest salary premiums today and in 2021 are IT Automation ($24,969) and AI & Machine Learning ($14,175).
  • The average salary premiums for the most in-demand tech skills range from $4,204 to nearly $25,000.
  • Startups valued at $1 billion or more are 33% more likely to prioritize one or several top ten tech job skills in their new hire plans versus their legacy Fortune 100-based competitors or colleagues.

These and many other fascinating insights are from Skills of Mass Disruption: Pinpointing the 10 Most Disruptive Skills in Tech, Burning Glass Technologies’ latest research study published earlier this month. Their latest study provides pragmatic, useful insights for tech professionals interested in furthering their careers and earning potential. Burning Glass Technologies is a leading job market analytics provider that delivers job market analytics that empowers employers, workers and educators to make data-driven decisions. 

Using AI To Find The Most Valuable Job Skills

Using artificial intelligence-based technologies they’ve developed, Burning Glass Technologies analyzed over 17,000 unique skills demanded across their database of over one billion historical job listings. The study aggregates then define disruptive skill clusters as those skill groups projected to grow the fastest, are most undersupplied and provide the highest value. For additional details regarding their methodology, please see page 8 of the report.

The research study is noteworthy because it explains how essential acquiring skills is to translating new technologies’ benefits into business value. They’ve also taken their analysis a step further, providing technical professionals with additional insights they need to plan their personal development and careers.

Key takeaways from their analysis include the following:

  • IT Automation expertise can earn technical professionals a $24,969 salary premium, the most lucrative of all tech job skills to have in 2021. Burning Glass Technologies defines IT Automation as the skills related to automating and orchestrating digital processes and workflows. Six of the ten job skills are marketable enough to drive technical professionals’ salaries above $10,000 a year. At an average salary uplift of $8,851, proactive security (cybersecurity) job skills’ market value seems low. Future surveys in 2021 will most likely reflect the impact of the SolarWinds breach on demand for this skill set. The following graphic compares the average salary premium by tech job skill area.
Top 10 Tech Job Skills Predicted To Grow The Fastest In 2021
Skills of Mass Disruption: Pinpointing the 10 Most Disruptive Skills in Tech by Burning Glass Technologies
  • Software Dev. Methodologies (DevOps) expertise is the most marketable going into 2021, with 634,600 open positions available in North America based on Burning Glass Technologies’ analysis. Employers initiated 1,714,483 job postings requesting at least one disruptive skill area between December 2019 and November 2020. With each skill predicted to grow at least 17%, technical professionals have several lucrative options for their personal and professional development plans. The following graphic compares job openings by skill areas for the time frame of the study:
Top 10 Tech Job Skills Predicted To Grow The Fastest In 2021
Skills of Mass Disruption: Pinpointing the 10 Most Disruptive Skills in Tech by Burning Glass Technologies
  • Quantum Computing, Connected Technologies, Fintech and AI & Machine Learning expertise are predicted to be the fastest-growing tech job skills in 2021 and beyond. Demand for technical professionals skilled in building and optimizing quantum computers and their applications will be in high demand for the next five years based on the study’s findings. Connected Technologies refers to skills related to the Internet of Things and connected physical tools and the telecommunications infrastructure needed to enable them. Fintech skills are related to technologies, including blockchain and others, that make financial transactions more efficient and secure. The following graphic compares the top ten tech job skills predicted to grow the fastest in 2021.
Top 10 Tech Job Skills Predicted To Grow The Fastest In 2021
Skills of Mass Disruption: Pinpointing the 10 Most Disruptive Skills in Tech by Burning Glass Technologies
  • AI & Machine Learning, Cloud Technologies, Parallel Computing and Proactive Security (Cybersecurity) are the most distributed across industries, translating into more diverse job opportunities for technical professionals with these skills. Professional Services leads all industries in demand for nine of the ten tech job skills, except Parallel Computing, the most in-demand skill in Manufacturing. Factors contributing to Professional Services leading all industries in demand for technical job skills include the following factors. First, their business models need to continue pivoting fast to stabilize during the pandemic. Second, better risk and compliance controls of remote operations are urgently needed. Third, better visibility into services costs across all systems to ensure financial reporting accuracy is a must-have, according to the CFOs I spoke with regarding the survey results. The following graphic compares demand for tech skills by industry sector.
Top 10 Tech Job Skills Predicted To Grow The Fastest In 2021
Skills of Mass Disruption: Pinpointing the 10 Most Disruptive Skills in Tech by Burning Glass Technologies
  • Demand for AI and Machine Learning skills is growing at a 71% compound annual growth rate through 2025, with 197,810 open positions today. Technical professionals with job skills in this area see salary premiums of $14,175. Top positions include Data Scientist, Software Developer, Network Engineer, Network Architect, Data Engineer and Senior Data Scientist.
Top 10 Tech Job Skills Predicted To Grow The Fastest In 2021
Skills of Mass Disruption: Pinpointing the 10 Most Disruptive Skills in Tech by Burning Glass Technologies
  •  Positions requiring IT Automation job skills are predicted to grow 59% over the next five years and have 282,380 positions open today. Besides being the most lucrative job skillset to have, IT Automation job skills lead to positions including Software Developer, DevOps Engineer, Senior Software Developer, Systems Engineer and Java Developer or Engineer.
Top 10 Tech Job Skills Predicted To Grow The Fastest In 2021
Skills of Mass Disruption: Pinpointing the 10 Most Disruptive Skills in Tech by Burning Glass Technologies

Oct 25

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What’s New In Gartner’s Hype Cycle For AI, 2020

What's New In Gartner's Hype Cycle For AI, 2020
AI is starting to deliver on its potential and its benefits for businesses are becoming a reality.

  • 47% of artificial intelligence (AI) investments were unchanged since the start of the pandemic and 30% of organizations plan to increase their AI investments, according to a recent Gartner poll.
  • 30% of CEOs own AI initiatives in their organizations and regularly redefine resources, reporting structures and systems to ensure success.
  • AI projects continue to accelerate this year in healthcare, bioscience, manufacturing, financial services and supply chain sectors despite greater economic & social uncertainty.
  • Five new technology categories are included in this year’s Hype Cycle for AI, including small data, generative AI, composite AI, responsible AI and things as customers.

These and many other new insights are from the Gartner Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence, 2020, published on July 27th of this year and provided in the recent article, 2 Megatrends Dominate the Gartner Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence, 2020.  Two dominant themes emerge from the combination of 30 diverse AI technologies in this year’s Hype Cycle. The first theme is the democratization or broader adoption of AI across organizations. The greater the democratization of AI, the greater the importance of developers and DevOps to create enterprise-grade applications. The second theme is the industrialization of AI platforms. Reusability, scalability, safety and responsible use of AI and AI governance are the catalysts contributing to the second theme.  The Gartner Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence, 2020, is shown below:

What's New In Gartner's Hype Cycle For AI, 2020
Smarter with Gartner, 2 Megatrends Dominate the Gartner Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence, 2020.

