What is Artificial Intelligence, and how does it work?
Artificial intelligence is a term that has been recently talked about a lot. You could be asking what it is, how it works, or what the benefits are for businesses, and this blog will answer all of your questions in a simplified version.
Co-authored by: Wishrant Mukesh Tuli
A deluge of unstructured data presents a complex challenge for enterprises to uncover underlying business value. While it is usually lauded as the next fuel, on its own, data has no power. The exhilarating industry-wide rise in digital transformations have increased the IoT numbers and accelerated data generation. But, that would only fill data centers and elevate expenditures rather than bring success; until businesses decide to use them.
The face of lending has changed ¾ from large banks and financial institutions to online consumer and lenders. With the pandemic mandating social distancing and lockdowns, businesses and individuals are looking for lenders that can perform the borrowing journey remotely and faster than before. And the competition is going digital. The global digital lending platforms market is already worth USD 4.87 billion and is poised to grow at a CAGR of 24% between 2021 and 2028. For traditional lenders, the competition now is with technologically advanced firms apart from big lenders.
The rise of digital technologies has disrupted utilities companies in the way they interact with their customers and employees. New digital touchpoints are increasing at a rapid pace, thereby creating pressure on businesses to ensure digital omnipresence. This has led the energy and utilities organizations to adopt mobile workforce technologies to give more power to field workers in this complex world to resolve customer issues quickly and more efficiently.
Every OTT platform has a distinct target audience and content that underline its purpose. Each OTT platform requires a distinct design approach and aesthetic. Understanding the requirement and pain points of consumers, coming up with a solution to solve these demands, and producing a product for users and businesses are all steps in creating any digital product.
Deal sourcing or Origination is a process used by Investment bankers, VC, PE and Finance professionals to identify investment opportunities in the market. Investment firms need to do this to ensure a large volume of deals is obtained in a given period to keep a continuous stream of deals generating future revenue flows.
Aside from an Investment firm and their deal originators having an excellent network and a professional reputation, deal origination entails managing relationships, generating leads and pitching to buyers. Outbound marketing activities includes trade shows, emails, cold calling and road shows as well as outsourcing through bankers to spread the message widely to different audiences.
Industry reports show that Private Equity (PE) investment firms with large, proactive outbound origination teams are the best performers. HOF capital, a venture capital firm undertook research on PE firms Battery Ventures, Great Hill Partners, Insight Venture Partners, Platinum Equity, Summit Partners, TA Associates, and TCV which have the largest origination functions. The results showed that large scale sourcing teams that were specialised were star performers by stage, year and sector with every investment professional achieving unique deal sources.
All PE firms have a strategic programme in place which vary widely from cold calling, outsourcing to business development executives at Investment Banks. Some PE funds are industry agnostic, ideally looking for a well-run company in a defensible market with healthy margins, solid growth and a good management team that wishes to stay long term. Deal originators may wish to analyse every deal which they request a bank to undertake however, a lot of investment bankers have the view this is not always the most efficient method to obtain relevant buyers for their target companies.
Originators at Investment banks will put together their buyer list using sources like Pitchbook, Capital IQ and Axial often making recommendations to PE firms with existing Portfolio companies that are active in the same space as the companies PE firms are targeting to buy.
Investment firms use either traditional approach or an online deal sourcing approach.
From e-commerce to EdTech, from streaming platforms to collaboration tools, since the outbreak of COVID-19, the world has taken many strides towards ensuring and enhancing human life, with Digital Technologies playing the lead role!
However, these digital transformation initiatives cannot follow the pre-COVID path journey. They need to be looked at from a fresh perspective – with a COVID lens. Companies need to re-draw their roadmaps based on changing customer behavior, newer workforce demands, digitally enabled operations to support the core business, supplier dynamics, regulations, etc. Any firm whose digital journey does not align with the business priorities and considerations of the ‘New Essential’ will lose its relevance to the market and its customers’ needs.
When someone thinks of the word ‘Blockchain’, the first thing that comes to their mind is “Bitcoin” or “Cryptocurrency”. No doubt, it was bitcoin’s success which brought Blockchain technology into the limelight. But Blockchain is the under-the-hood technology and has many more applications beyond just bitcoin or cryptocurrency. Blockchain is a decentralized or distributed ledger where data in the form of transactions or records are stored on the ledger. All these records/transactions are immutable, i.e. no one can modify or change the data once recorded. Typically, hundreds of transactions are added in one block. And each new block is linked or chained to the previous block, thus creating a chain of blocks.
LEO or Low Earth Orbit Satellites orbit around 500 to 2000Kms from earth’s surface capable of delivering low latency of less than [1] 40mS (RTT- Round Trip Time) compared to 1000-1700 mS ( RTT ) of Geostationary Satellites (35000 Km above equator; operating in Ka Band ). LEO Satellites operate in Ka or V band ( 26.5 to 75 GHz ). Higher frequencies enable higher data rates and security by packing more antennas and narrower beams. But the flip side is such high frequencies can cause attenuation due to atmospheric absorption.
The pandemic and growth of Cloud has paved the way for extremely high demand for high throughput consumer broadband which can be enabled by Satellite Broadband. Their winning feature of Frequency reuse and onboard data processing, with low latency compared to traditional FSS, will eventually pave way for the emergence, dominance, and sustenance of Satellite Broadband Services. This market of satellite manufacturing, operations, launch, and consumer equipment has a potential of tens of billions of dollars. Plus, it promises more consumers access to internet connectivity. This is a good enough driving factor for this market to thrive, grow, and stay!!
One of the most revolutionary AI-based technologies, at least for marketers, are bots. AI-based bots can perform certain human activities at a scale and speed beyond human capacity. Whether they are chatbots who can communicate, engage with, or troubleshoot customer concerns, or research bots that comb through terabytes of data to feed you critical competitor updates and data in real-time, bots are here to stay.
