Augmented Reality in Commercial Aviation

Augmented Reality enables an integration between virtual reality and physical reality. This technology has become really popular in multiple sectors including entertainment, business, healthcare, and aviation as well.

Why is AR a much-needed requirement in aviation?

In aviation, AR is considered as one of the necessary innovations to bring safety to the processes. The aviation industry has definitely evolved a lot in terms of safety. But there is still room for improvement. Pilot errors are the most crucial areas that requires work.

According to a survey, about 85% of aviation accidents happen due to an error made by pilots. However, this clearly suggests that there is something wrong with the techniques and technologies that pilots use while flying.

Even the smallest decisions such as checking the weather, reading control panels, evaluating the maintenance of an aircraft takes a lot of effort in the aviation industry. And that is where AR becomes a perfect solution.

Also with augmented reality, the market value is supposed to achieve $90 billion worth by 2020. This presents unique opportunities and benefits for the aviation industry as well.

1. AR navigation in commercial flying

Augmented reality is not a new term in aviation. However, it has been seen as a military technology for a long time. Jet planes all over the world use augmented reality navigation to fly, target, navigate and complete their mission. A glass screen in front of the pilot allows him or her to make correct decisions that keep the pilot and the fighter jet safe.

Now, the same technology is coming to the commercial flying. New startups are presenting augmented reality navigation systems for commercial pilots. These systems are able to make the visualization more advanced, which allows the pilot to make the right decisions and have a safe flight.

2. AR in air traffic visualization

Augmented reality has the capacity to make the air-traffic visualization more effective. Pilots will be able to have a 360-degree view with statistics and virtual images that make air traffic clearly visible to them. As a result, pilots can keep an eye on the air traffic and fly safely. The enhanced use of AR in air-traffic visualization can improve the safety aspect of the aviation industry to a great extent.

3. AR in aircraft maintenance

The application of AR in aircraft maintenance can result in amazing benefits in terms of safety. The commercial flight engineers can leverage AR to inspect and maintain their aircraft. The technology offers real-time details with a combination of technologies such as 3D scanning, sensors, and others. With such a comprehensive inspection, the maintenance of the aircraft can become incredibly successful, which brings safety to the industry.

In 3D scanning, AR technologies offer a clear visual of the aircraft which allows the engineers to easily find dents, scratches and other issues with the aircraft. The technology is already available in the military. And now, the commercial aviation industry is also starting to realize its importance.

Thus, to conclude, there is a big change coming in the commercial aviation industry with Augmented Reality, as these pointers have aptly depicted.

Myths about Cognitive Technology Debunked

Cognitive technology is one of the widely discussed concepts in the world of business. These discussions help businesses understand the importance and opportunities of the technology. However, there are several myths associated with cognitive technology that limit the knowledge of enterprises.

According to a survey on cognitive technology, businesses and enterprises feel confident about the future of AI and cognitive technologies. However, it would be important to clear the myths in order to successfully adapt cognitive technologies.

In this article, we are going to clear the air around the common misconceptions around congnitive technology.

1. Cognitive technology is all about automated functions

There is a myth among enterprises that cognitive technologies are only used to bring automation in the workforce. The technology is used to reduce the required human labor. However, this is not the whole truth.

AI and cognitive technologies are much more than automation solutions. The applications of these technologies can be used in multiple processes including insights. For instance, cognitive technologies can be used to create better customer service for the end users. The technology helps in understanding the customer data through insights and provide relevant and satisfactory services to the customers. So, the application is more about the intelligence, rather than just automation.

2. The financial outcomes are very basic with cognitive technologies

There are business owners who feel that AI technologies require a lot of investment and result in very basic financial outcomes. Also, they argue that the time lag between the investment and benefits is too long for general organizations.

However, the above-mentioned survey suggests that about 83% of companies that invested in cognitive technologies have obtained impressive or moderate benefits in terms of finances. So, the improved functions of the business get much better economic results with the application of cognitive technologies.