Details Of What’s New In Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence, 2020

  • Chatbots are projected to see over a 100% increase in their adoption rates in the next two to five years and are the leading AI use cases in enterprises today.  Gartner revised the bots’ penetration rate from a range of 5% to 20% last year to 20% to 50% this year. Gartner points to chatbot’s successful adoption as the face of AI today and the technology’s contributions to streamlining automated, touchless customer interactions aimed at keeping customers and employees safe. Bot vendors to watch include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cognigy, Google, IBM, Microsoft, NTT DOCOMO, Oracle, Rasa and Rulai.
  • GPU Accelerators are the nearest-term technology to mainstream adoption and are predicted to deliver a high level of benefit according to Gartner’s’ Priority Matrix for AI, 2020. Gartner predicts GPU Accelerators will see a 100% improvement in adoption in two to five years, increasing from 5% to 20% adoption last year to 20% to 50% this year. Gartner advises its clients that GPU-accelerated Computing can deliver extreme performance for highly parallel compute-intensive workloads in HPC, DNN training and inferencing. GPU computing is also available as a cloud service. According to the Hype Cycle, it may be economical for applications where utilization is low, but the urgency of completion is high.
  • AI-based minimum viable products and accelerated AI development cycles are replacing pilot projects due to the pandemic across Gartner’s client base. Before the pandemic, pilot projects’ success or failure was, for the most part, dependent on if a project had an executive sponsor and how much influence they had. Gartner clients are wisely moving to minimum viable product and accelerating AI development to get results quickly in the pandemic. Gartner recommends projects involving Natural Language Processing (NLP), machine learning, chatbots and computer vision to be prioritized above other AI initiatives. They’re also recommending organizations look at insight engines’ potential to deliver value across a business.
  • Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) lacks commercial viability today and organizations need to focus instead on more narrowly focused AI use cases to get results for their business. Gartner warns there’s a lot of hype surrounding AGI and organizations would be best to ignore vendors’ claims of having commercial-grade products or platforms ready today with this technology. A better AI deployment strategy is to consider the full scope of technologies on the Hype Cycle and choose those delivering proven financial value to the organizations adopting them.
  • Small Data is now a category in the Hype Cycle for AI for the first time. Gartner defines this technology as a series of techniques that enable organizations to manage production models that are more resilient and adapt to major world events like the pandemic or future disruptions. These techniques are ideal for AI problems where there are no big datasets available.
  • Generative AI is the second new technology category added to this year’s Hype Cycle for the first time. It’s defined as various machine learning (ML) methods that learn a representation of artifacts from the data and generate brand-new, completely original, realistic artifacts that preserve a likeness to the training data, not repeat it.
  • Gartner sees potential for Composite AI helping its enterprise clients and has included it as the third new category in this year’s Hype Cycle. Composite AI refers to the combined application of different AI techniques to improve learning efficiency, increase the level of “common sense,” and ultimately to much more efficiently solve a wider range of business problems.
  • Concentrating on the ethical and social aspects of AI, Gartner recently defined the category Responsible AI as an umbrella term that’s included as the fourth category in the Hype Cycle for AI. Responsible AI is defined as a strategic term that encompasses the many aspects of making the right business and ethical choices when adopting AI that organizations often address independently. These include business and societal value, risk, trust, transparency, fairness, bias mitigation, explainability, accountability, safety, privacy and regulatory compliance.
  • The exponential gains in accuracy, price/performance, low power consumption and Internet of Things sensors that collect AI model data have to lead to a new category called Things as Customers, as the fifth new category this year.  Gartner defines things as Customers as a smart device or machine or that obtains goods or services in exchange for payment. Examples include virtual personal assistants, smart appliances, connected cars and IoT-enabled factory equipment.
  • Thirteen technologies have either been removed, re-classified, or moved to other Hype Cycles compared to last year.  Gartner has chosen to remove VPA-enabled wireless speakers from all Hype Cycles this year. AI developer toolkits are now part of the AI developer and teaching kits category. AI PaaS is now part of AI cloud services. Gartner chose to move AI-related C&SI services, AutoML, Explainable AI (also now part of the Responsible AI category in 2020), graph analytics and Reinforcement Learning to the Hype Cycle for Data Science and Machine Learning, 2020. Conversational User Interfaces, Speech Recognition and Virtual Assistants are now part of the Hype Cycle for Natural Language Technologies, 2020. Gartner has also chosen to move Quantum computing to the Hype Cycle for Compute Infrastructure, 2020. Robotic process automation software is now removed from the Hype Cycle for AI, as Gartner mentions the technology in several other Hype Cycles.

Sep 13

How An AI Platform Is Matching Employees And Opportunities

How An AI Platform Is Matching Employees And Opportunities

Instead of relying on data-driven signals of past accomplishments, Eightfold.ai is using AI to discover the innate capabilities of people and matching them to new opportunities in their own companies.

Bottom Line: Eightfold.ai’s innovative approach of combining their own AI and virtual hackathons to create and launch new additions to their Project Marketplace rapidly is a model enterprises need to consider emulating.

Eightfold.ai was founded with the mission that there is a right career for everyone in the world. Since its founding in 2016, Eightfold.ai’s Talent Intelligence Platform continues to see rapid global growth, attracting customers across four continents and 25 countries, supporting 15 languages with users in 110 countries. Their Talent Intelligence Platform is built to assist enterprises with Talent Acquisition and Management holistically.

What’s noteworthy about Eightfold.ai’s approach is how they have successfully created a platform that aggregates all available data on people across an enterprise – from applicants to alumni – to create a comprehensive Talent Network. Instead of relying on data-driven signals of past accomplishments, Eightfold.ai is using AI to discover the innate capabilities of people and matching them to new opportunities in their own companies. Eightfold’s AI and machine learning algorithms are continuously learning from enterprise and individual performance to better predict role, performance and career options for employees based on capabilities.

