Business Solutions with AI — June 5, 2023

Business Solutions with AI

With the explosion of AI, Businesses are deploying AI solutions that are aligned with business objectives, meet customer needs, and deliver value to the organization.  This blog explores the AI solutions that can be applied to various business decision-making scenarios, enabling organizations to leverage data and intelligent algorithms to make more informed and efficient choices. Here are some everyday use cases for AI in business decision-making:

  1. Process Automation: AI-powered robotic process automation (RPA) can automate repetitive and rule-based tasks, such as data entry, report generation, and invoice processing. This frees up human resources, improves productivity, and reduces errors.
  2. Predictive Analytics: AI can analyze historical data to identify patterns and make predictions about future outcomes. This can help businesses in areas such as sales forecasting, demand prediction, inventory management, and risk assessment.
  3. Customer Segmentation and Personalization: AI algorithms can analyze customer data to segment them into different groups based on their preferences, behavior, and demographics. This enables businesses to personalize their marketing efforts, optimize product offerings, and tailor customer experiences.
  4. Fraud Detection: AI-powered systems can analyze large volumes of data and detect anomalies or suspicious patterns that indicate fraudulent activities. This is particularly useful in the finance, insurance, and e-commerce sectors to identify and prevent fraudulent transactions.
  5. Supply Chain Optimization: AI can optimize supply chain operations by analyzing data on factors such as demand patterns, inventory levels, transportation routes, and production capacity. This helps businesses optimize inventory management, reduce costs, and improve overall efficiency.
  6. Sentiment Analysis: AI techniques can analyze customer feedback, social media posts, and online reviews to understand customer sentiment toward products, services, or brands. This information can guide business decisions related to marketing campaigns, product improvements, and reputation management.
  7. Pricing Optimization: AI algorithms can analyze market dynamics, competitor pricing, customer behavior, and other relevant factors to optimize pricing strategies. This helps businesses determine the right price points for their products or services, maximizing revenue and profit.
  8. Risk Assessment and Credit Scoring: AI can analyze various data sources to assess risks associated with loans, insurance claims, or credit approvals. By considering factors like credit history, financial data, and behavioral patterns, AI models can provide more accurate risk assessments and aid in decision-making.
  9. Demand Forecasting and Inventory Management: AI can analyze historical sales data, market trends, and external factors (e.g., weather, and events) to forecast future product demand. This helps businesses optimize inventory levels, reduce stockouts, and minimize carrying costs.
  10. Churn Prediction and Customer Retention: By analyzing customer data and behavior patterns, AI can identify customers who are likely to churn or discontinue using a service. This allows businesses to take proactive measures, such as targeted retention campaigns or personalized offers, to reduce churn and retain valuable customers.
  11. Recommender Systems: AI-powered recommendation engines can analyze customer preferences, browsing history, and purchase behavior to provide personalized product or content recommendations. This enhances the customer experience, increases sales, and improves customer engagement.
  12. Employee Recruitment and Retention: AI can analyze candidate resumes, job descriptions, and historical employee data to identify the best candidates for specific roles. Additionally, AI can help predict employee attrition risks, enabling businesses to proactively implement retention strategies.

These are just a few examples of how AI can be leveraged for business decision-making. The specific use cases and benefits will vary depending on the industry, business model, and available data.

First Principle of Everyday Life — May 30, 2021

First Principle of Everyday Life

Let’s start with a story – Manya is a girl grown up in a conservative family setup, surrounded by elder and younger siblings. Her parents are hardworking-Mother a homemaker and father disciplinarian Engineer. The environment Manya was growing up taught her one thing – observe, learn and persevere. There is no shortcut to life and attracting bounties. Rely on your hard work, common sense and keep nourishing it with real life experiences. Be closer to your roots and evolve a new experience from that which enriches everyone’s life

You must be wondering what’s the context of telling this story?  Manya is a Product Manager who employs first principles to get a sense of the problem she is working on, draws real life experiences and challenges and works upward to apply her creative self to solution- which may still not be complete but is ever evolving. In this process she has to learn, unlearn many new concepts, shoot down noises, rely sometimes on data, and mostly use common sense. 

I have been listening to lots of podcast, webinars, tweets, stories explaining the experiences of product management -what, why, how, who etc. etc. and was wondering if Product Management as a role/function is that monster or mountain to climb that it is being made out of? Why is no other role like- Design, Development, Sales, Marketing receiving this chaotic attention and definition which product management is receiving. I understand that product management is hardly a 10yr old baby and still figuring out its rightful place in the world the way Manya was exploring while growing up days. It has been a tough journey for early Product Managers to explain to whoever cares to listen what Product Management is and what Product Managers do. I guess that’s the reason for this chaos as we have been spreading thin to explain, to justify what Superman(Product managers) can, should and will be able to do :D. 

Many individuals, companies have build businesses on the top of this chaos attempting to structure this role by selling short/long term courses teaching Product management with no clear boundaries where it starts and stops. This has pained me a lot and made me feel invalidated, outdated, putting me in a race of this cat and mouse where no one wins. These paid media have made Product management role to be this shiny object which every professional wants to transition to but when they do get finally into it realise – Oh man is this what it was all about?? Its lots of dirty work, no clear role definition(expectation changes from organization to organization), picking up anything and everything that no one is ready to do and just making it happen – with no real credit. 

