Jersey City, New Jersey
Fractal Analytics (www.fractal.ai), a provider of analytics & AI, today announced that Doug Hillary, former Senior Vice President, Performance Analytics Group at Dell Technologies, has joined them as a strategic advisor.

“We are delighted to have Doug in our team. His experience in leading a transformative journey with data and analytics combined with Fractal’s AI and analytics capabilities will help our clients power every human decision in the enterprise” said, Pranay Agrawal, Co-founder and CEO, Fractal Analytics.

Doug held various leadership roles at Dell for more than 19 years. In his most recent role, he was responsible for providing global data, reporting, and analytics services to support Dell’s sales, marketing, finance, services, e-commerce, and operations business units. He also partnered with IT to launch Dell’s first enterprise-wide big data business intelligence solution to create a platform that significantly improved enterprise level descriptive analytics while enabling and accelerating predictive analytics at global scale.

“I’m excited to leverage my experience and lessons learned to assist Fractal’s excellent team as they empower Fortune 500 firms to leverage AI and analytics solutions to achieve competitive advantage,” said Doug Hillary.

In his prior role as the Vice President of Dell Services, his responsibilities included ownership for a $1.5B P&L, solution design and delivery, and global leadership of over 6,000 professionals. Prior to that, he held several senior executive roles in Dell Services where he led growth and scaling of Dell’s enterprise and global service capabilities to serve customers in all segments and regions. Throughout his tenure, Doug was also a champion and leader for diversity, STEM education for girls, and an advocate for women in technology leadership.

About Fractal Analytics

Founded in 2000, Fractal Analytics is a strategic analytics partner to the most admired Fortune 500 companies globally and helps them power every human decision in the enterprise by bringing analytics & AI to the decision-making process.

Fractal Analytics has presence across 12 global locations including the United States, UK and India and has been recently featured as a leader on Forrester Wave™: Customer Analytics Service Providers, 2017. Fractal has also been recognized as “Hot Artificial Intelligence (AI)” company by Forbes and a “Cool Vendor” and a “Vendor to watch” by Gartner.

JERSEY CITY, New Jersey, PRNewswire via COMTEX
Fractal Analytics (https://fractal.ai), a pure play provider of analytics & AI, today announced that it has been named as a leader among Customer Analytics Service Providers (CASPs) in Forrester Research’s recent report, ‘The Forrester Wave™: Customer Analytics Service Providers, Q3 2017.’

Based on Forrester’s comprehensive set of 33 evaluation criteria, Fractal Analytics received the highest score among all the evaluated vendors in the strategy category, as well as the second highest score in current offering and market presence categories. Download the report.

In the report, Forrester mentions, “Fractal Analytics raises the bar by turning its analytics inward.” It further notes that, “Fractal Analytics feverishly tracks Net Promoter Scores (NPS) for its client engagements and bakes it into individual goals. The CEO personally congratulates team members who work on high-NPS projects; this is refreshingly unique, as many other CASPs do not internalize their own analytical best practices. NPS (and revenues) for customer analytics continue to rise at Fractal due to:

  • its ability to attract high-quality data scientists, who further develop their skills through Fractal’s Academy of Analytics; and
  • its continued productization efforts of offerings like Customer Genomics, its proprietary customer data model, and Cuddle, its AI-enhanced business intelligence (BI) solution.”

“We are honored to be recognized as a leader in ‘The Forrester Wave™ report,” said Pranay Agrawal, Co-founder and CEO, Fractal Analytics. “It is a testament to the value we have been creating for our clients and to the passion our people have in bringing innovative solutions to the marketplace. We will continue to aim to transform our clients’ businesses with AI and analytics and power every human decision in the enterprise.”

Forrester report states, “Customer analytics service providers help their clients transform customer data into analytical insight to optimize customer decisions and design customer-focused programs and initiatives that drive acquisition, retention, cross-sell/upsell, and targeted marketing campaigns.” Download report.

About Fractal Analytics

Founded in 2000, Fractal Analytics is a strategic analytics partner to the most admired Fortune 500 companies globally and helps them power every human decision in the enterprise by bringing analytics & AI to the decision-making process.

Fractal Analytics has presence across 12 global locations including the United States, UK and India and has been recently featured as a “Hot Artificial Intelligence (AI)” company by Forbes.

 

JERSEY CITY, New Jersey, PRNewswire via COMTEX
Fractal Analytics (https://fractal.ai), a provider of analytics & AI, and Final Mile Consulting, an innovative behavior architecture firm, today announced a partnership to bring data sciences and behavioral sciences together to improve decision making.

