Artificial Intelligence is doing so much to accelerate process automation in so many industries that it’s difficult not to get drawn in by the hype. The AI industry can be considered to still be in its innovator/early adopter phase, but obviously with varying degrees of maturity in some sectors; more biased towards life sciences and healthcare. 

Nonetheless, the allure of AI proves almost irresistible in sectors such as retail, FS&I, and Enterprise. It’s the new(ish) kid on the block. That means it has to be worth a look, right? Well, maybe so. Maybe not; because that ‘look’ needs to be wary. 

The Artificial Intelligence Paradox

A recent survey showed that 91 percent of top businesses are actively investing in AI. Meanwhile, only 39.7 percent of them say “they’re using data as an asset, and just one in five (19.3 percent) claim to have a data culture within the company”.

This points to what the paradox is. AI is fast, in some use cases it can work “at the speed of light” (for the avoidance of doubt, that’s around 300 million meters a second). 

Meanwhile, investigating, adopting, and implementing any AI solution can be a long drawn-out process. And an expensive one. 

Embark on that journey and you could be looking at how to accelerate innovation
long after events or opportunities in your market have come and gone. 

That would be such a shame. It might even border on being commercially disastrous. It would certainly be ironic since the data on which your decisions are made is in your business right now.

You Already Have the Answers | Now all You Need are the Questions

In the late 17th century, the French playwright Molière wrote a comedy ballet called ‘Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme’ (The Middle-Class Aristocrat) about a lowly cloth merchant who wants to become upper class. As part of the process he discovers that when words are spoken or written, other than in poetry, they are called prose. He’s delighted and says:

“My faith! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose while knowing nothing of it.”

It’s the same with data, the same with automation, the same with what your systems—give or take adjustments here and there–are capable of doing, and have been all along. 

Vertical Intelligence enables you to realize the power you already have and leverage your data by transforming automation at the core, fully integrated from the get-go. It is defined as the combination of human expertise and big data analytics applied with surgical precision and timing. The intelligence you need and certainly, the ways to extract it are waiting to be optimized. They are not waiting to be replaced, and you don’t have to make that sort of level of investment (or commitment to novel solutions). 

AI is nearly always a retrofit and nearly always a generic solution. This means that any AI solution will need to be customized. It can’t just be bolted on. It has to be aligned to work—not just within your industry—but also within your organization. And that means it has to be wired in—integrated.

It has to be integrated with existing systems to share data and allow collaboration, it has to address different entities and disciplines within the business while enabling them to function seamlessly together. 

What a lot of tech jargon that was in one sentence. 

That’s because it is all so familiar. Share/collaborate/ seamless etc. They are the pillars of your already-in-place IT infrastructure and your systems, varying degrees relative to where you are in your digitization journey.

Ahead of the Tipping Point

Decisions in business will always cost—or save—money and time. And decisions in business will always involve risks and opportunities. When innovation comes into the mix — trialing or launching new products or services, planning major associated projects, impacting society and how we live and work (or even play)—the risk expands but so does the opportunity of hitting the sweet spot of providing relevancy at the right time. 

In a technology-driven world, the harsh reality is that fortune favors the fast.

TNW (a Financial Times company) framed the problem like this: “You can deploy a thousand models and parse a planet’s-worth of data, but if you don’t know what insights to look for or how to ensure your entire platform meets regulatory compliance, then you’re just muddling about in the dark.” 

Being fast means seeing opportunities as they emerge and seizing them as they materialize—prime mover advantage embedded in your organization’s behaviors and practices. 

Vertical Intelligence delivers the agility for you to be able to do this, by optimizing the data assets you already have, to optimize the human talent within your teams. Best of all, it doesn’t take forever to get going with it. It’s platform-agnostic, it’s industry-agnostic and product-agnostic.

Vertical Intelligence doesn’t come along with an ROI expectation that runs so far into the future that you just know–deep down inside–that by the time you should be getting a return, the dynamics in your market (and/or among your customers, in your supply chain,  and probably across society) will have shifted again. You don’t want to be history. You want to make it.

Vertical Intelligence is the Here and Now

AI is about combining domain-specific human expertise with AI-powered Big Data analytics. It’s high-level and long-term. VI is about practical and pragmatic solutions that you can implement with little fuss and little wait. It’s close to immediate; maybe not the speed of light but certainly beyond the speed of customer needs and requirements in the here and now.

VI is not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution but rather a tailored way of uplifting your existing tech stack, and staff, with platform-agnostic solutions requiring minimal setup or customizations, all at a lower cost than going to the generic AI marketplace. It shapes how your business or organization needs it to shape. The way your users need it to. The way agility dictates that it should. 

So, imagine a single data discovery platform where you have complete visibility across your structured and unstructured data. Within this platform, privacy-safe collaboration thrives, consumer insights clamor for attention, and you can mine your data to uncover meaningful correlations between different entities according to their co-occurrence in a data set. 

Imagine using analytics tools that can extract significant knowledge about unexpected trends. Think about how fast and how smart your decisions can be. Anticipate how relaxed you’ll feel when you do know everything you need to know to stay ahead of the competition. Welcome to the real world according to Vertical  Intelligence. Like prose, it’s something you’ve been speaking all the way along, without even realizing it. And we can help you articulate it.