How Eightfold Sets A Quick Pace Innovating Their Marketplace

Recently Eightfold.ai announced Project Marketplace, an AI-based solution for enterprises that align employees seeking new opportunities and companies’ need to reskill and upskill their employees with capabilities that line up well with new business imperatives. Eightfold wanted to provide employees with opportunities to gain new skills through experiential learning, network with their colleagues, join project teams and also attain the satisfaction of helping flatten the unemployment curve outside. Project Marketplace helps employers find hidden talent, improve retention strategies and gain new knowledge of who has specific capabilities and skills. The following is a screen from the Marketplace that provides employees the flexibility of browsing all projects their unique capabilities qualify them for:

How An AI Platform Is Matching Employees And Opportunities

Employees select a project of interest and are immediately shown how strong of a match they are with the open position. Eightfold provides insights into relevant skills that an employee already has, why they are a strong match and the rest of the project team members – often a carrot in itself. Keeping focused on expanding employee’s capabilities, Eightfold also provides guidance of which skills an employee will learn. The following is an example of what an open project positions looks like:

How An AI Platform Is Matching Employees And Opportunities

How An AI Platform Is Matching Employees And Opportunities

Employee applicants can also view all the projects they currently have open from the My Projects view shown below:

How An AI Platform Is Matching Employees And Opportunities

Project Marketplace is the win/win every employee has yearned for as they start to feel less challenged in their current position and start looking for a new one, often outside their companies. I recently spoke with Ashutosh Garg, CEO and Co-Founder and Kamal Ahluwalia, Eightfold’s President, to see how they successfully ran a virtual hackathon across three continents to keep the Marketplace platform fresh with new features and responsive to the market.

How to Run A Virtual Hackathon

Starting with the hackathon, Eightfold relied on its own Talent Intelligence Platform to define the teams across all three continents, based on their employees’ combined mix of capabilities. Ashutosh, Kamal and the senior management team defined three goals of the hackathon:

  1. Solve problems customers are asking about with solutions that are not on the roadmap yet.
  2. Accelerate time to value for customers with new approaches no one has thought of before.
  3. Find new features and unique strengths that further strengthen the company’s mission of finding the right career for everyone in the world.

It’s fascinating to see how AI, cybersecurity and revenue management software companies continue to innovate at a fast pace delivering complex apps with everyone being remote. I asked Ashutosh how he and his management team approached the challenge of having a hackathon spanning three continents deliver results. Here’s what I learned from our discussion and these lessons are directly applicable to any virtual hackathon today:

  1. Define the hackathon’s purpose clearly and link it to the company mission, explaining what’s at stake for customers, employees and the millions of people looking for work today – all served by the Talent Intelligence Platform broadening its base of features.
  2. Realize that what you are building during the hackathon will help set some employees free from stagnating skills allowing them to be more employable with their new capabilities.
  3. The hackathon is a chance to master new skills through experiential learning, further strengthening their capabilities as well. And often learning from some of the experts in the company by joining their teams.
  4. Reward risk-taking and new innovative ideas that initially appear to be edge cases, but can potentially be game changers for customers.

I’ve been interviewing CEOs from startups to established enterprise software companies about how they kept innovation alive during the lockdown. CEOs have mentioned agile development, extensive use of Slack channels and daily virtual stand-ups. Ashutosh Garg is the only one to mention how putting intrinsic motivation into practice, along with these core techniques, binds hackathon teams together fast. Dan Pink’s classic TED Talk, The Puzzle of Motivation, explains intrinsic motivators briefly and it’s clear they have implications on a hackathon succeeding or not.

Measuring Results Of the Hackathon

Within a weekend, Project Marketplace revealed several new rock stars amongst the Eightfold hackathon teams. Instead of doing side projects for people who had time on their hands, this Hackathon was about making Eightfold’s everyday projects better and faster. Their best Engineers and Services team members took a step back, re-looked at the current approaches and competed with each other to find better and innovative ways. And they all voted for the most popular projects and solutions – ultimate reward in gaining the respect of your peers. As well as the most “prolific coder” for those who couldn’t resist working on multiple teams.

Conclusion

Remote work is creating daunting challenges for individuals at home as well as for companies. Business models need to change and innovation cannot take a back seat while most companies have employees working from home for the foreseeable future. Running a hackathon during a global lockdown and making it deliver valuable new insights and features that benefit customers now is achievable as Eightfold’s track record shows. Project marketplace may prove to be a useful ally for employees and companies looking to stay true to their mission and help each other grow – even in a pandemic. This will create better job security, a culture of continuous learning, loyalty and more jobs. AI will change how we look at our work – and this is a great example of inspiring innovation.

 

Apr 19

How To Reduce The Unemployment Gap With AI

How To Reduce The Unemployment Gap With AI

It’s time for AI startups to step up and use their formidable technology expertise in AI to help get more Americans back to work now.

Bottom Line: A.I.’s ability to predict and recommend job matches will help get more Americans back to work, helping to reduce the 22 million unemployed today.

One in ten Americans is out of work today based latest U.S. Department of Labor data. They’re primarily from the travel and hospitality, food services, and retail trade and manufacturing industries, with many other affected sectors. McKinsey & Company’s recent article, A new AI-powered network, is helping workers displaced by the coronavirus crisis provides context around the scope of challenges involved in closing the unemployment gap. McKinsey, Eightfold A.I., and the FMI – The Food Industry Association combined efforts to create the Talent Exchange, powered by Eightfold.ai in a matter of weeks. McKinsey insights across a broad base of industries to help Eightfold and FMI create the Talent Exchange in record time. “In talking with clients across the U.S., it became very clear that there is a huge labor mismatch, and individuals are being affected very differently—from retailers furloughing tens of thousands of workers to other organizations needing to hire more than 100,000 workers quickly. We’re excited to help bring a scalable offering to the market,” said McKinsey partner Andrew Davis. McKinsey and FMI collaborating with Eightfold speak volumes to how Americans are coming together to combat the COVID-19 fallout as a team.

And with the food & agriculture, transportation, and logistics industries considered essential, critical infrastructure by Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), demand for workers is more urgent than ever. Eightfold’s Talent Exchange launched last weekend and already has more than 600,000 jobs uploaded that employers need to fill and is available in 15 languages. Eightfold is making the Talent Exchange available free of charge through the COVID-19 epidemic. The Talent Exchange is also being extended to other industries and eco-systems, illustrating how the Eightfold A.I. platform can provide transferability of skills across roles and industries.

Getting Americans Back To Work Using A.I.

Earlier this week Eightfold, FMI – The Food Industry Association and Josh Bersin, the noted global research analyst, public speaker, and writer on many aspects of human resources and talent management, hosted the webinar, COVID-19: Helping the food industry on the front lines with A.I. It’s available to watch here and includes a walk-through of the Eightfold Talent Exchange. The following graphic explains how the Talent Exchange addresses the needs of downsizing companies, impacted workers and hiring companies:

How To Reduce The Unemployment Gap With AI

Eightfold’s Talent Exchange Is A Model For How To Use A.I. For Good

Eightfold’s Talent Exchange uses A.I. algorithms to match candidates with available roles, based on each individual’s skills and previous experience.

