06 Jan Advanced Cloud Analytics Brings Predictive Insight Capabilities for Small & Medium-Sized Businesses

“Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the new electricity. Just as 100 years ago, electricity transformed industry after industry, AI will do the same,” according to Andew Ng, Chief Scientist at Baidu Research.

This disruption is happening right now. Companies with vast resources and astute foresight are investing heavily into Machine Learning and Deep Learning. These investments will further tilt the competitive landscape toward the companies with a data-driven culture and capabilities. There is now an ongoing “shift where everyone wants systems that are smarter. Everyone wants systems that are more predictive, everyone wants everything scored, everyone wants to understand what’s the next best offer, next best opportunity, how to make everything a little bit more efficient,” said Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.

As the large forward-thinking companies strategize to lead this change, how are the SMBs without the big budgets and without AI capabilities to keep up and compete? Industry analysts are starting to address this issue. According to CIO magazine, the demand for data scientists is larger than supply, which means that companies without their own deep expertise will look to cloud services and marketplaces for analytical solutions and algorithms.

So how are SMBs going to fill this gap? Cloud solutions, such as Advanced Cloud Analytics, will allow SMBs to harness data science capabilities without having to try to recruit and retain data scientists, which in today’s environment, can be extremely costly and time consuming. Furthermore, Advanced Cloud Analytics allows companies to avoid having to build and maintain their own data infrastructure environment. Advanced Cloud Analytics, such as the TenPoint7 Cloud, is fully managed and offers fast speed-to -market capability for SMBs.

In addition, Advanced Cloud Analytics is an effective mean by which companies can do rapid proof-of-concepts to validate the impact of Machine Learning methods for their businesses before making full-blown investments to apply data science principles.

By 2018, there will be a shortage of 200,000 data scientists in the US alone. It is unrealistic for many SMBs and even smaller divisions of enterprises to build their own Machine Learning capabilities. Yet, the market is getting more competitive each day with better and better predictive insights that drive business strategies, marketing campaigns, customer experience initiatives, sales efforts, employee retention programs, more accurate forecasting, workforce optimization, among other business initiatives.

If you are a SMB or a smaller division of an enterprise and understand the value of being a data-driven business powered by Machine Learning but have had difficulty building your own data science team and/or infrastructure, Advanced Cloud Analytics should be a cost-effective, low risk alternative that can get you to predictive insights quickly.

Andrew Ng, further stated, “Corporations may have hit another infliction point. In the past a lot of S&P 500 CEOs wished they had started thinking sooner than they did about their internet strategy. I think five years from now there will be a number of S&P 500 CEOs that will wish they’d started thinking earlier about their AI strategy.”

For the SMB CEOs, the need to find ways to incorporate AI to their business will be even more difficult, and the time is now to start coming with a workable strategy to survive all the changes ahead.

To learn more about Advanced Cloud Analytics from TenPoint7, please contact us directly.

John Song (Co-Founder, John@TenPoint7.com)