Adoption Of Machine Learning becomes New Normal: Rajesh Murthy, Founder Architect & Vice President Engineering, Intellicus Technologies

What is Intellicus and its' offerings for the retail sector? 
Intellicus is a 16-year-old data engineering and analytics platform. More than 60% of Fortune companies are using Intellicus to build powerful reports and dashboards with ease. Our interactive web and mobile platforms give users the power to access, view, and interact with corporate data anywhere. With over 17,000 installations worldwide, we are assisting organizations to make better-informed decisions. With our data engineering services, we not just help organizations implement advanced analytics but also help them with all of the stages that come before actual analysis, like collection, cleansing, and transforming their data into a usable format. What we really tend to ensure at Intellicus is when a customer comes to us for a BI solution, we provide them an end-to-end data solution, where from collection to predictive insight generation becomes a seamless cycle and data analytics becomes the least of their worries.

For the retail industry, we provide unified AI-based analytics and reporting solution, empowering them to better understand their customers, foresee future trends, maximize revenue and optimize overall operations.

Tell us about the sectors you are offering services in and how has been the experience so far? 
We are providing data engineering and analytics solutions in multiple industries like retail, healthcare, logistics, BPO, banking, and verticals like human resources, PMO, finance operations, etc. The experience has been tremendously rewarding and valuable in terms of learning and shaping Intellicus throughout the years. We have been consistently utilizing customer needs and feedback to come up with innovative solutions to their problems. This has also enabled us to foresee any future demand in one sector that has been a staple in the other and empower our clients with next-gen customized solutions.

How your services are different from your competitors? 
Intellicus has been in the BI and analytics market for the last 16 years, where competition is stiff with the presence of multiple international brands. However, we have consistently witnessed growth due to Intellicus’ exceptional capability to deliver customized solutions to each and every client and provide consistent 24*7 support for any of their requirement.

The self-serve BI module is very popular among the business users. Also, a fantastic in-house services team, which does implementation projects, and our training programs enable customer staff to quickly adopt Intellicus.

Currently, we are a product of choice for more than 17,000 large- & small-scale enterprises across the globe owing to our brilliant team and their efforts to delight our customers with next-gen technologies like AI/ML and NLP.

Do you have any big brand under your umbrella? Please give us a few names. 
We have worked with multiple national and international brands in the past and are currently working with noteworthy brands like PTC, Microfocus, Walgreens, Patanjali, Amrutanjan, Schneider Electric, etc.

Please tell us about the partnership with Patanjali.
We have been working with Patanjali for more than a year now and it has been a great journey driving towards success. Intellicus has successfully changed the way their sales team operate. We have moved all of their data from manual processing to our advanced analytics platform, which made their operations paperless and empowered their leaders to get dynamic insights quickly. We have provided them end-to-end visibility in their sales process, which enables them to have high-level insights like top 10 products or top 10 sales agencies of the month. We have also empowered them to dig deep to the lowest level and monitor the performance of an individual or drill down to the exact pin code and see the brand’s performance there. Advanced location analytics further contextualize these insights for their leaders.

Tell us about the challenges that companies usually face while engaging with AI / ML for the first time and what are the things that they should keep in mind?
Adopting Machine Learning has its first-timer anxiety for the organizations. But when they see the results matching the actuals better than their previous way of projections, then it becomes their new normal.

Initially, the data warehouses may not be designed to collect as much volume and variety of data needed for advanced algorithms, but eventually, they start bringing in that using Intellicus ETL’s data pipelines.

At Intellicus, we ease this for our customers by providing them services of our in-house data scientists, while also promoting citizen data scientists with our self-service BI capabilities. Another issue organizations usually face is the lack of the right data for AI.

How AI/ML is helping the retails sector in understanding the customers?
AI/ML brings two benefits – one, by predicting individual consumer behavior and the other is predicting mass consumer trend. Both of these are important to do efficient marketing campaigns, open the offers, procurement, stock replenishment, and shelf placement. 

For example, clustering-based market basket analysis will help in keeping items sold together near to one another. Sending a promotional message to a repeat customer just at the right time of the next purchase, this type of analysis can be done to create an unsaid comfort to the customers. Retailers with a passion for customer service thrive on the insights from machine learning!

Also, by analyzing mass consumer behavior and purchases, they can segment customers into various groups and target the right marketing campaigns for each group. They can also arrive at optimal attainable prices for each customer and identify the right pricing to increase sales. They can analyze buying patterns, market trends, socioeconomic conditions, and other factors to accurately forecast revenue. With demand forecasting, they can better manage inventory and supply chain and prevent any losses. From generating personalized recommendations to enhancing marketing campaigns, AI-based analytics can give retailers a much-needed competitive advantage.