Current employers who have to furlough or lay off employees can invite employees to participate in the program. Eightfold also designed in a useful feature that enables employers to add lists of impacted employees and send them a link to register for the Exchange. Employers can view their entire impacted workforce in a single dashboard and can filter by role, department, or location to see details about the talent needs from hiring companies and how their impacted employees are getting placed in new roles. The following is the Talent Exchange dashboard  for current employers showing progress in placing employees with furlough and outplacement partners, including the number of offers accepted by each:

How To Reduce The Unemployment Gap With AI

Employees impacted by a furlough or lay-off can create and update profiles free on the Talent Exchange, defining their job preferences, skills, and experience. That’s invaluable data for hiring companies relying on the platform to make offers and fill positions quickly.  How current employers handle furloughs and lay-offs today will be their identity for years to come, a point John Bersin made during the webinar saying “employers who thrive in the future are going to build long-term relationships with employees today.” Employees receive the following when their current employer adds their name to the Eightfold Talent Exchange. The fictional Company Travel Air is used for this example:

Hiring companies see candidate matches generated by the Exchange, so they can contact these prospects or immediately offer them new jobs. Eightfold’s A.I. engineering teams have automated and personalized this contact as well, expediting the process even further. Hiring companies can add onboarding instructions to allow new hires to start as soon as they are ready and have real-time views of their hiring dashboard shown below:

How To Reduce The Unemployment Gap With AI

Conclusion

Combining A.I.’s innate strengths with H.R. and talent management professionals’ expertise and insights is closing the unemployment gap today. Employers furloughing or laying off employees need to look out for them and get their profile data on the Talent Exchange, helping them find new jobs with hiring companies. As was so well-said by Josh Bersin during the webinar this week, “smart employers should think of their hourly workers as talent, not fungible, replaceable bodies.” For hiring companies in a war for proven employees with talent today, that mindset is more important than ever.

Dec 31

Predicting How AI Will Improve Talent Management In 2020

Predicting How AI Will Improve Talent Management In 2020

47% of U.S.-based enterprises are using AI today for recruitment, leading all countries in the survey. U.S.-based enterprises’’ adoption of AI for recruitment soared in the last year, jumping from 22% in 2018 to 47% this year based on last years’ Harris Interactive Talent Intelligence and Management Report 2018.

  • 73% of U.S. CEOs and CHROs plan to use more AI in the next three years to improve talent management.
  • U.S.-based enterprises’’ adoption of AI for recruitment soared in the last year, jumping from 22% in 2018 to 47% this year.
  • U.S.-based enterprises lead in the use of AI to automate repetitive tasks (44%) and employee retention (42%).

These and many other fascinating insights are from a recent study completed by Harris Interactive in collaboration with Eightfold titled Talent Intelligence And Management Report 2019-2020, which provides insights into how CHROs are adopting AI today and in the future. You can download a copy here. A total of 1,350 CEOs and CHROs from the U.S., France, Germany, and the U.K. responded to the survey. One of the most noteworthy findings is how U.S-based CEOs and CHROs lead the world in prioritizing and taking action on improving their teams and their own AI skills. The more expertise they and their teams have with AI, the more effective they will be achieving operational improvements while taming the bias beast. The following graphic provides insights into how the four nations surveyed vary by their CEOs’ and CHROs’ perception of new technologies having had positive impacts, their plans for using AI in three years, and employee’s concerns about AI:

Predicting How AI Will Improve Talent Management In 2020

Predicting The Future Of AI In Talent Management

Four leading experts who are actively advising clients, implementing, and using AI to solve talent management challenges shared their predictions of how AI will improve talent management in 2020. The panel includes Kelly O. Kay, Partner, Heidrick & Struggles, Jared Lucas, Chief People Officer at MobileIron, Mandy Sebel, Senior Vice President, People at UiPath and David Windley CEO, IQTalent Partners. Mr. Kay leads the Software Practice for Heidrick & Struggles, a leading executive search and consulting firm commented: “As we all know, the talent crisis of 2019 is real and Eightfold’s application of AI on today is the most impactful approach I’ve seen and the outcomes they deliver eliminate unconscious bias, increases transparency and improves matching supply and demand of talent.” The following are their predictions of how AI will improve the following areas of talent management in 2020:

  • “Pertaining to talent attraction & acquisition-as adoption of intelligent automation and AI tools increases hiring managers and recruiters more easily uncover and surface overlooked talent pools,” said Mandy Sebel, Senior Vice President, People at UiPath.
  • “I predict that AI will become a requirement for companies in the screening of candidates due to the pervasive need to find higher-quality candidates at a faster pace,” said Jared Lucas, Chief People Officer at MobileIron.
  • “I believe the use of AI in the talent acquisition space will begin to hit critical mass in 2020. We are still in the early adopter phase, but the use of AI to match potential candidates to job profiles is catching on. Especially the use of AI for rediscovering candidates in ATS systems of larger corporations. Companies like Eightfold, Hiretual, and Atipica are leading the way,” said David Windley CEO, IQTalent Partners.
  • “Fear of job replacement will also subside, and more focus on job/role evolution as teams are experiencing firsthand how respective task elimination allows them to do more meaningful work,” commented Mandy Sebel, Senior Vice President, People at UiPath.
  • AI will provide the insights needed for CHROs to retain and grow their best talent, according to Jared Lucas, Chief People Officer at MobileIron. “I predict that AI will drive better internal mobility and internal candidate identification as companies are better able to mine their internal talent to fill critical roles,” he said.
  • Having gained credibility for executive and senior management recruiting, AI platforms’ use will continue to proliferate in 2020. “Private Equity is beginning to commercialize how AI can help select executives for roles based on competencies and experiences, which is exciting!” said Kelly O. Kay, Partner, Heidrick & Struggles.

Dec 28

Top 25 AI Startups Who Raised The Most Money In 2019

Top 25 AI Startups Who Raised The Most Money In 2019

  • $10.7B was invested in AI startups this year in their seed, early-stage venture, or late-stage venture funding rounds.
  •  Over half, or 57.9% of all AI startup financing rounds where either seed or pre-seed, 21.2% are Series A, 11.8% are Series B, and all others comprise 9% of all funding rounds.
  • The median AI startup funding round generated $4M with the average being $14.6M and the maximum, $319M, obtained by Vacasa.

These and many other fascinating insights are from an analysis of AI startups’ funding rounds in 2019 using Crunchbase Pro research. AI startups who have had seed, early-stage venture or late-stage venture funding since December 31, 2018, and are U.S.-based are included in the analysis which is provided here. Crunchbase Pro found 499 startups meeting the search criteria as of today.