3. Cognitive technologies increase unemployment

One of the most argued topics in the application of cognitive technologies is the automation that brings unemployment. However, this is all wrong. In fact, cognitive technologies present great opportunities for the human employees to work side-by-side with the artificial intelligence.

The technology definitely enhances the productivity of employees, but it doesn’t reduce their importance in any manner. Plus, the arrival of cognitive technologies has created multiple new jobs for professionals, which is also a positive outcome in terms of the future of employment.

4. Cognitive technology is just a trend that will fade away

Many people suggest that AI and cognitive technologies are just a trend that is getting hyped by the media. But what they don’t know is that AI presents clear signs of acceptance and growth on a global scale. In fact, the AI market is expecting $59.8 billion revenue worldwide by the end of 2025. And that says a lot about cognitive technology’s future.

5. The application of cognitive technologies requires a complete transformation

This is another myth that stops companies and organizations from implementing AI in their business. A few company leaders think that cognitive technology application changes the functionality of the business drastically. However, it is not about the transformation, but the integration of cognitive technologies in business.

Final words:

The studies are presenting clear signals towards the success of the cognitive technology. It is the time that you understand it too. Debunking these myths will help businesses embrace this technology wholeheartedly and gain from it.

How Machine Learning can help with Business Development

Accelerated business growth has always been about innovation in functionalities such as customer experience, employee management, and others. And with advanced machine learning technologies, businesses are now able to make useful changes to bring better results for their companies.

The biggest advantage of machine learning in the corporate sector is the ability to make automated decisions without taking risks in any manner. This is why the corporate sector is expecting $59.8 billion revenue with machine learning and AI by 2025. More and more companies are integrating machine learning into their businesses to innovate various aspects.

Here are the top 4 ways that businesses can leverage machine learning.

1. Bringing personalization to customer service

Businesses keep on looking for effective ways to improve the quality of customer service and reduce the investment requirements. And machine learning offers those exact solutions to obtain those goals. With ML technologies, businesses get the ability to combine their years of data related to customer services and merge it with natural language processing technology.

The NLP algorithms make customer interactions more personal by leveraging the data to provide satisfactory services. Each and every customer gets the most accurate answers to their questions, which makes them happy. Plus, the same technology reduces the need for too much investment, resulting in lower customer servicing costs.

2. Making recruitment process convenient and successful

For a long time, hiring and recruitment processes faced multiple struggles. The difficulty in shortlisting the right candidates, removing the human biases, asking the right questions and keeping it cost-effective have presented troubles for recruiters.

But now, with machine learning, it is possible to bring automation in the hiring process. Corporates are now able to shortlist candidates among thousands of applications without skipping a valuable candidate. The machine learning tools are able to analyze credentials and match them with relevant job profiles.

Also, the same technology can detect biases and remove those factors while conducting the assessment. It all makes machine learning a cost-effective and successful way of hiring people.

3. Improving finance management and handling methods

Machine learning also offers the capacity to manage financial processes of a company. In fact, the processes such as payment, invoice analysis, and others can become automatic with machine learning.

A huge number of invoices can be analyzed in no time. The companies can reduce their efforts and time on managing their finances and save a lot of cash too. Plus, the security of machine learning technologies provides protection to the processes at the same time.

4. Marketing and Management

Marketing and management can also get innovative results with machine learning. The AI tools are already being used in gathering customer data, supply chain management, and other processes.

Companies are leveraging machine learning tools to find data related from social media about products, logos, and other factors. All this data is used to create a better brand exposure and to get successful outcomes.

All in all, AI and machine learning offers innovation to almost every part of a business. So, it would be wise to integrate right tools and algorithms to improve ROI and make your business a success.

How IoT can improve CX at Airports

From arrival to security checks that people face in an airport, it can prove to be hectic and irritating. The passengers have to go through multiple checkpoints in order to board a flight. In the end, it all becomes an experience that no passenger likes.

However, things are changing with the enhancements of technologies. Over 95 percent of passengers carry a mobile device while visiting airports. And that presents a great opportunity for airports to integrate IoT in their services to improve the customer experience. The well-connected Internet of Things can not only reduce the time requirement, but it can also improve the security measures for an airport.