Final Mile uses innovative behavioral research methods like games and simulations, to truly understand why people do what they do. By understanding the rational and emotional factors that drive human behavior, Final Mile develops interventions to drive sustainable behavior change across contexts for clients including corporations, governments and social impact organizations globally.

“The nature of human-machine relationship is evolving with rapid advances in AI. A better way of understanding, predicting and shaping human behavior requires the combination of data science and behavioral sciences,” said Srikanth Velamakanni, Group Chief Executive & Executive Vice-Chairman, Fractal Analytics. “Final Mile’s track record in influencing human behavior through behavioral science and design combined with Fractal’s data science & AI capabilities will help our clients drive lasting behavior change internally and externally.”

“Data from organizational systems and other structured and unstructured sources can dramatically improve our understanding of human behavior, inform better hypotheses and complement our work with our clients in achieving behavior change,” said Biju Dominic, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Final Mile Consulting. “We are excited to partner with Fractal to bring behavioral and data sciences together and help our clients create and test winning strategies for shaping their stakeholder behavior.”

About Fractal Analytics

Founded in 2000, Fractal Analytics is a strategic analytics partner to the most admired Fortune 500 companies globally and helps them power every human decision in the enterprise by bringing analytics & AI to the decision-making process.

Fractal Analytics has presence across 12 global locations including the United States, UK and India and has been recently featured as a ‘Hot Artificial Intelligence (AI)’ company by Forbes. Fractal has also been recognized as a ‘Cool Vendor’ and a ‘Vendor to watch’ by Gartner.

About Final Mile Consulting

Founded in 2008, Final Mile Consulting pioneers a practice of Behavior Architecture – the application of behavioral sciences to understand decision making and influence consumer and social behavior. It has worked on behavioral challenges in financial services, healthcare, consumer goods, ecommerce, safety and sanitation. It has offices in United States and India and engagements across the globe.

Jersey City, New JerseyFractal Analytics (www.fractal.ai), a provider of analytics & AI, announced today that it has been ranked among the top 100 best companies to work for 2017 in India by The Economic Times in partnership with the Great Place to Work® Institute.

“We recognized many years ago that to be truly client centric, we need to be people centric,” said Pranay Agrawal, Co-founder & CEO of Fractal Analytics. “We take great care of our people and we invest in their development as professionals and individuals so that our people are fully focused and equipped to help clients transform their business through analytics & AI”.

“I have spent 9 years at Fractal and plan to spend the rest of my career here. I can be myself here, do my best work and know that Fractal really cares”, said Anindya Sengupta, Principal data scientist and part of Fractal’s AI & Machine learning team.

“The task of building a great place to work is a constantly evolving one, especially as needs of our extremely talented workforce evolve,” said Raj Aradhyula, Chief People Officer, Fractal Analytics. “We have built a culture of openness, extending extreme trust and freedom in the organization and codified it in our People Principles to stay the course. We are delighted to be recognized as a Great Place to Work.”

About Fractal Analytics

Founded in 2000, Fractal Analytics is a strategic analytics partner to the most admired Fortune 500 companies globally and helps them power every human decision in the enterprise by bringing analytics & AI to the decision-making process.

Fractal Analytics has presence across 12 global locations including the United States, UK and India and has been recently featured as a “Hot Artificial Intelligence (AI)” company by Forbes. Fractal has also been recognized as a “Cool Vendor” and a “Vendor to watch” by Gartner.

 

Making the right decisions at the right time has always been an imperative for business success. Business leaders rely too much on ‘gut-feel’ and experience to make these decisions which may not lead to the right outcomes, says Srikanth Velamakanni, Co-founder, Group Chief Executive & Executive Vice-Chairman, Fractal Analytics.

He talks about artificial intelligence and algorithms coming into decision support systems and how these can reduce the dependence on human judgement, and yet be highly accurate.

Srikanth and the team at Fractal Analytics help companies leverage analytics, AI & deep learning to transform the way they make strategic, tactical and operational decisions. He is responsible for overall growth of the Fractal businesses, which include the core business of providing analytics services to Fortune 500 companies, along with Fractal’s AI based product businesses – Customer Genomics & Trial Run, Cuddle.ai and Qure.ai.

In 2016, Fractal Analytics was designated as one of the great places to work by the Great Place to Work Institute. Though most of its employees are based in India, it has offices in the US, UK, Canada, Singapore, Australia, Ukraine and other countries.