Top 25 AI Startups Who Have Raised The Most Money In 2019

  1. Vacasa – Raised $319M from a Series C round on October 29th, Vacasa is creating and using AI-driven tools to improve their customers’ experiences renting vacation homes around the world. Their AI strategies include improving every aspect of the customer’s lifecycle from pricing through scheduling post-stay cleans. The company manages a growing portfolio of more than 14,000 vacation homes in the U.S, Europe, Central, and South America, and South Africa.
  2. Samsara – Raised $300M from a Series F round on September 10th. Samsara is an IoT platform combining hardware, software, and cloud to bring real-time visibility, analytics, and AI to operations. Samsara’s portfolio of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions combine hardware, software, and cloud to bring real-time visibility, analytics, and AI to operations. Their core strengths include vehicle telematics, driver safety, mobile workflow and compliance, asset tracking, and industrial process controls all in an integrated, open, real-time platform.
  3. TripActions – Raised $250M from a Series D round on June 27th. TripActions is a business travel platform that combines the latest AI-driven personalization with inventory and 24×7 365 live human support to serve employees, finance leaders, and travel managers alike all while empowering organizations to seize travel as a strategic lever for growth.
  4. ThoughtSpot – Raised $248M from a Series E round on August 22nd. ThoughtSpot’s AI-Driven analytics platform enables business analyst to capitalize on the expertise and shared knowledge of experienced data scientists. With ThoughtSpot, business analysts can analyze data or automatically get trusted insights pushed to you with a single click. ThoughtSpot connects with any on-premise, cloud, big data, or desktop data source. Business Intelligence and Analytics teams have used ThoughtSpot to cut reporting backlogs by more than 90% and make more than 3 million decisions and counting.
  5. CloudMinds – Raised $186M from a Series B round on February 23rd. Founded in 2015, CloudMinds’ unique Cloud Robot Service Platform consists of Human Augmented Robotics Intelligence with Extreme Reality (HARIX), a Secure virtual backbone network (VBN over 4G/5G), and Robot Control Unit (RCU). Designed by CloudMinds, XR-1 Robot is the first commercial humanoid service robot powered by our Smart Compliant Actuator (SCA) technology with precise and compliant grasping capability. Their AI Cloud Brain platform (HARIX) is designed to enable robotic intelligence through a secured network over 4G/5G. CloudMinds is focused on several core technologies, including Smart Vision, Smart Voice, Smart Motion and Human Augmentation. The following is an overview of their architecture:

Top 25 AI Startups Who Raised The Most Money In 2019

  1. Icertis – Raised $115M from a Series E round on July 17th. Icertis is an enterprise contract management platform in the cloud that solves contract management problems using AI. Using advanced algorithms, Icertis helps its customers accelerate business cycles by increasing contract velocity, protecting against risk by ensuring regulatory and policy compliance and optimizing the commercial relationships by maximizing revenue and reducing costs. 3M, Airbus, Cognizant, Daimler, Microsoft, and Roche who rely on Icertis to manage 5.7 million contracts in 40+ languages across 90+ countries, are all customers. The following is an overview of the Icertis Contract Management Platform:

Top 25 AI Startups Who Raised The Most Money In 2019

  1. SparkCognition – Raised $100M from a Series C round on October 8th. SparkCognition builds artificial intelligence systems focused on the needs of its customers in the aviation, cybersecurity, defense, Financial Services, manufacturing, maritime, and Utilities industries. SparkCognition offers four main products: DarwinTM, DeepArmor, SparkPredict, and DeepNLPTM. One of their most noteworthy products is DeepArmor, an AI-powered endpoint security solution that has trained on millions of malicious and benign files and provides industry-leading protection against a broad spectrum of threats. With millions of new malware variants showing up each month, DeepArmor uses AI to assess risk levels and thwart malware and break attempts. DeepArmor’s dashboard is shown below:

Top 25 AI Startups Who Raised The Most Money In 2019

  1. Vectra AI – Raised $100M from a Series E round on June 10th. Vectra specializes in network detection and response – from cloud and data center workloads to user and IoT devices. Its Cognito platform accelerates threat detection and investigation using artificial intelligence to collect, store, and enrich network metadata with the right context to detect, hunt and investigate known and unknown threats in real-time.
  2. Globality – Raised $100M from a Series D round on January 22nd. The January round enabled Globality to accelerate its growth through investment in its AI technology, increasing business capacity by hiring additional members of its engineering, product, and client teams, and expanding its Marketing and Sales programs. Through its AI-powered Platform, Globality is automating the procurement of B2B services and improving the RFP process. Globality efficiently matches companies with service providers that meet their specific needs, cutting the sourcing process from months to hours, and delivering savings of 20% or more for companies.
  3. Black Sesame Technologies – Raised $100M from a Series B round on April 12th.  Black Sesame Technologies is an AI digital imaging technology firm provides solutions for image processing and computing images, as well as embedded sensing platforms. The firm specializes in algorithms for smartphones, autonomous driving, and other consumer electronics. Its R & D teams are actively working on core algorithm development, ASIC design, software system, and ADAS engineering applications.
  4. Scale – Raised $100M from a Series C round on August 5th. Scale accelerates the development of AI applications by helping computer vision teams generate high-quality ground truth data. Our advanced LiDAR, video, and image annotation APIs allow self-driving, drone, and robotics teams at companies like Waymo, OpenAI, Lyft, Zoox, Pinterest, and Airbnb focus on building differentiated models vs. labeling data. Scale’s greatest strength is its API for training data, providing access to human-powered data for a multitude of use cases.
  5. AutoX – Raised $100M from a Series A round on September 16th. AutoX is a self-driving car startup that uses AI to fine-tune Location-Based Services with camera-first autonomous driving technology. In July of this year, AutoX announced a partnership with NEVS, the Swedish holding company, and electric vehicle manufacturer that bought Saab’s assets out of bankruptcy, to deploy a robotaxi pilot service in Europe by the end of 2020.
  6. DISCO – Raised $83M from a Series E round on January 24th. DISCO is a legal technology company that applies artificial intelligence and cloud computing to legal problems to help lawyers and legal teams improve legal outcomes for clients. Corporate legal departments, law firms, and government agencies around the world use DISCO as an ediscovery solution for compliance, disputes, and investigations. The company is looking to reinvent legal technology to automate and simplify complex and error-prone tasks that distract from practicing law.
  7. QOMPLX – Raised $78.6M from a Series A round on July 23rd. QOMPLX makes it faster and easier for organizations to integrate disparate internal and external data sources across the enterprise via a unified analytics infrastructure that supports better decision-making using AI at scale. This enterprise data-fabric is called QOMPLX OS: an enterprise operating system that powers QOMPLX’s decision platforms in cybersecurity, insurance, and quantitative finance. The following is an example of how the QOMPLX OS automates data management while providing greater contextual intelligence to data:

Top 25 AI Startups Who Raised The Most Money In 2019

  1. Galileo Financial Technologies – Raised $77M from a Series A round on October 17th. Galileo’s APIs are used widely throughout the neobank, payments, gig economy, investing and SaaS market segments. As of September 2019, Galileo was managing over $26B in annual payments volume, a 130% increase over September 2018. Galileo’s latest round, a $77M investment led by venture capital firm Accel with participation from Qualtrics Co-Founder & CEO Ryan Smith. The company, which is already profitable and growing rapidly, plans to use the funds to accelerate growth, including expansion into Latin America, the UK, and Europe, and for continued product expansion.
  2. BlackThorn Therapeutics – Raised 76M from a Series B round on June 13th. BlackThorn Therapeutics, Inc., is a clinical-stage neurobehavioral health company pioneering the next generation of AI technologies to advance its pipeline of targeted therapeutics for treating brain disorders. The company has engineered PathFinder, a cloud-based computational psychiatry and data platform, to enable the collection, integration, and analysis of multimodal data at great speed and scale. BlackThorn applies its data-driven approaches to create an understanding of the core underlying pathophysiology of neurobehavioral disorders and uses these insights to generate objective neuromarkers, which support drug target identification, patient stratification, and objective clinical trial endpoints.
  3. Highspot – Raised $75M from a Series D round on December 3rd. Highspot is a sales enablement platform that relies on AI technologies to elevate and add value to companies’ conversations with their customers and drive strategic growth. The platform combines intelligent content management, training, contextual guidance, customer engagement, and actionable analytics. Revenue teams use Highspot to deliver a unified buying experience that increases revenue, customer satisfaction and retention. Highspot has attained a 90% average monthly recurring usage rate and has global support across 125 countries. It’s available on the Salesforce AppExchange, Microsoft Store, Google Play and Apple AppStore.
  4. Moveworks – Raised $75M from a Series B round on November 11th. Moveworks is a cloud-based AI platform designed for large enterprises’ IT support and service desk challenges. Instead of just tracking issues, Moveworks uses advanced AI to solve IT support and service problems automatically, often with no human intervention. Customers include AutoDesk, Broadcom, Nutanix and many other Fortune 500 companies. Moveworks is backed by Bain Capital Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners and is headquartered in Mountain View, California.
  5. Reonomy – Raised $60M from a Series D round on November 7th. Reonomy is an AI-powered data platform for the commercial real estate industry. The goal of the company’s platform is to leverage big data, partnerships, and machine learning to connect the fragmented world of commercial real estate. Reonomy products enable individuals, teams, and companies to unlock new insights from property intelligence. By constantly aggregating and organizing up-to-the-minute marketplace data, Reonomy offer investors and brokers the opportunity to research nuanced property characteristics that indicate the likelihood of a future sale. Below is an example of an analysis of the San Francisco neighborhood using AI-based filtering technology:

Top 25 AI Startups Who Raised The Most Money In 2019

  1. Clari – Raised $60M from a Series D round on October 10th. Clari is a connected revenue operations platform that uses automation and AI to unlock all the activity data captured in key business systems such as marketing automation, CRM, email, calendar, phone, content management, and conversations. It automatically aligns that data to accounts and opportunities to deliver visibility, forecasting, and apply predictive insights, which results in more insight, less guesswork, and more predictable revenue. Clari helps companies by changing their revenue operations to be more connected, efficient, and predictable. Clari’s platform is used by hundreds of sales, marketing, and customer success teams at B2B companies such as Qualtrics, Lenovo, Adobe, Dropbox, and Okta to control pipeline, audit deals and accounts, forecast the business, and reduce churn. The following is an example of a Clari dashboard:

Top 25 AI Startups Who Raised The Most Money In 2019

  1. People.ai – Raised $60M from a Series C round on May 21st. People.ai is an artificial intelligence (AI) platform for enterprise revenue. People.ai helps sales, marketing, and customer success teams uncover every revenue opportunity from every customer by capturing all customer contacts, activity, and engagement to drive actionable insights across all revenue teams. People.ai enables sales leaders to be more effective at managing their teams and growing revenue by giving them a complete picture of sales activities and leveraging AI to deliver sales performance analytics, personalized coaching, one-on-one feedback, and pipeline reviews. The People.ai platform identifies and targets the buying group, and gives marketers a clear visualization of whom sales have spoken with, and which campaign has been successful in each opportunity. Using this information, marketers are able to build personas and deal models in order to better target their marketing efforts and get better campaign ROI. Customer success and services teams use People.ai to ensure they are engaging with the right people when the customer is handed off to them, but more importantly, these post-sales teams are constantly looking to align their effort and activities with the right opportunities and customers, tracking the true cost to support each customer. The following graphic illustrates the People.ai platform automatically capture all contact and customer activity data, dynamically update your CRM, and provide actionable intelligence to realize the full potential of customer-facing teams. The following graphic illustrates the People.ai platform:

Top 25 AI Startups Who Raised The Most Money In 2019

 

  1. Invoca – Raised $56M from a Series C round on October 17th. Invoca is an AI-powered call tracking and analytics platform that helps marketers drive inbound calls and turn them into sales. The platform delivers real-time call analytics to help marketers take informed actions based on data generated before and during a phone conversation. It also allows marketers to understand, in real-time, the factors affecting consumers’ intent to buy, like competitive promotional campaigns. Marketers can put the data to work directly in the platform by automating customer experience workflows during, before, and after each call. Invoca’s platform integrates with Google Marketing Platform, Facebook, Adobe Experience Cloud, and Salesforce Sales and Marketing Clouds. Invoca’s investors include Accel Partners, H.I.G. Growth Partners, Upfront Ventures, Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners, Salesforce Ventures, and Rincon Venture Partners. The following is an example of an Invoca dashboard used for measuring Google AdWords effectiveness:

