How To Be a Super Hero
With the Avengers End Game breaking box-office records around the world, we thought it opportune to highlight how machine learning can turn ordinary humans into super heroes.
Machine Learning Augments Human Intelligence
When it comes to business decisions, we tend to prioritise a combination of experience and gut feel. Machine learning combines our past experience and domain knowledge with advanced analytics, giving us new super powers in decision making. This comes in the form of accessing more accurate predictions, forecasts, pattern and anomaly detection, and ultimately, a better understanding of customer behaviour. All of this sets a business on the path to competitive advantage.
Optimising Operations
Machine learning when used with automation and other types of operations, allows businesses to optimise their operations, reduce inefficiencies and wastage, and ultimately reduce cost. Here are a couple of examples.
Clustering customers based on a muti-facetted set of characteristics allows us to deliver curated messages that speak to their individual needs.
Uplift or response modelling goes a step further and makes predictive analytics actionable by segmenting a target population into 4 categories based on their response to a given intervention, such as an election or marketing message.
Customers are said to:
- respond positively (Persuadables)
- respond negatively (Sleeping Dogs)
- respond anyway (Sure Things)
- won’t ever respond (Lost Causes)
Clearly the Persuadables are the ones to focus on. The machine learning techniques underpinning clustering and uplift modelling help make marketing campaigns more effective, thus saving precious time, effort and money.
Enriching local data
By combining and overlaying data from multiple sources, business can enrich their internal data, an upgrade as it were, to better quality decisions.
For example, the Zindi competition platform helped a bus ticketing company in Kenya combine data from Uber with their own ticketing data to predict demand for their bus routes, thus greatly improving the company’s financial planning.
Businesses around the world are gaining immensely from integrating AI and Machine learning into their daily operations. Whether customer facing or internally, both small and large businesses are now using their data and publicly available data sets to make their operations as efficient as possible.
Machine learning is here to stay. Please don’t wait too long.