First principle helps in all this journey- be it to understand framework, technology, business. Whether you do this with 5 why framework (kids are natural in their inquisitiveness of questioning “Why” to understand why adults are saying something or asking them to do) or by challenging assumptions, looking for evidence, considering alternative perspective, or examining the caveat of doing something. I urge you all aspiring PMs to focus on this one thing and the rest will follow suit. There is no end to this horizontal and vertical knowledge that you may have to learn, unlearn, but what remains constant is the First Principle of life. Ending with this quote which sets the tone for your journey onwards.

“To understand is to know what to do.”

— Wittgenstein

Digital Marketing and Role of Social Media to Build Smart Libraries 2.0 — November 12, 2017

Digital Marketing and Role of Social Media to Build Smart Libraries 2.0

TERI in partnership with NITI Aayog organized Workshop on “Digital Marketing and Role of Social Media to Build Smart Libraries 2.0″ during 8-10 November 2017 ” at Seminar Hall, TERI, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi. The workshop aims at equipping the LIS (Library and Information Science) professionals with state-of-the art skills and knowledge to meet current and recent challenges in this dynamic knowledge society.

Among other resource person facilitating this 3 day spread workshop, ProductStudioz conducted workshop for Social media and Blogging, Measuring Impact and Implementing Metrics. Workshop pedagogy include tutorial presentations, demonstrations, hands-on sessions with case studies/best practices, and covered following topics:

  • Emergence of socially smart and creative librarians in digital era
  • Principles of social media and digital marketing
  • Who should create and publish content?
  • Theoretical and practical discussion on the major social media sites
    – Facebook
    – Twitter
    – Linkedin
  • Digital content strategy
  • Social Enterprise Collaboration Model

The workshop was intended for library and information professionals, knowledge managers, information entrepreneurs, and e-content developers with some experience of social media in the workplace; beginners also benefitted with this. In order to provide individual attention and training facilities, the workshop was confined to limited number of participants not exceeding 30 (Thirty).

Participants included from government institution like-
Akshaya Project(KSITM), Central Council for Research in Homoeopathy, Central Secretariat Library, DGIPR Government of Maharashtra, Election commission of India, Institute of Economic Growth (IEG) etc. and private, autonomous and corporates like Honeywell Technology Solutions, JK Cement Ltd, KPMG, Ansal University and AIIMS.

There was a mix blend of students in terms of level of expertise right from beginners to those already using Social media for daily work and the challenge for ProductStudioz was to make it informative and engaging for all level of students.

The session was conducted spread over 3 days planned in a manner that user get acquainted to each process in digital marketing right from strategy to execution.  For doing the group activities participants were divided into group of 4-6 and each group was named after social media platform like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest etc.

Day 1 – Participants learnt the Introduction of digital marketing-

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Resource Person – Ms Reeta Sharma & Dr Shantanu Ganguly, TERI

Why Digital Marketing is Important?
  • Different channels for digital marketing
  • Resources required for digital marketing essentials

It also included hand-ons exercise wherein participant learnt How to make your first Digital Marketing plan. This was followed up with Introduction to SEO, case study discussion on SEO/Sample exercise taken by Mr. Shahnawaz Khan from Digital Vidya.

Next was Facebook introduction and exercise where participants were to create and present Facebook Marketing strategy for their organisation libraries.

Day 2 – Introduction to Social media platforms like Facebook, twitter and LinkedIn

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Resource Person – Mr.Amarendra Srivastava, Omnizient Labs.

Continuing from Day 1, case studies of Social media strategy was discussed and participants also learnt to build social media marketing plan to build library of the future. Next Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn platform was introduced to participants and how they can leverage it to build communities, engage with them and promote their events. How each channel differs in their nature and audience and the best practices to use them for their brand and organization.

Day 3 – Blogging Essentials, Measuring Impact and Implementing Metrics

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Resource Person – Ms. Moushmi Srivastava, ProductStudioz

With the first 2 days preparing participants to understand the nature of social media, various platform available and its usage, Day 3 followed up with next level of reaching out to communities via Blogs. Before getting into practical exercise into creating their own blogs using WordPress participants learnt –

  • Blogging Basics
  • Types of Bloggers
  • Establishing Tone of Voice for Brands
  • Blogging Do’s and Don’ts
  • Org Versus WordPress.com
  • Using WordPress.com

Final agenda of the Workshop was to understand setting up business goals and how to measure the social media efforts and strategy that participants worked on since past 3 days. Understanding Analytics for each social media platform and analyzing the outcomes of their efforts, what is working and not working as per the goals and strategy they setup for their organization. Communicating your impact and using tools to measure ROI like Hootsuit, Bufferapp, Twitter Analytics, Google analytics, Linkedin Analytics and Facebook Insights.

The workshop came to an end with each participants presenting their digital marketing strategy for the project that was given to them, Valedictory session and Certificate distribution.

Brief on ProductStudioz

ProductStudioz was started to help startup, SME’s, Ngo’s corporate to execute the product vision, management, and customer development. Our expertise comes from working with businesses who are flexible, agile, innovative and who want their users to have a great experience.

Apart from that we conduct workshop for product development, web based marketing and using social media platforms to increase the interest in your business. We help small and medium sized businesses set up their Social Media platforms and train them on how to best utilise these platforms to draw more attention to themselves and/or their business. To conduct a similar workshop for your organization Send us an email at contact@productstudioz.com  with your query and we’ll reply as soon as we can.