Here, in this article, you will find all the customer experiences that can get an immense level of improvement with IoT.

1. Effortless security checks

The security checks are the biggest considerations for customers as well as airport authorities and IoT can become an effective solution to that problem. The automatic sensors can be implemented at security checkpoints which can help to reduce long queues.

These sensors can connect to the mobile device of the passenger to know the person’s identity and boarding details. The same information can reach the security guards on her device along with the analysis reports of their luggage.

The facial recognition technology can also be attached to the security checkpoints. A customer can opt for such a technology, which will allow airport authorities to match his or her facial features with the data available in blockchain systems.

As a result, every security point will receive information related to the identity of the passenger, which will reduce the time requirement of security checks.

2. Easy luggage handling

Another aspect of customer experience that people care about is luggage handling. Airport authorities can include the smart device features in their baggage management.

First of all, the luggage should provide the ability to the passenger to receive information regarding the weight of the luggage on their mobile device. Also, it should include a mobile payment facility too. Authorities can include tracking sensors in the scale to get a report of the baggage.

There are smart bags available in the market that provide valuable reports regarding the temperature, g-force, humidity and other data on a smartphone. These smart bags are able to give alerts whenever the bag is opened. Similarly, the bags have an automatic lock system, which activates whenever the luggage gets out of reach from your mobile device.

The airport security can open and check your bags, but the complete report can appear on your device. This can reduce the problem of losing your items from the luggage.

3. Boarding assistance

IoT facilities can also improve customer experience in terms of boarding. The information about the flights, directions, and location can help passengers navigate their way in an airport on their own.

The smart devices can become their personal assistance and lead them towards the right direction. The devices can offer an exact boarding time to the passengers. So, a passenger doesn’t have to keep waiting in one place for the boarding turn.

There are various other customer experience aspects that IoT can help with. But, it is all about correct application.

Do let us know in case there are any other ways through which IoT can elevate the overall airport experience!

Artificial Intelligence in Social Media Marketing

It is increasingly being proven that AI is helping marketers find leads and engage like never before through social media. Targeting social media users over the online space is a highly specialized and complex field. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be a potential catalyst that can drive the fortunes of digital businesses across the globe.

Why the need to introduce AI into marketing?

73% of B2B users need to be nurtured for quite some time before they are converted to active leads for the business. In a traditional ecosystem, marketers simply cannot keep pace with the lead management scenario that evolves daily for each and every enquiry. AI can help devise and deliver personalized content to nurture leads to a better degree.

How does this happen?

Marketers can leverage the basic principle of AI to understand human psychology and its implications in the real world scenario. When marketing automation uses AI, it helps understand and monitor various aspects of customer behaviour like –

1 – How they spend their time online

2 – What posts or products get the most visibility from them on social media

3 – What do they use the social media for

They combine this with past marketing campaign data and then build appropriate marketing messages that have good potential for success. Here are some ways in which this can be done.

1. Better insights on CRM

Bits and pieces of useful information may lay hidden in plain view in various mediums like emails, phone calls, or social media posts/comments. With Artificial Intelligence, you get the right hints about what steps can be taken to subtly induce the prospect to move up the sales funnel towards successful conversion.

With the presence of sufficient amount of data, you can also configure a sentiment analysis activity to grasp the purchase goals/motivators behind the words used by the prospects on social media.

2. Align social media content with buyer persona

With a structured buyer persona, a marketers’ targeting efforts yield better fruits. AI can help smartly segregate customers into personas for a better level of personalized marketing. AI can also learn about which type of content (blog posts, whitepapers, videos, case studies, or other marketing collaterals) will help which type of personas at a particular level in the sales funnel. This way, customers will find only the content which is relevant and timely to their particular need.

3. Social sentiment analysis

With continuous social media analysis a viable brand analysis picture can be formed. However, keeping track of all the posts and ads and analyzing these on different platforms can be complex.

