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Friday, October 14, 2016

Watch out for the internet of things

Trends in artificial intelligence (AI) along with augmented reality (AR) are expected to change the way companies do business in the years to come.


Frank Rizzo from KPMG said on Thursday that technology giants are shifting into different tech spaces to take advantage of emerging technologies.
He said three to four years ago the big thing in trends was cloud computing and mobile. If one owns a smartphone then one is in the cloud, Rizzo said.

The big thing to watch out for in 2017 and in the next couple of years is "the internet of things" – AI, virtual reality and AR, cryptocurrencies and robotics.
Rizzo said the internet of things comprises devices that connect to the web, such as Fitbit devices or Apple watches.

Currently there are 4.9-billion such devices worldwide. The number is expected to climb to 20-billion in 2010.
For businesses, these devices will create a huge amount of data that could be utilised. It could also provide real-time data with sensors that can feed information on anything that affects the business’s operations.
Providing cognitive solutions that do the "thinking for you" could revolutionise the way companies do business.
According to Rizzo, AI could allow business to make better decisions. AI would augment "what we do" rather than change it.

Marius van der Westhuizen from BusinessOptics said AI is a way of gathering information from the past and in real time and applying it. This is where the business of tomorrow is heading.
Van der Westhuizen also said his company had applied AI to a range of problems in an attempt to maximise the operations of enterprises. BusinessOptics had used AI to assess a company’s exposure to currency risk.
AI was able to monitor the relationship between all currencies that a company was exposed to in real time.
The technology could take all the currency data and the oil price for example and produce a likely outcome of how fluctuations in either would affect the company’s bottom line or financial results at the end of the year.
"There is a vast range of different outcomes but the [AI] is able to tell us that, allowing you to manage the risk or maximise the opportunity."
AI could also be used to analyse company’s data to see which of its customers are likely to renew a contract or switch to a competitor.

Van der Westhuizen said that, by looking at all the data a company had available, from complaint records to social media interactions and even to payment data, it can create a model and predict a likely outcome of whether the customer will stay with a company or not.
AI could even advise a business to set its debit orders to the day when it is most likely the majority of customers would be able to pay or have funds available.

"There is a lot of insufficiency in the business of today and if we can use the current technologies available, we can extract that extra percent [out of them], " van der Westhuizen said.
Other technologies include blockchain, which could be the most disruptive development in finance in the coming years. The technology behind cryptocurrencies allows for an open distributed ledger.
Rizzo said the technology can be applied to the way auditing or accounting is done within a company.
Robotics does not only apply to manufacturing but also to the financial sector. Rizzo said that robots could be used to replace manual processes with robotic processes, like imputing data into a system, getting rid of error and resulting in standardisation.

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