How do you enhance the customer experience with artificial intelligence? And how the factories are placed in termini di Internet of Things, that is of robotization and automation (but not only)? Again: to what extent and how do financial institutions and platforms use cloud technologies?
These are the 3 major areas of interest for technology applied to consumption, to production and finance which took into consideration Reply, the consulting, system integration, digital services applications group founded by Mario Rizzante. Previously they had been concerned with the future of the online market.
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Artificial intelligence enhances the customer experience
Let’s start with the first report, dedicated to AI and the customer experience. Thanks to the Sonar Trend Platform, the company has identified the main ones trend di marketing and the most significant enabling technologies, evaluating parameters such as citation in articles by experts in the sector, in media services but also in patents and scientific publications. Where research is going, but also what is in vogue and what consumers and organizations want.
Research, strategy and action are the 3 aspects of contemporary marketing: among the trends of the first front, supported by artificial intelligence systems, Reply has identified the Sentiment Analysis, i.e. the analysis of the customer journey in the real-time assistance, and the Visual Listening, i.e. the ability to interpret hundreds or thousands of images and feedback without having to analyze them one by one but choosing the most appropriate content.
On the marketing strategy side, however, machine learning and Nlp techniques for language recognition they will help to optimize the contents and test them on certain target audiences, to carry out one of the key marketing tasks that is to segment the market and the target of users-potential customers and in Marketing Effectiveness Modeling, that is the ability to understand in real time how an advertising campaign is progressing, what results it is delivering and how to modify it to make it more effective (and waste less money). Finally, in terms of marketing actions, AI will improve chatbots and virtual assistants even more already largely widespread, it will serve to understand the mechanisms that lead a user to become loyal to a brand and to offer them products and services that are always different and personalized, avoiding overlapping with goods already purchased in the past.
Ultimately, according to Reply’s survey, using artificial intelligence correctly means being clear very precisely and in the past unimaginable who the customers are, create fairly reliable forecasts of their reference markets, diversify and enrich the return on investments, always on the condition that you know how to supervise the biases of the algorithms, trying to correct them where necessary, and increase the rate of creativity, working on the trends born from AI.
How is the Internet of Things going in the company
In another year-end report, Reply instead investigated two key areas that are driving the growth of the IoT in the industrial sector: factories smart e logistics e transport smart. In this sense, the pandemic has provided a formidable acceleration to certain trends that have already blossomed before: many sectors have discovered how the IoT could be useful in addressing the new challenges and have increased investments in a large number of technological solutions. During the pandemic peaks reached in 2020, investments in IoT technologies not by chance have suffered less than others: “In this phase of recovery, the IoT, which helps both companies and governments to achieve their goals, plays a fundamental role and by 2025 investments in this technology are destined to increase ”, Reads the Reply report.
Investments in smart systems will rise by 205% over the next five years, while smart logistics will be a little less. Among the Big 5 cluster in this area, China and the United States will without too many surprises be the two leaders in the smart factory sector, with the fastest growing platforms and massive investments in predictive and remote monitoring solutions. As far as smart logistics and transport are concerned, Brazil was the hardest hit during the pandemic, but is now recovering, while the greatest growth is expected in India. And Europe? Considering only the 5 most developed countries in this area (Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium), the market for smart factories will grow almost three times, despite a shortage in the necessary skills. On smart logistics and transport in the Europe 5 cluster, Germany will remain in the lead, however others will also grow significantly.
The IoT will bring important improvements from many points of view: it will increase the productivity of factories and above all the quality of production. And then, will revolutionize maintenance, making it predictive: the monitoring of environmental parameters or process control (for example temperature and pressure) and the control of the efficiency of individual devices (for example valves, conveyor belts, pumps) are considerably simplified thanks to the Industrial IoT, which takes care of it 24 hours a day. In the same way, it will overturn warehouse and storage management: “Smart shelves, robots, drones and cobots now manage inventories by communicating with the warehouse management systems, automating the inventory control process without interrupting production”, yes still reads in the report. Finally, connectivity will come out of the factories to be incorporated into products: the majority of goods, both destined for companies (in abbreviation, B2B) and ai consumers, will be designed and manufactured to be connected by default, and companies will no longer have to rely on the intermediation of retailers, but will be able to invest in direct-to-consumer business models.
Among the most pronounced trends, which are changing production processes, there are edge / cloud and 5G networks, increasingly widespread on a world scale (in the platform offered by Reply, Brick), the so-called digital twins, that is the avatars of real objects, useful for simulating the times and costs of the distribution chain (especially in times of global flooding like the ones we are crossing), the increase of mobile robots also in the company, equipped with legs or wheels, and the attention paid to cybersecurity. According to Reply, this market will grow up to 25 billion euros in the next 5 years. And overall, connected devices will continue to grow and total global IoT spending could reach 1,200 billion euros by 2025.
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The adoption of cloud services in the financial world
In the last of the 3 reports, Reply listened to more than 100 financial institutions in the European Union and the United Kingdom, drawing useful trends from the analysis of over 1000 cloud projects conducted with these partners. That the future of financial services is on the cloud is a fact: “Increased productivity, innovation and scalability are the key drivers of this change. Furthermore, moving to the cloud saves time and energy that can be dedicated to more important activities. Data storage and computing power are increasingly considered as services to be entrusted to specialized companies “, reads the document drawn up at the end of the investigation. However, this move to the cloud is proceeding at different rates across industries and countries, and for many companies the experience of adopting the cloud has not lived up to initial expectations.
Relying on the cloud for a bank, payment platform or financial intermediary means being able to scale on demand, guarantee innovation, implement new features more quickly and progressively reduce dependence on existing systems. The challenges, however, are not few: more suppliers are needed, there is a lack of cultural readiness, safety levels need to be raised and one ends up being dependent on external suppliers. To influence the timing of this transition it is obviously the regulations, but also and above all the incompatibility that occurs in very large realities with the existing systems on which they still base a large part of their activities.
Curious the in-depth study on safety which provided contradictory results: according to a large percentage of respondents, the cloud significantly improved security compared to traditional systems, while for many others, security was one of the thorniest issues in the transition to the cloud. How do you explain this difference? Probably with the most consolidated experience: the more you rely on the cloud, the more you understand its advantages also from this point of view.
In cultural terms, however, the speed and impact of cloud adoption is highly dependent by the presence of the right people, by the existence of the right environment and the readiness of leaders to make some choices. Having the right technology without having the right people, culture and leadership will not bring the profits and return on investment that is possible with a well-managed transition to the cloud.
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