It eats up a lot of time for the marketer which could have been otherwise used to push fresh and unique content for the readers. This is where AI comes in. Take NY Times’ case – it has been using chatbots in innovative ways to create a deep one-on-one experience for its readers.

Thus, with astounding levels of competition to capture eyeballs on the social media, these advantages prove that AI adopters will have an upper hand in this regard.

Big Data in Retail Industry

The amount of data involved is huge in the retail industry. This is the reason why industry leaders keep on looking for innovative methods to make their brands more successful.

“Big data” is the name for a collection of huge amount of data. However, it is also associated with the management, storage and use of data. With more than 6 billion mobile users all over the world, big data offers retailers the ability to understand consumer behaviour and market their brands like never before.

Here are the ways big data can help retail brands getting success in their market.

1. Getting precise insights about the retail sector

With the ever-changing market, retail brands need high-quality insights regarding the brand categories, customers, technologies and other aspects. And big data technologies prove to be a perfect choice in order to bring precision in that. The brand managers can get multiple combinations of reports that weren’t possible without big data technology.

2. Accelerating the analysis process

The ability to take action at the right moment defines the success rate in the retail sector. The brands need high-performing analytics to predict and take actions. This has become feasible with modern big data technologies.

The big data technology offers the ability to generate daily predictions and analyze the market in no time. As a result, there is no need to wait for days and lose the opportunities to succeed in the market.

3. Better coordination between brand and IT

Before big data, the retail brands always felt that there was a gap between their business and IT strategies. However, this problem can go away for good with big data implements. The IT support can design applicable strategies for retail brands including factors. The exploration, visualization, simplicity of understanding and other benefits make it easier for retail brands to adapt to big data IT solutions.

4. Fast decision-making that improves supply chain

A retail brand has to manage and handle multiple steps of the supply chain from the inventory to the shelf. These steps require immediate decision-making capacities. But that is only possible when the business leaders have enough data available regarding the channels and segments associated with their supply chain.

Knowing which area is beneficial in terms of brand popularity makes it easy to manage the supply chain for high ROI. And that is exactly what big data implementation offers for the business.

5. Understanding and fulfilling customer demands

The whole foundation of the retail industry lies in the demands of customers. Retail brands need to understand those demands in real-time in order to stock the right products and provide them to the customers. The big data presents the opportunity to get accurate data on customer demands, which helps in forecasting the potential sales. As a result, brands can stock the necessary quantity and save themselves from wastage and loss.

Big data technologies offer all those solutions that any retail brand requires in order to succeed in the market. So, it would be a smart strategy to find such solutions and get your brand visible and successful.

UX Design for Chatbots

If you look at the market and business trends, Chatbots are available on almost every list. All the big businesses and brands are leveraging chatbots. On the other hand, small brands are planning to have one for their business.

Experts say that chatbots are going to cover about 85% of customer service related interactions in the coming years. However, the popularity has also increased the demand for a quality experience. Hence, businesses can’t compromise the UX design of their bots in any manner.

Sure the functionality of the bots matters a lot, but it is the user experience of the design that brings customers again and again.

Here, in this article, you will find the most valuable UX guidelines to create an impressive chatbot for your business.

1. Make it easy to understand

The initial impression matters the most in your chatbot design. The users should be able to understand the functions and the processes of the chatbot very easily. Only then, you can expect them to come back for further interactions.

So, make sure you include exciting and helpful elements in the onboarding process of the chatbot. This will make the design more impressive for the users.

2. Add elements to maintain the conversational flow

Many times, the users don’t realize that they are interacting with a chatbot. So, if the bot does not maintain a conversational flow, the users might leave and never come back.

To avoid this, it is important to add elements that can help you maintain a conversational flow. A chatbot can ask pre-defined questions or present suggestions to the user. These elements in the design help out the user throughout the conversation. Some of the advanced chat platforms such as Facebook Messenger and Kik leverage such elements in their chat methods. These platforms offer regular response suggestions during an ongoing conversation, which helps the users.

3. Give it a consistent personality

The personality of the chatbot is probably the most important UX design component. The goals should be to attain consistency. Plus, the bot should sound friendly during the conversation.