Top 25 AI Startups Who Raised The Most Money In 2019

  1. Clinc – Raised $52M from a Series B round on May 20th.  Clinc is a conversational AI platform that enables enterprises to build “human-in-the-room” level, next-gen, virtual assistants. In contrast to a speech-to-text word matching algorithm, Clinc analyzes dozens of factors from the user’s input including wording, sentiment, intent, tone of voice, time of day, location, and relationships, and uses those factors to deliver an answer that represents a composite of knowledge extracted from its trained brain. Clinc’s underlying technology is based on state-of-the-art machine learning and deep neural networks (DNN)-as-a-service developed by computer science professors at the University of Michigan. Clinc is a standalone “trained brain” that has been given an initial deep knowledge of the financial and banking industry. Its machine learning capabilities enable it to expand its knowledge with every query and to then draw from that knowledge for each subsequent customer query.
  2. Biz2Credit – Raised $52M from a Series D round on June 4th. Biz2Credit is a hub connecting small business owners with lenders and service providers, and seek solutions based on their online profiles. Biz2X uses a streamlined user interface, AI-driven analytics, and a customizable white label environment to help banks enhance their core services such as offering focused customer service, growing their portfolio, and increasing the use of their products. With enhanced loan management, servicing, risk analytics and a configurable customer journey, Biz2X is helping banks like these run their lending operations at scale.
  3. Uniphore – Raised $51M from a Series C round on August 13th. Uniphore is a global Conversational AI technology company that offers a customer service platform that is powered by AI and automation technologies. The Company’s vision is to bridge the gap between people and machines through voice. Uniphore enables businesses globally to deliver transformational customer service by providing a platform of Conversational Analytics, Conversational Assistant, and Conversational Security that changes the way enterprises engage their consumers, build loyalty and realize efficiencies.

 

Dec 1

7 Ways AI Reduces Mobile Fraud Just In Time For The Holidays

7 Ways AI Reduces Mobile Fraud Just In Time For The Holidays

  • There has been a 680% increase in global fraud transactions from mobile apps from October 2015 to December 2018, according to RSA.
  •  70% of fraudulent transactions originated in the mobile channel in 2018.
  • RSA’s Anti-Fraud Command Center saw phishing attacks increase 178% after leading banks in Spain launched instant transfer services.
  • Rogue mobile apps are proliferating with, 20% of all reported cyberattacks originating from mobile apps in 2018 alone.

On average, there are 82 new rogue applications submitted per day to any given AppExchange or application platform, all designed to defraud consumers. Mobile and digital commerce are cybercriminals’ favorite attack surfaces because they are succeeding with a broad base of strategies for defrauding people and businesses.

Phishing, malware, smishing, or the use of SMS texts rather than email to launch phishing attempts are succeeding in gaining access to victims’ account credentials, credit card numbers, and personal information to launch identity theft breaches. The RSA is seeing an arms race between cybercriminals and mobile OS providers with criminals improving their malware to stay at parity or leapfrog new versions and security patches of mobile operating systems.

Improving Mobile Fraud Prevention With AI And Machine Learning

Creating a series of rogue applications and successfully uploading them into an AppExchange or application store gives cybercriminals immediate access to global markets. Hacking mobile apps and devices is one of the fastest-growing cybercriminal markets, one with 6.8B mobile users worldwide this year, projected to increase to 7.3B in 2023, according to The Radicati Group. The total number of mobile devices, including both phones and tablets, will be over 13B by the end of 2019, according to the research firm. And a small percentage of mobile fraud transactions get reported, with mobile fraud losses reported totaling just over $40M across 14,392 breaches according to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Mobile fraud is an epidemic that needs to be fought with state-of-the-art approaches based on AI and machine learning’s innate strengths.

Traditional approaches to thwarting digital fraud rely on rules engines that thrive on detecting and taking action based on established, known patterns, and are often hard-coded into a merchant’s system. Fraud analyst teams further customize rules engines to reflect the unique requirements of the merchants’ selling strategies across each channel. Fine-tuning rules engines makes them effective at recognizing and taking action on known threat patterns. The challenge for every merchant relying on a fraud rules engine is that they often don’t catch the latest patterns in cybercriminal activity. Where rules-based approaches to digital fraud don’t scale, AI, and machine learning do.

Exploring The 7 Ways AI Is Reducing Mobile Fraud

Where rules engines are best suited for spotting existing trends in fraud activity, machine learning excels at classifying observations (called supervised machine learning) and finding anomalies in data by finding entirely new patterns and associations (called unsupervised machine learning). Combining supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms are proving to be very effective at reducing mobile fraud. The following are the seven ways AI and machine learning are reducing mobile fraud today:

  1. AI and machine learning reduce false positives by interpreting the nuances of specific behaviors and accurately predicting if a transaction is fraudulent or not. Merchants are relying on AI and machine learning to reduce false positives, saving their customers from having to re-authenticate who they are and their payment method. A false positive at that first interaction with a customer is going to reduce the amount of money that they spend with a merchant, so it’s very important to interpret each transaction accurately.
  2. Identifying and thwarting merchant fraud based on anomalous activity from a compromised mobile device. Cybercriminals are relying on SIM swapping to gain control of mobile devices and commit fraud, as the recent hack of Twitter’s founder Jack Dorsey illustrates. Hackers were able to transfer his telephone number using SIM swapping and by talking Dorsey’s mobile service provider to bypass the account passcode. Fortunately, only his Twitter account was hacked. Any app or account accessible on his phone could have been breached, leading to fraudulent bank transfers or purchases. The attack could have been thwarted if Jack Dorsey’s mobile service provider was using AI-based risk scoring to detect and act on anomalous activity.
  3. AI and machine learning-based techniques scale across a wider breadth of merchants than any rules-based approach to mobile fraud prevention can. Machine learning-based models scale and learn across different industries in real-time, accumulating valuable data that improves payment fraud prediction accuracy. Kount’s Universal Data Network is noteworthy, as it includes billions of transactions over 12 years, 6,500 customers, 180+ countries and territories, and multiple payment networks. That rich data feeds Kount’s machine learning models to detect anomalies more accurately and reduce false positives and chargebacks.
  4. Combining supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms translates into a formidable speed advantage, with fraudulent transactions identified on average in 250 milliseconds. Merchants’ digital business models’ scale and speed are increasing, and with the holidays coming up, there’s a high probability many will set mobile commerce sales records. The merchants who will gain the most sales are focusing on how security and customer experience can complement each other. Being able to approve or reject a transaction within a second or less is the cornerstone of an excellent customer buying experience.
  5. Knowing when to use two-factor authentication via SMS or Voice PIN to reduce false negatives or not, preserving customer relationships in the process. Rules engines will often take a brute-force approach to authentication if any of the factors they’re tracking show a given transaction is potentially fraudulent. Requesting customers authenticate themselves after they’re logged into a merchant’s site when they attempt to buy an item is a sure way to lose a customer for life. By being able to spot anomalies quickly, fewer customers are forced to re-authenticate themselves, and customer relationships are preserved. And when transactions are indeed fraudulent, losses have been averted in less than a second.
  6. Provide a real-time transaction risk score that combines the strengths of supervised and unsupervised machine learning into a single fraud prevention payment score. Merchants need a real-time transaction risk score that applies to every channel they sell, though. Fraud rules engines had to be tailored to each specific selling channel with specific rules for each type of transaction. That’s no longer the case due to machine learnings’ ability to scale across all channels and provide a transaction risk score in milliseconds. Leaders in this area include Kount’s Omniscore, the actionable transaction safety rating that is a result of their AI, which combines patented, proprietary supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms and technologies.
  7. Combining insights from supervised and unsupervised machine learning with contextual intelligence of transactions frees up fraud analysts to do more investigations and fewer transaction reviews. AI and machine learning-based fraud prevention systems’ first contribution is often reducing the time fraud analysts take for manual reviews. Digitally-based businesses I’ve talked with say having supervised machine learning categorize and then predict fraudulent attempts is invaluable from a time-saving standpoint alone. Merchants are finding AI, and machine learning-based approaches enable to score to approve more orders automatically, reject more orders automatically, and focus on those gray area orders, freeing up fraud analysts to do more strategic, rewarding work. They’re able to find more sophisticated, nuanced abuse attacks like refer a friend abuse or a promotion abuse or seller collusion in a marketplace. Letting the model do the work of true payment fraud prevention frees up those fraud analysts to do other worth that add value.