Excerpts from the hour-long interview:

BW: How are businesses making decisions today? To what extent is it being driven by decision support systems and analytics?

Srikanth Velamakanni: Individuals and enterprises make hundreds and thousands of decisions every day. Most of these are small decisions. The decisions get better with experience and age. But if you bring in data, you can actually accelerate those decisions. Data can improve the quality of the decisions.

Our research says that roughly 60 per cent of decisions are today driven by gut, intuition and experience. Another 30 – 35 per cent are driven by data and analytics, but human beings make those decisions (guided by data). Just 5 per cent of decisions are algorithmic. In the next 10 years the gut-driven, experiential decisions to drop to a small number, like 10 per cent. We expect 10 percent of the decisions to be purely intuition driven and the rest to be data driven or purely algorithmic driven. We are shaping that world.

AI will actually do all those things that looked impossible from an automation standpoint.

BW: How do you see the level of automation changing? How will AI change this?

Srikanth Velamakanni: The face of AI today is automation. Traditional automation has been simple and rule-based. It mimics human actions. In the last three years, a totally different type of automation began to happen. There has been intelligence and AI coming into automation to make the right decisions at the right time. It’s about fluid intelligence. With AI, things can be done much better than humans.

Our mission is to power every human decision in the enterprise. We believe that all human decisions in the enterprise can be better if we bring in data, AI and software into the decision. That’s our mission.

BW: What’s the differentiator for Fractal Analytics? What is the value proposition that you offer?

Srikanth Velamakanni: We need to improve the quality, speed and execution of decisions. By quality we mean accuracy of decisions. To do that, we have to bring in three key things: solid data, better techniques to analyse the data, and thirdly, we need to bring in behavioural sciences.

Data is extraordinarily powerful, so you need to have more data, better data and all kinds of data to make a difference. Take the case of Google Maps vs Apple Maps or Google vs Bing. In both cases, Google has a significant advantage because it has better data and more data.

We need better and more sophisticated techniques (for analysis) than the current statistical techniques. We need AI which is real-time and learning oriented. We need techniques like deep learning and machine learning.

Thirdly, we need to make human beings act differently. If people continue to do things the old way then organisations won’t improve. For that we need to bring in behavioural sciences – the understanding of human behaviour.

Our differentiator is how we bring in data, AI and behavioural sciences to improve the quality, speed and execution of decisions.

BW: How do you classify the different types of decisions that people make?

Srikanth Velamakanni: We divide the realm of all decisions that people make into strategic, tactical and operational.

Strategic decisions are the one-off decisions. You don’t do these every day. For instance, acquiring a company. We may do our due diligence but we have limited data or experience to know whether it is the right decision. You can improve the quality of strategic decisions if you have a solid process. But you will never know the outcomes of strategic decisions. You need to bring in more data and better data for these decisions – and support the decision to some extent.

Tactical decisions are made daily. These could be small or big decisions. Doing a performance appraisals or deciding the place for your next vacation, are tactical decisions.

Operational decisions are high velocity decisions. For instance, deciding how much raw material to order or how much to manufacture today. You make tactical decisions when you drive. You are making a number of decisions, although each has a low impact.

Tactical decisions are slower than Operational decisions.

BW: How do your solutions help improve the quality of these decisions?

Srikanth Velamakanni: We try to bring in solid data and push the right insights to customers or enterprise users. For instance, we have a solution called Cuddle. It is a disruptive BI offering. The traditional BI offerings are old school. AI should already know who you are (and your business). It should just give organisations what they already need to know. What if you have a personal analyst that tells you exactly what you need to know? This is what Cuddle does – it supports Tactical decisions. It runs as an app on your phone too. You get minute-by-minute updates on the performance of your business – or insights to any trends you track.

For Operational decisions, we have a number of solutions. For instance, one AI solution can diagnose and understand medical images. It produces a report after analysing these images. It takes years to train a radiologist to do this. But you can have an algorithm do the same thing – it can also keep learning. For instance, it will look at a chest x-ray and give a comprehensive report of all ailments in the chest. Imagine what you can achieve with a million such algorithms!

Our Trial Run product helps organisations make better decisions. It helps companies to experiment at a smaller scale and learn from their decisions.

Customer Genomics is a product that helps organisations personalise at scale. You can personalise the interactions with customers. It understands the customer in great detail and does customer profiling.