To achieve that, you need to focus on providing clear diction capacity and simple language to the chatbot. Use a vocabulary that is generally used in the common language. This will make the conversations more smooth and friendly.

4. Prepare chatbot for anticipated issues

A conversation between a human and a chatbot presents some difficulties. Sometimes, a user might ask an invalid question or a query, which won’t allow the Chabot to answer. However, that should not stop the conversation. Your design should get the user on the right track for the conversations to flow. For that, you can include polite reminders of the purpose of the bot. The bot can provide suggestions and tips to help the user ask the right questions and queries. This way, the conversation won’t end in the middle.

So, in this way a good UX can help you create an impressive chatbot and also create immersive user experiences for your customers.

Natural Language Processing tools for Chatbots

Language understanding tools have the capacity to make chatbots smarter. These tools are designed to enhance the communication capabilities of the chatbots. The ability to understand the sentiment, create an automatic summary and find a relationship between the topics. All these abilities can make your chatbot much more effective for the users.

Here are 5 NLP tool choices that can help your chatbot deliver high impact performance in customer servicing.

1. LUIS

Microsoft offers cognitive services to provide language intelligence and other capabilities. The LUIS or Language Understanding Intelligence Service offers high-quality models that help chatbots understand various entities and intents. The availability of the models related to times, places and others enhance the performance of chatbot. The users can get much better experience, as an active understanding of the language is used.

The tool is compatible with various platforms such as KiK, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Skype, SMS, and others. You can get both free as well as paid versions of the tool.

2. RASA NLU

When you are looking for an open source method of classifying the intent, RASA NLU is your answer. The tool offers a complete set of APIs that make entity extraction highly convenient for the chatbot.The libraries come along with the tool that enhances the capacity of any bot. The corporate sectors like health, insurance, travels, telecoms and banks get the maximum advantage of this tool.

The tool is available for free and works on platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Telegram, SMS, Skype, Line, and others. This is why the tool has gained an incredible level of popularity in multiple sectors.

3. Amazon Lex

The tool can provide high-quality language capabilities to your mobile applications. The specific properties include natural language recognition and speech recognition too. Hence, the chatbot can provide both text and voice experience to the users.

This will improve the ability of the bot to assist and help the users conducting various tasks such as placing orders, opening an account, making bookings, and others. The tool offers a simple console, which makes the processes much more convenient for the chatbot.

4. API AI

Known as one of the most trustworthy language understanding tools, API AI makes brand specific interactions easier. The businesses can leverage this tool to create bots that can provide multiple services to the users.

The conversational interface with this tool takes not much effort. Plus, the powerful features of the tool allow the bots to answer highly complex questions asked by the users. The bots get to leverage the stored knowledge along with the machine learning. Hence, the bot learns and gets better.

Some other valuable features include multilingual interactions, cross-platform support, easy integrations and others.

5. ChatScript

ChatScript allows you to create a script for the dialog conducted by the chatbot. The tool uses the scripting rules to create extensive texts. Plus, it scans documents, memorizes old interactions and manages a large volume of users.

All the mentioned tools have their own set of properties. You can add these tools and enhance the capabilities of your chatbot.

Blockchain Technology in Investment Banking

Data storage is one of the prime requirements to manage an investment bank. Banks create multiple databases to store valuable information regarding the customers, transactions, and others. These databases play a critical role while completing any task. Banks are required to offer and obtain the needed data to facilitate a smooth transaction. All the counterparties require informational pieces on a regular basis. Managing huge databases becomes a troubling and expensive task for investment banks.

It is here that Blockchain can display immense potential for investment banks.

It can become a viable answer to all the database related issues faced by the banks. Blockchain database systems provide one platform for all the counterparties to access the required data. The highly secured access system keeps the databases protected too.

According to a report, Blockchain has been able to reduce the banking costs and increase savings up to 30%. Also, it is reported that investments in Blockchain efforts in capital markets will rise from $75 million in 2015 to a staggering $400 million by 2020.

The banks can integrate all the fragments of databases together and make their office processes much more cost-effective.