Conclusion

With the holiday season rapidly approaching, it’s time for merchants to look at how they can protect mobile transactions at scale across all selling channels. AI and machine learning are proving themselves as viable replacements to traditional rules engines that rely on predictable, known fraud patterns. With 70% of fraudulent transactions originating in the mobile channel in 2018 and the influx of orders coming in the next three months, now would be a good time for merchants to increase their ability to thwart mobile fraud while reducing false positives that alienate customers.

Sources:

RSA 2019 Current State of Cybercrime Report (11 pp., PDF, opt-in)

The Radicati Group, Mobile Statistics Report, 2019 – 2023 (3 pp., PDF, no opt-in)

U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Sentinel Network, Data Book 2018 (90 pp., PDF, no opt-in)

 

 

Jul 10

What’s Next For You? How AI Is Transforming Talent Management

Bottom Line: Taking on the talent crisis with greater intelligence and insight, delivering a consistently excellent candidate experience, and making diversity and inclusion a part of their DNA differentiates growing businesses who are attracting and retaining employees. The book What’s Next For You? by Ashutosh Garg, CEO and Co-Founder and Kamal Ahluwalia, President of eightfold.ai provide valuable insights and a data-driven roadmap of how AI is helping to solve the talent crisis for any business.

The Talent Crisis Is Real

  • 78% of CEOs and Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs) say talent programs are important, with 56% say their current programs are ineffective.
  • 83% of employees want a new job yet only 53% want to leave for a new company.
  • 57% of employees say diversity and inclusion initiatives aren’t working, and 40% say their companies lack qualified diverse talent.
  • Nearly 50% of an organizations’ top talent will leave their jobs in the first two years of being hired.
  • 28% of open positions today won’t be filled in the next 12 months.

The above findings are just a sample of the depth of data-driven content and roadmap the book What’s Next For You? delivers. Co-authors Ashutosh Garg’s and Kamal Ahluwalia’s expertise in applying AI and machine learning to talent management problems with a strong data-first mindset is evident throughout the book. What makes the book noteworthy is how the authors write from the heart first with empathy for applicants and hiring managers, supporting key points with data. The empathetic, data-driven tone of the book makes the talent crisis relatable while also illustrating how AI can help any business make better talent management decisions.

“Businesses are having to adapt to technology changes and changes in customer expectations roughly every 10 years – a timeframe that is continuing to shrink. As a result, business leaders need to really focus on rethinking their business strategy and the associated talent strategy, so they have the organizational capability to transform and capitalize on the inevitable technology shifts,” writes John Thompson, Venture Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Chairman of the Board at Microsoft in the forward.

The book cites talent management researchers and experts who say “our current knowledge base has a half-life of about two years, and the speed of technology is outperforming us as humans because of what it can do quickly and effectively“ (p.64). John Thompson’s observations in the forward that the time available for adapting to change is shrinking is a unifying thread that ties this book together. One of the most convincing is the fact that using today’s Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and hiring processes prone to biases, there’s a 30% chance a new hire will not make it through their first year. If the new hire is a cloud computing professional, this equates to a median salary of $146,350 and taking best-case 46 days to find their replacement. The cost and time loss of losing just one recruited cloud computing professional can derail a project for months. It will cost at least $219,000 or more to replace just that one engineer. Any manager who has lost a new hire within a year can relate to how real the talent crisis is and how urgent it is to solve it.

The Half-Life Of Skills Is Shrinking Fast

The most compelling chapter of the book illustrates how today’s talent crisis can be solved by taking an AI-enabled approach to every aspect of talent management. Chapter 4, The Half-Life Of Skills Is Shrinking Fast, delves into how AI can find candidates who can unlearn old concepts, and quickly master new ones. The book calls out this attribute of any potential new hire as being essential for them to adapt.  Using higher quality data than is available in traditional ATS systems, the authors illustrate how AI-based systems can be used for evaluating both the potential and experiences of applicants to match them with positions they will excel in. The authors make a convincing argument that AI can increase the probability of new candidate success. They cite a well-known Leadership IQ statistic of 46% of all new employee hires failing to adapt within 18 months, and the Harvard Business Review study finding between 40% to 60% of new upper management hires fail within 18 months. The authors contend that even Leonardo Da Vinci, one of the primary architects of the Renaissance, would have trouble finding work using a traditional resume entered into an ATS system today because his exceptional capabilities and potential would have never been discovered. When our existing process of recruiting is based on practices over 500 years old, as this copy of Leonardo Da Vinci’s resume illustrates, it’s time to put AI to work matching peoples’ potential with unique position requirements.

When Employees Achieve Their Potential, Companies Do Too   

Attracting the highest potential employees possible and retaining them is the cornerstone of any digital business’ growth strategy today and in the future. The book addresses the roadblocks companies face in attaining that goal, with bias being one of the strongest. “For example, McKinsey & Co., a top consulting agency, studied over 1,000 companies across 12 countries and found that firms in the top quartile of gender diversity were a fifth more likely to have above-average profits than those in the bottom quartile,” (p. 105). Further, “diverse executive boards generate better financial returns, and gender-diverse teams are more creative, more productive and more confident.” (p. 105).

In conclusion, consider this book a roadmap of how hiring and talent management can change for the better based on AI. The authors successfully illustrate how combining talent, personalization at scale, and machine learning can help employees achieve their potential, enabling companies to achieve theirs in the process.