Jersey City, New Jersey

Fractal Analytics (www.fractal.ai), a pure play provider of analytics & AI, today announced that Fran Slavich has joined Fractal’s executive team as the Chief Sales Officer. Fran will be based in New Jersey and will look to initiate and strengthen client relationships and drive accelerated growth.

Fran brings more than 20 years of sales and consulting experience across industries with companies such as SAS Institute and Genpact.

“Clients are increasingly looking to AI & analytics to transform their business – accelerate growth, enhance productivity and dramatically increase the pace of innovation,” said Pranay Agrawal, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Fractal Analytics. “Fran’s leadership will help us in forging client relationships and play an important role in this transformation our clients are seeking.”

“I am incredibly excited to join Fractal’s leadership team and nurture client relationships that produce market leading growth,” said Fran. “Fractal has the right culture, leading-edge analytics know-how, and industry expertise to lead clients on the transformation journey of improving their strategic, tactical and operational decision-making across the organization.”

About Fractal Analytics

Founded in 2000, Fractal Analytics is a strategic analytics partner to the most admired Fortune 500 companies globally and helps them power every human decision in the enterprise by bringing analytics & AI to the decision-making process.

Fractal Analytics has presence across 12 global locations including the United States, UK and India and has been recently featured as a “Hot Artificial Intelligence (AI)” company by Forbes. Fractal has also been recognized as a “Cool Vendor” and a “Vendor to watch” by Gartner.

 

The acquisition will strengthen Fractal’s strategy consulting capabilities

Jersey City, New Jersey
Fractal Analytics (www.fractal.ai), a pure play provider of analytics & AI, today announced that it has completed the acquisition of 4i Inc. to expand its growth strategy consulting capabilities.

4i, a Chicago based firm, empowers Fortune 500 companies to identify and capitalize on growth opportunities through its proprietary “foresight analytics” approach and business consulting expertise.

“4i has an impeccable track record of problem solving and serving clients in addressing their growth challenges through sophisticated capabilities,” said Srikanth Velamakanni, Co-founder and Group Chief Executive, Fractal Analytics. “We share a common vision of powering strategic, tactical and operational decisions in enterprises through analytics & AI. This partnership will help us in being even more strategic to our clients.”

“Traditional business models are under a lot of pressure due to significant changes in consumer behavior, consumer demographics and marketplace dynamics leading to a need for better (and faster) strategic and operational decisions driven by analytics & AI”, said Dr. Eugene Roytburg, Managing Partner, 4i. “Our coming together with Fractal will address this need effectively.”

Lana Klein, Managing Partner, 4i echoed the sentiment. “We were looking for a partner who shared our vision, aspirations and had synergetic capabilities, so that we can jointly maximize value for our clients and accelerate our own growth. We’re pleased to have found such a partner in Fractal Analytics”.

4i will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Fractal Analytics and will continue delivering services to clients, while getting immediate access to Fractal Analytics’ IP, capabilities, infrastructure and talent.

“We are excited about what this means for our clients”, added Pranay Agrawal, Co-founder and CEO of Fractal Analytics. “Finding growth is one of the foremost challenges our clients are tackling. Our combined value proposition of bringing data, AI, technology and consulting capabilities together will resonate well with our clients.”

About Fractal Analytics

Founded in 2000, Fractal Analytics is a strategic analytics partner to the most admired Fortune 500 companies globally and helps them power every human decision in the enterprise by bringing analytics & AI to the decision-making process.

Fractal Analytics has presence across 12 global locations including the United States, UK and India and has been recently featured as a “Hot Artificial Intelligence (AI)” company by Forbes. Fractal has also been recognized as a “Cool Vendor” and a “Vendor to watch” by Gartner.

About 4i, Inc.

4i’s forward-looking, foresight analytics driven approach helps clients uncover future growth opportunities, size future demand, develop successful growth strategies, and identify new innovations to succeed in tomorrow’s marketplace. The company’s foresight analytics have been proven over time to deliver consistently accurate results that help companies realize unparalleled growth opportunities. 4i has operations in US, Ukraine and Mexico.

Jersey City, New Jersey
Fractal Analytics (www.fractal.ai), one of the largest pure play providers of analytics, today announced that Sameer Dhanrajani has joined as Chief Strategy Officer. Sameer will drive strategic investments and inorganic growth, lead high-priority growth initiatives and help clients on AI led transformation of their businesses.

