AI
Despite the growing use of automation in the workplace, some jobs are still best done by real, live humans. After all, robots aren’t yet cooking and serving en masse in restaurants or tidying guest rooms in large hotels. One novel startup in Hong Kong, though, envisions machines doing better
automation
Back in 2013, a pair of researchers at Oxford University crunched data about several hundred occupations to determine which were at greatest risk from technological change. Their conclusion? Nearly half — 47 percent, to be exact — of all jobs in the U.S. were in danger of seeing human workers replaced
Digital Leaders
Good morning and welcome to Digital Leaders; the first of our regular Q&A slots with some of the leading senior executives in the global digital space. To kick off, we are pleased to introduce Mike Nuttall, recently appointed by LendInvest to be the company’s first VP of
customer service
Companies that adopt automation and other advanced technologies can reap significant rewards — higher profits, reputation-building positive PR and more — if they succeed at improving services for customers. But such solutions only work over the long run if businesses also keep a focus on more fundamental “boring” infrastructure as well. As
enterprise apps
The China-based messaging app WeChat has seen phenomenal growth over its brief five-and-a-half-year history, having recently passed 700 million monthly active users. What makes it so popular? As a writeup in The Economist observed, quoting a U.S. venture capitalist, Tencent’s WeChat is there for its users “at every
Data
As our society has become more diverse, we’ve discovered a myriad reasons to question what once seemed like rock-solid research. Decades of medical findings, for example, turned out to be based on studies conducted almost exclusively on male subjects, raising legitimate concerns that many medicines and therapies might perform
automation
It’s no wonder that a generation used to always-on, instant communication should prefer to access customer service just as quickly and conveniently. But Generation Y’s desire for easy interactions with businesses has been greatly aided by an innovation that wasn’t available until not too long ago: private
GPS
Timing is important in marketing, but so, increasingly, is location. People served up targeted ads following a Web search at home, for instance, can end up judging those advertisements as needlessly invasive. But mobile ads aimed at customers near a store they’re interested in can boost sales significantly. For
competition
Think back to the best recommendations for businesses you’ve ever heard from friends and colleagues, and you’ll probably find a common thread running through most of them: really great customer service. Maybe an employee was remarkably knowledgeable about a product someone was having trouble with. Or maybe a
No business can be static nowadays: technology, people’s expectations, the world in general are all simply changing too quickly. A business that still has a 2006 mindset in 2016 has a good chance of not being around in a couple of years, much less 10 years from now. On
AI
If you regularly follow developments in information technology, particularly in the cloud, you’ll be familiar with terms like PaaS (platform as a service) or IaaS (infrastructure as a service), but what about AIaaS? Artificial intelligence as a service might not yet be a widely available cloud offering, but it’
digital business
We can trace back a lot of problems in business — as well as in life — to one big, though all-too-human, mistake: our frequent failure to recognize that some things simply aren’t within our control. Rather than accept that unpleasant yet undeniable fact, many of us ignore or gloss over