Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence : stop doing POCs. Start using data !

Overwhelmed with thousands of articles about digital transformation, about new technologies, about new business models, about uberization of any business, … ? What are you doing yourself ? POCs ? It’s already something ! But even if France is getting acquainted with the culture of test and learn, of fail and learn, …, at a point of time, you need to deliver tangible software in production to your users to drive a solid ROI and a real competitive advantage…

We work for the Chief Data Officer of a CAC40 company who even decided to make his 2017 tagline as “Zero POC !”. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are not anymore reserved to Amazon, Facebook or Google. However, very few initiatives (less than 1/3rd) deliver some measurable ROI.

We believe at Zelros that 3 fundamental elements are required to make a Machine Learning or Artificial Intelligence initiative successful :

• Compute and Storage — it has already become a true commodity for a couple of years now… Amazon Web Services, Digital Ocean, … Or even OVH ! Cocorico. No excuse on this one !
• Algorithms — it is becoming a commodity with the open source release of breakthrough in this area like for example deep learning. Again cocorico. Scikit-learn, baby of Inria, has got huge momentum and is a worldwide reference in terms of exhaustive and scalable datascience toolkit. You can even use for pretty simple and common use cases on-the-shelve platforms like Microsoft Azure Machine Learning or Amazon Web Services Machine Learning. No excuse on that one too !
• Combined business and data skills — people that understand your business stakes, translate them into a data scheme and deliver a turnkey smart data application transforming your process, your products and your services => this is where companies get stuck !

To overcome this hurdle, it is however somewhat rather simple. For a change, do not start only investing hundred thousands or millions euros building a data lake… We quite often see that a couple of hundreds megabytes already offer very rich insights to train predictive models. And plugging a simple but well designed bot with powerful NLP (Natural Language Processing) to your legacy BI datawarehouses free up tremendous hidden value.

Hence, let’s start and talk about your business stakes. What would you like to predict or anticipate ? How would you like machines to support your decision making with prescriptive recommendations ? To which data would you like to ease access ? How do you plan to measure the ROI of your data initiatives ?

At Zelros, we believe that there is a whole new way of delivering data projects. Scope, Onboard, Adopt are our new keywords and key phases of any data initiative spanning over a couple of weeks, not months. We deliver turnkey solutions through our rapid deployment platform for intelligent applications, Zelros Bridge. Our flagship solution is our Enterprise Smart Virtual Assistant made of self-learning, predictive and prescriptive bots.

Take a step back and start inventing new ways through which people will interact with machines and data with bots. Some say bots will kill applications as we know them today. We already see emerging a second generation of chatbots.

Frustrated with your SAP or your Excel reports ? We can plug a bot to your Enterprise messaging system (Skype for example) that will get you and your users rid of painful useless clicks or searches to deliver right away the expected information.

Eager to turn your enterprise old fashioned workstation into a smart powerful assistant to your users ? We can implement your own “enterprise Jarvis” (Just A Rather Very Intelligent System) that will reinvent the way users interact with their desktop and get access to very basic and repetitive services or information without getting stuck with a remote inefficient help desk.

Proud of your terabytes datawarehouse or datalake ? But only a few users benefit from this goldmine ? Ask us to set up a smart BI companion that will answer the top questions of many of your users.

Those are a short glimpse of what Zelros can deliver to you ! If you want to be ahead of the game, if you want to delight your customers, if you want to unleash the power of your data, if you want to enjoy a fun and exciting journey into the Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence world, put your data in safe hands with Zelros ! And get ready to redefine your company.