Sameer is an analytics & AI evangelist for Fortune 500 global companies and has won multiple industry awards as a top business leader in the analytics industry. Prior to joining Fractal, Sameer held leadership positions at Cognizant Technology Solutions as Global Business Leader and Fidelity National Financial as Country Head. In his recent role at Cognizant, Sameer built and scaled Cognizant’s analytics & data sciences business to be a leading player in the industry.

“Sameer has consulted with several global organizations and has played a pivotal role in their analytics led strategic transformation,” said Srikanth Velamakanni, Co-founder and Global Chief Executive, Fractal Analytics. “His rich experience of growing analytics organizations and creating significant client impact will help Fractal in fulfilling its aspiration of powering every human decision in the enterprise”.

“I’m honored to join the leadership team of Fractal Analytics and help us achieve our strategic vision,” said Sameer. “The analytics industry is at an inflexion point and clients are increasingly looking to partner with Fractal to achieve business transformation through analytics and AI. I am excited to be a part of Fractal and lead us on this journey.”

About Fractal Analytics

Founded in 2000, Fractal Analytics is a strategic analytics partner to the most admired Fortune 500 companies globally and helps them power every human decision in the enterprise by bringing analytics and AI to the decision.

Fractal Analytics has a 1000+ member team across 12 global locations including the United States, UK and India and has been recently featured as a “Hot Artificial Intelligence (AI)” company by Forbes. Fractal has also been recognized as “Cool Vendor in Analytics” and a “Vendor to watch” by Gartner.

At a Nasscom session, leaders across the technology landscape discussed how technology will help reshape our world.

“I never expected India and Bharat coming together so soon,” says Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and CEO, Paytm. Sharma was speaking at the last session of Day 1, at the Nasscom India leadership Forum in Mumbai. The session, titled ‘Aiming beyond the horizon’, had four entrepreneurs on the panel talking about how technology will help reshape our world.

Sharma said that demonetisation was clearly the inflection point for the company, with the company seeing large-scale adoption by people and in places he never expected.

While Sharma’s business decisions have paid off, Srikanth Velamakanni, co-founder and group chief executive and executive vice-chairman at Fractal Analytics says that most human beings are terrible at taking decisions. “We have cognitive biases, we are bad at basic math and probability and thus need help,” he says. That’s where his company steps in. Through its products – Qure.ai which provides deep learning technology to help diagnose disease and recommend personalised treatment plans and Cuddle, an artificial intelligence based personal analyst – Fractal Analytics is aiming for a day when 95 percent decisions are taken based on data and analytics, and just 5 percent will be based on personal experiences.

The third panelist, Amit Jain, president and CEO, Prysm, Inc, adds that with data and analytics also comes collaboration. “10x of digital content is created every five years. Collaboration therefore becomes necessary to process all this content seamlessly. One needs to access multiple programs at the same time and Prysm solves this need,” he says. Essentially, Prysm is a visual collaboration cloud where teams across the globe can create, share and innovate. It is device agnostic. “Serial versus simultaneous use of programs is the key for millennials today,” he adds.

Moving to the fourth panelist – Rahul Narayan, the moderator, Ravi Gururaj, Chair, Nasscom Product Council and CEO, QikPod, says, “Just today, ISRO sent 104 satellites in one go, breaking Russia’s record. How soon do you see your robot landing on the moon?”

Rahul Narayan, fleet commander, Team Indus – Axiom Research Labs Pvt Ltd is a part of the only Indian team in the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition. They are building a privately funded Spacecraft capable of soft landing on the Moon by 2017. “We made wrong assumptions about the budget and the time required at the start. But we are nearing completion. We have had no revenues for the past six years. But what worked for us is the fact that the core team was clear about the roadmap,” says Narayan.

Narayan adds that it is essential to keep away from ‘pivoting’. “As a start-up entrepreneur, evolution is ripe. You can’t keep your head dug into the sand. But one needs to understand that you can’t re-engineer everything from the start. Reimagine instead of reengineering,” he says with a smile.

Sharma adds that from his interaction with Jack Ma (founder and executive chairman of Alibaba Group, which is an investor in Paytm), he has learnt that one shouldn’t be shy of entering new categories. “Aggressively entering new categories and building them is what I learnt from Chinese companies,” says Sharma.

The panel concluded on the note that today, India is a market for the world to come.

Top 10 Hot Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technologies

The market for artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is flourishing. Beyond the hype and the heightened media attention, the numerous startups and the internet giants racing to acquire them, there is a significant increase in investment and adoption by enterprises. A Narrative Science survey found last year that 38% of enterprises are already using AI, growing to 62% by 2018. Forrester Research predicted a greater than 300% increase in investment in artificial intelligence in 2017 compared with 2016. IDC estimated that the AI market will grow from $8 billion in 2016 to more than $47 billion in 2020.

