Sep/Oct 2019

Abe Raher, who writes technical documentation at AppDynamics, recently interviewed Vijay Ramakrishnan, technical development leader of MindMeld, on the topic of conversational AI platforms and how to choose the right platform for particular business needs.

• Abe Raher

The oil and gas industry presents a particularly compelling opportunity to leverage blockchain technologies due to the high transactional values (and therefore risks) and economic pressures to reduce costs. A secure system that mitigates risk, increases transparency, provides an audit trail and speeds up transactions at a significantly reduced cost such as blockchain should be appealing to oil and gas companies.

• Vinodkumar Raghothamarao

Conversion rate optimization can heavily impact the bottom line, making it an important metric to track, especially for marketers. However, improving conversion rates is easier said than done. Marketers do not always have the right tools in place to make these high-value campaign updates, or if they do, they may not know where to focus their efforts. The most effective method for conversion rate optimization is through leveraging analytics.

• Andy Cheong

Enterprise-scale AI will only achieve its full potential when it empowers core process transformation, improving the quantity and quality of workflows directly impacting strategic business objectives. Until its technologies are ingrained in these mission critical use cases, it’ll just remain a novelty for fringe deployments without demonstrable business value and justifying its value to upper-level management can be difficult. What needs to be conveyed is that by automating and accelerating fundamental business processes in industry-specific use cases, AI becomes vital to increasing revenues while decreasing costs.

• Ramesh Mahalingam

Unless you’ve been Rip Van Winkle, asleep in a hollow for 20 years, you’ve witnessed a big increase in the buzz around artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML). Keeping up with what feels like the ever-increasing speed of change can be daunting, so you may feel sympathy for Van Winkle trying to play catch up. So what is AI/ML? And how can it heal a supply chain?

• Polly Mitchell-Guthrie