AI regulates traffic, selects personnel, and helps identify criminals
The summer draws to a close but life in the analytics field is burgeoning with news. The recent announcements from technology vendors, promising projects and the ubiquitous penetration of AI in all spheres of our everyday routine has set the scene for autumn developments.
Vendor news
Zoho, a set of collaboration software, has updated its extensive range of collaboration products with new AI, workflow automation, and industry-specific functionality to. Four core collaboration tools — Zoho Projects, Zoho Notebook, Zoho WorkDrive, and Zoho Sign — are receiving new features, some of which are industry-specific. Zoho Projects, the company’s project management platform, receives natural language processing powered by the company’s AI engine, Zia, to enable users to easily search across Zoho’s apps. Then, within Projects, Zia Insights is able to create custom charts and analytics dashboards to generate task recommendations. Zoho’s dynamic note-taking app, Zoho Notebook, is also benefitting from Zia’s capabilities, adding smart summarization, task management, automatic tagging of topics, data analysis from notes, visual chart creation from notes, and calendar creation for next steps.
KNIME, one of the leading open-source data science and AI companies, has raised additional funding from its longstanding investor Invus. Since the last announcement, Invus invested another $30M, bringing total funding to $50M. This will allow KNIME, as the only open-source, low-code data science company on the market, to double down on development of its enterprise-grade AI governance and ModelOps capabilities, while continuing to stay ahead of the rapid innovation in the field. KNIME Analytics Platform is now cloud- and browser-ready and benefits from a new UX/UI, speeding up the learning curve for beginners and improving productivity for advanced users. KNIME Analytics Platform also includes K-AI, an AI assistant that helps users get started or add advanced functionality to their data projects. The commercial enterprise-grade KNIME Business Hub has been re-engineered from the ground up as well, to facilitate automation, collaboration, deployment, and governance of analytical and AI models.
Optimum Consultancy Services, IT consulting firm that specializes in data, business intelligence, and AI solutions, has announced a new strategic partnership with Qlik. Through this collaboration, Optimum will integrate Qlik’s BI tools and data integration solutions into its service offerings. This includes the powerful Qlik Sense platform and Qlik Talend Cloud. Qlik Sense will enable Optimum’s clients to unlock powerful insights from their data, enhancing decision-making processes with interactive dashboards, fully interactive analytics apps, and beautiful reports that are accessible on any device.
SAP has entered into a partnership with the appliedAI initiative. Together, AI scenarios will be explored and suitable use cases for SAP’s customers will be identified. Claiming to be Europe’s largest initiative for the application of trustworthy AI technology, appliedAI was set up in 2017 by Andreas Liebl as a division of UnternehmerTUM Munich. The appliedAI initiative seeks to provide comprehensive support to corporations such as BMW and Siemens, but also to midsize user companies, in their AI transformations, according to their mission. The exchange and joint development of knowledge, accelerator programs, and specific solutions and services are intended to help with this. Many partners of the appliedAI initiative use SAP’s software to run their businesses. The new collaboration between SAP and appliedAI opens up opportunities for the appliedAI partnership network to optimize business processes with AI and make better use of data, especially in the areas of finance, HR, and supply chain.
Outstanding projects
Mercury, a software company specialising in recruitment and staffing, has formed a multi-year alliance with Microsoft aimed at shaking up the recruitment industry. The agreement will give Mercury and its agency clients access to the power of Microsoft’s Cloud and AI technologies. It will deliver AI-powered tools that will help medium and large staffing and recruitment firms. Mercury’s platform, built on Microsoft’s Power Platform, already integrates with essential recruitment tools like LinkedIn and Microsoft Teams.