Mike Vizard

Interactive voice responsive (IVR) systems and their online chatbot counterparts leave a lot to be desired when it comes to customer service. Most people wind up asking to engage with an actual customer service person either because the issue they want addressed can’t be handled by a series of recorded responses or navigating their way […]

Data management historically within most enterprise IT environments has tended to be sloppy. Multiple copies of the same data reside in both production applications and various application development projects. Customer data has been rendered in multiple different ways and nobody is quite sure if any of the data has been successfully backed up any time […]

Google this week announced a bevy of initiatives at a Google Cloud Next 2018 conference that promise to democratize access to artificial intelligence (AI) tools and services delivered via the cloud. Fei-Fei Li, chief scientist for Google AI, told conference attendees that Google is committed to making it simpler to embed AI into business processes […]

Blockchain technologies coupled with machine learning algorithms are about to transform the way media and entertainment are created and consumed. In fact, smart contracts enabled by blockchain databases may soon take an Attention Economy theory based on audience scarcity that underpins most online media business models to a whole new level. Media companies are already […]

Amazon Web Services (AWS) at an AWS Summit event revealed it is extending a managed service it provides for training algorithms to include custom algorithms developed by organizations investing in artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Most AI applications are based on algorithms that are in some cases decades old. It’s only now that the cost of […]

Microsoft and EY (formerly known as Ernst & Young) have teamed up to create a rights and royalties management application based on Quorum blockchain technologies that promises to dramatically reduce the overhead associated with managing contracts between publishers and the army of contractors most of them employ. Developed originally by JP Morgan, Quorum is based […]

Atos has made available a software suite intended to make it simpler to build artificial intelligence (AI) applications using a combination of intellectual property developed by Atos and open source components that have been vetted by the global systems integrator. Jerome Sandrini, head of Big Data and cybersecurity for Atos North America, says the Atos […]

Tensions between sales teams and finance departments are as old as corporations themselves. The source of that tension stems primarily from the lack of visibility that finance teams have into the sales pipeline. To achieve that visibility, many organizations have invested heavily in customer relationship management (CRM) applications. But finance teams today are still generally […]

FinancialForce is betting that the number of businesses relying more on services to drive profitability is about to expand exponentially. The company has expanded a professional services automation (PSA) cloud application that it makes available as a complement to the suite of ERP applications built on top of the same customer records that Salesforce uses […]

A survey of 2,500 C-Level executives conducted by SAP finds more than half (52 percent) say they have implemented some form of “active intelligence” that includes a surprisingly large amount of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. The survey finds 32 percent of businesses have either already implemented or plan to implement AI in the next year, […]

Thanks to the rise of machine learning algorithms and other forms artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that will soon be augmented by “smart contracts” enabled by blockchain databases, the role of purchasing executives within organizations is about to be transformed utterly. Most of the supply chains that purchasing executives construct are relatively rigid. Terms and conditions […]

IBM today made it a little easier for organizations to build their first blockchain applications by making available a starter kit. Kathryn Harrison, a director of product management at IBM, says the IBM Blockchain Platform Starter Plan, now generally available, provides the tools needed to build and test blockchain applications in addition to providing the […]