Enterprises have been relying on business intelligence tools like Cognos, Tableau and Power BI for decades now. These types of software revolutionized how businesses generated reports, analyzed them and made crucial decisions (both daily and long term) aimed at improving their market performance. They especially changed the speed at which businesses could generate information and reach these decisions.

But in 2020, these tools are beginning to show their age.

BI Tools Are Not Perfect

The primary function of most BI tools is to get business information in front of those who should act upon it. In practice, this means generating reports or providing interactive dashboards…

Over the past year, retailers and distributors have faced huge challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Supply chains have been disrupted and workforces have been reduced. Customers have shifted massively to purchasing online rather than in-store, and businesses have been forced to adjust their practices accordingly. CrowdANALYTIX has already created a solution that allows retailers and distributors to scale their businesses quickly and easily so that they can compete in this changed — and continually changing — market. …

CrowdANALYTIX creates automation solutions, and our most popular offering is DataX, an AI-driven product data onboarding solution for retailers and distributors. There are countless benefits to automating this process, and the ones we tend to focus on are increased speed, increased accuracy, lower costs, and of course scalability. But are there challenges when a business chooses to automate their product onboarding?

Of course there are! And we want to be transparent about them.

Automation is not instant.

Every company wants a solution that will instantly digitally transform their business, deliver ROI immediately, and require no onboarding period. Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, this is more…

When are machine learning models not enough?

AI companies like CrowdANALYTIX give their customers the best AI models for their needs, and that means offering accuracy levels of at least 94–96%. In AI development, the majority of models fail — at CrowdANALYTIX, close to 90% of the models our scientists create never get used by a client because they are not accurate or precise enough. …

What is General AI?

Although most people outside of the industry do not consider AI in these terms, there are actually two different types of AI that we can think about and discuss: the kind of AI we typically use in real life, for instance for doing quality control in manufacturing or for generating fashion recommendations on retail websites; and the kind of AI we tend to see in movies, which we might call “General AI.” This is AI with human-like thinking and reasoning capabilities, the kind of humanoid robots that end up overtaking the human race in science fiction films. …

In Part 1 we discussed what CrowdANALYTIX’ eCommerce solutions can do to improve conversions for fashion brands as they rely more and more on online sales. The process simply outlined includes:

1. Adding subjective tags to products
2. Tying attributes and values to the SKUs associated with them
3. Creating customer clusters

All using AI algorithms for the fastest, most accurate results.

We then explored how all of this data can be leveraged together to improve three key aspects of eCommerce for fashion retailers: Search, Marketing, and Design. …

One of the solutions offered by CrowdANALYTIX is our autonomous product data onboarding solution that integrates seamlessly with most popular Product Information Management(PIM) systems. Thanks to this solution, brands have sped up the growth of their product catalogs and begun offering their customers much broader product selections, helping retailers compete with even the biggest eCommerce sites that have grown their product catalogs into the tens of millions. Automating the process can increase the speed of product onboarding by 60–70% on average, giving most businesses a quick and significant return.

Beyond this level of automation, CrowdANALYTIX has also helped retailers across…

It’s the first step towards robust AI solutions

Digital transformations begin with structured data. Yet most businesses are still dealing with heavily siloed, unstructured data that holds them back from implementing technologies that could help them gain efficiencies. Even worse, the backlogs of unstructured data within businesses are growing by 55–65% every single year. More data is piled on during every second of an enterprise’s continued existence, and even more is added when the business is in a period of growth: emails, PDFs, images, video files, and audio content proliferate.

This data plays a major role in digital transformation. As long as it remains unstructured, it is difficult…