06 Apr Is Artificial Intelligence Right for Your Business?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is something of a lofty, tech buzzword. It’s easy to imagine it as a solution reserved for huge companies using supercomputers to sift through massive stores of data. For example, IBM’s Watson is often what comes to mind when people think about AI.

Further Reaching Than You Think

In truth, AI is very general, and can be applied to many solutions and applications. In fact, you likely experience AI on a daily basis, and may not even know it.

If you shop on Amazon, you’re seeing AI at work producing other suggested purchases. If you use Google Maps, you’re seeing AI at work predicting traffic patterns for route suggestions. If you use Pandora or Spotify, you are seeing AI at work making music selection suggestions. AI is used for speech recognition and natural language processing to help Google Voice, Siri, and Alexa answer your questions.  Job search engines are leveraging AI to help better understand industry specific jargon and acronyms to improve your search results. This list goes on and on….

Easier Than Ever to Integrate

Technology cloud providers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are changing the game when it comes to the ability to integrate and leverage AI in your custom software solutions. They all offer specialized AI services that can be readily  integrated and built upon. These well documented, constantly updated tools make enterprise level AI technology accessible to non-enterprise businesses.

How We’re Leveraging This Internally for Estimation

Providing accurate estimates can be a pain point for any business. Combing through past projects to find similar examples and plugging relevant scope information into highly customized excel sheets can be time consuming. Often, the job of estimating is put on more senior members of the team who simply make a “gut estimate” for the sake of time.

Fully automating the estimation process can be challenging though as there are many factors that can be hard to account for (such as desire to work with a new client or a known to be easy client relationship). In this case, simply augmenting the process is of huge value, bringing relevant information to your fingertips and providing easy access to those self-derived formulas that will give you the information you need as an informed starting point.

At SeeSaw Labs, we’ve augmented our own estimation process. A dashboard allows project requirements to be input into a linear-regression, machine learning algorithm which populates a list of our most similar past projects. That information then helps up populate the necessary inputs to generate an estimated range for time, resources, and cost.

What This Means for Your Business

Automating or augmenting your internal processes with AI has never been more straight-forward and cost-effective. For labor intensive, repetitive tasks these cloud provided services can offer tools to abstract away the dirty work from your day-to-day processes or customer journey.

Here are a few examples of practical applications that may be applicable to your business:

• Customer support or product finding chatbot
• Categorization of large amounts of data
• Image and  face recognition in photos and videos
• Anomaly detection and notification in customer behavior data
• Size dimensions and weight estimation from photos
• “Most Similar” matching for cost estimations

How We Can Do It For You

The above list goes on and on. We’d love to learn more about your business and help determine whether AI might be beneficial to your bottom line. The most useful solutions are those built specifically to serve your business’s unique process and needs. Let’s chat about AI and how it may fit within your business to alleviate unnecessary tedium, improve an existing product, or simple bring the information you need, right to your fingertips.

How We’re Leveraging This Internally for Estimation

Providing accurate estimates can be a pain point for any business. Combing through past projects to find similar examples and plugging relevant scope information into highly customized excel sheets can be time consuming. Often, the job of estimating is put on more senior members of the team who simply make a “gut estimate” for the sake of time.

Fully automating the estimation process can be challenging though as there are many factors that can be hard to account for (such as desire to work with a new client or a known to be easy client relationship). In this case, simply augmenting the process is of huge value, bringing relevant information to your fingertips and providing easy access to those self-derived formulas that will give you the information you need as an informed starting point.

At SeeSaw Labs, we’ve augmented our own estimation process. A dashboard allows project requirements to be input into a linear-regression, machine learning algorithm which populates a list of our most similar past projects. That information then helps up populate the necessary inputs to generate an estimated range for time, resources, and cost.

How We Can Do It For You

The most useful solutions are those built specifically to serve your business’s unique process and needs. Let’s chat about AI and how it may fit within your business to alleviate unnecessary tedium, improve an existing product, or simple bring the information you need, right to your fingertips.