Attending tech events is an important part of life at Software Solved. In our industry, it’s vital that we stay connected with the trends that are shaping both the current and future tech landscapes.
Bath Digital Festival is a yearly event that brings together some of the brightest minds in the digital world, and as a festival supporter, we were delighted to send several members of our team to some of the events throughout the week.
It’s no surprise that Artificial Intelligence was one of the main themes of the festival, but it was refreshing to see practical applications of how it is going to change how businesses operate on a daily basis.
Highlights from Friday’s talks included two on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, which we will recap.
Cognisses are a company looking to make work more meaningful, using applicant data to predict how employees will behave in work-related situations before they are hired. It is also possible to assess which motivational areas a candidate is driven by, comparing it against the company’s current culture. The company can then assess whether the hire is a good fit for the person and the organisation.
But it doesn’t stop there, once hired, they can be tracked over time to see how they grow alongside the organisation.
Whilst many worry that AI and automation will make work obsolete, we should instead focus upon the things that humans excel at. The personable and unpredictable aspects are in fact hard to automate, but AI can be used to help place people in the right position in the best fitting business.
We also attended a talk on how marketing agency TinyGiant are harnessing the power of AI in experiential marketing campaigns. The great thing about Artificial Intelligence is that it’s accessible for all! If the quality of your data is high then you have the ability to create meaningful output. Neural networks are a set of algorithms, modeled loosely after the human brain, that are designed to recognise patterns.
For marketeers, this can help create stand-out campaigns. They gave examples of how they used data from recipe books to create AI cocktails. Additionally, a science festival wanted to use AI to decide what talks to put on at their forthcoming event. By inputting the titles and descriptions of talks from previous events into a neural network they were able to come up with a raft of weird and wonderful talk suggestions such as ‘Introvert Narwhals’ and ‘Aliens What What’. Although these results are trivial, it raises the question of whether you are you sitting on data which could be used to predict future trends or untapped opportunities?
We love hearing about the different ways that machine learning and artificial intelligence can be applied across a multitude of businesses and industries. We’re continuing to see great progress with our Machine Learning KTP (Knowledge Transfer Partnership) with the University of Plymouth, where we’re using data to create predictive models that can be used in the insurance industry. Catch up with our recent webinar in which we’ll share how machine learning can be applied in the insurance industry.
So there we have it, AI and machine learning aren’t fads but are in fact already revolutionising the way we work. If you’d like to find out more about how your business can put their data to work, get in touch.