Coined in 1955 to describe a new computer science sub-discipline, “Artificial Intelligence” today includes a variety of technologies and tools, some time-tested, others relatively new. To help make sense of what’s hot and what’s not, Forrester just published a TechRadar report on Artificial Intelligence (for application development professionals), a detailed analysis of 13 technologies enterprises should consider adopting to support human decision-making.

Based on Forrester’s analysis, here’s my list of the 10 hottest AI technologies:

  1. Natural Language Generation: Producing text from computer data. Currently used in customer service, report generation, and summarizing business intelligence insights. Sample vendors: Attivio, Cambridge Semantics, Digital Reasoning, Lucidworks, Narrative Science, SAS.
  2. Speech Recognition: Transcribe and transform human speech into format useful for computer applications. Currently used in interactive voice response systems and mobile applications. Sample vendors: NICE, Nuance Communications, OpenText, Verint Systems.
  3. Virtual Agents: “The current darling of the media,” says Forrester (I believe they refer to my evolving relationships with Alexa), from simple chatbots to advanced systems that can network with humans. Currently used in customer service and support and as a smart home manager. Sample vendors: Amazon, Apple, Artificial Solutions, Assist AI, Creative Virtual, Google, IBM, IPsoft, Microsoft, Satisfi.
  4. Machine Learning Platforms: Providing algorithms, APIs, development and training toolkits, data, as well as computing power to design, train, and deploy models into applications, processes, and other machines. Currently used in a wide range of enterprise applications, mostly `involving prediction or classification. Sample vendors: Amazon, Fractal Analytics, Google, H2O.ai, Microsoft, SAS, Skytree.
  5. AI-optimized Hardware: Graphics processing units (GPU) and appliances specifically designed and architected to efficiently run AI-oriented computational jobs. Currently primarily making a difference in deep learning applications. Sample vendors: Alluviate, Cray, Google, IBM, Intel, Nvidia.
  6. Decision Management: Engines that insert rules and logic into AI systems and used for initial setup/training and ongoing maintenance and tuning. A mature technology, it is used in a wide variety of enterprise applications, assisting in or performing automated decision-making. Sample vendors: Advanced Systems Concepts, Informatica, Maana, Pegasystems, UiPath.
  7. Deep Learning Platforms: A special type of machine learning consisting of artificial neural networks with multiple abstraction layers. Currently primarily used in pattern recognition and classification applications supported by very large data sets. Sample vendors: Deep Instinct, Ersatz Labs, Fluid AI, MathWorks, Peltarion, Saffron Technology, Sentient Technologies.
  8. Biometrics: Enable more natural interactions between humans and machines, including but not limited to image and touch recognition, speech, and body language. Currently used primarily in market research. Sample vendors: 3VR, Affectiva, Agnitio, FaceFirst, Sensory, Synqera, Tahzoo.
  9. Robotic Process Automation: Using scripts and other methods to automate human action to support efficient business processes. Currently used where it’s too expensive or inefficient for humans to execute a task or a process. Sample vendors: Advanced Systems Concepts, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, UiPath, WorkFusion.
  10. Text Analytics and NLP: Natural language processing (NLP) uses and supports text analytics by facilitating the understanding of sentence structure and meaning, sentiment, and intent through statistical and machine learning methods. Currently used in fraud detection and security, a wide range of automated assistants, and applications for mining unstructured data. Sample vendors: Basis Technology, Coveo, Expert System, Indico, Knime, Lexalytics, Linguamatics, Mindbreeze, Sinequa, Stratifyd, Synapsify.

There are certainly many business benefits gained from AI technologies today, but according to a survey Forrester conducted last year, there are also obstacles to AI adoption as expressed by companies with no plans of investing in AI:

There is no defined business case – 42%

Not clear what AI can be used for – 39%

Don’t have the required skills – 33%

Need first to invest in modernizing data mgt platform – 29%

Don’t have the budget – 23%

Not certain what is needed for implementing an AI system – 19%

AI systems are not proven – 14%

Do not have the right processes or governance – 13%

AI is a lot of hype with little substance – 11%

Don’t own or have access to the required data – 8%

Not sure what AI means – 3%

Once enterprises overcome these obstacles, Forrester concludes, they stand to gain from AI driving accelerated transformation in customer-facing applications and developing an interconnected web of enterprise intelligence.