1. Lower reporting costs with transparent data optimization

The blockchain provides a single source for the data. The source offers a highly optimized quality of the data for the banks, which brings an incredible level of transparency in the financial reporting.

The verification of the data becomes much easier as the authorities, clients, and customers share the data at the same time. This way, the banks get to create financial reports without investing a huge amount on gathering and verifying the data.

2. Lower processing costs with efficient operations

Blockchain centralizes the whole operation of investment banks. The operations related to finding details of customers, connecting with clients and others take much lesser effort with the continuous availability of the required data. A single source provides all information about every function.

With that, banks get to manage the digital identities efficiently. Multiple branches can use the same source to understand customers and provide quick and easy services. By doing this, the banks get to save a lot of operational costs too.

3. Lower compliance costs with transparency

With traditional database systems, banks have to spend a huge amount of money in communicating information with all the counterparties. Banks need to gather data and audit them again and again to ensure the compliance in the functions.

These costs can also be reduced with blockchain. A single database system becomes a perfect solution to bring transparency and audit transactions conveniently. The whole process becomes visible to all the authorities. As a result, the costs of compliance reduce by 30 to 50 percent.

Other benefits

There are various other functions that an investment bank needs to manage. Some of the functions include middle office work, trade support, settlement, investigations, and clearance. It is obvious that all the mentioned functions require the availability of the right data at the right time.

Banks are required to gather, analyze and confirm the data before taking any action. Hence, the availability of a blockchain database system makes these functions much more cost-effective.

Recent reports have presented positive outcomes of the blockchain technology and thus, more investment banks are exploring to implement this database technology in their work.

Outlook of Internet of Things (IoT) in 2018

The humongous connection of sensors, human beings, computing devices, and other things connected over the internet to pass information holds tremendous potential. This underlying principle of IoT can shape lives to be better than before and get proactive alerts rather than a reaction.

It is this possibility that is taking IoT to a whole new level of adoption across the planet. Consider the below numbers –

1. The number of connected devices will rise from 15.4 billion (2014) to 30.7 billion (2020) and further to 75.4 billion (by 2025)
2. The global spending on IoT (hardware, software, integration, monitoring, and analysis) was $737 billion. This will go reach a whopping $1.29 trillion by 2020!

This data proves that IoT holds substantial value in our lives in the coming years and businesses are already marshaling their resources to help take this technology mainstream.

How IoT impacts customer lives?

IoT provides personal assistance by regulating temperature, locking doors, activating burglar alarms, and so on. The continuous data flowing through all the objects connected over the IoT has provided a new dynamic in the world of AI. Companies are actively using IoT paired with AI to create interesting and useful products.

Here are some ways in which IoT will influence customer lives in 2018.

1. Voice Technology

IoT and AI paired together have provided people with a way of managing everything ranging from their personal to professional lives, through speech. Be it controlling AC temperature to turning on car ignition, voice assistants are fast becoming a part of everyone’s daily lives.

Ford has incorporated Alexa into their cars to enable easy radio toggle and accurate traffic updates which the user can ask for, through his speech. This will make driving safer. Alexa can also be installed into your home to act as a hub to control your personal gadgets and electronics.

2. Healthcare

The massive data collected by IoT can help determine diseases quickly and also provide accurate and relevant medications for the same. This is done by gathering information and insights on the disease from the internet.

IoT can help hospitals maintain patient records, manage workflow, and optimize appointments to help doctors carry out their duty more effectively. Using IoT enabled software to monitor blood pressure and heartbeat can help doctors recognize the cause by studying data provided by IoT.

3. Smart Refrigerators

Imagine if you were to be informed beforehand of a shortage of supplies in next 1-2 days so that you can fill in the grocery provisions easily? Yes, that’s what the IoT enabled refrigerator of the future would be capable of doing. It will generate a grocery shopping list based on which staple is running low on supply.

At the store end too, they can push notifications to your smartphone right when you step into the supermarket. They will alert you to add specific items on your list/shopping cart based on your past buying behavior or trends.

Thus, IoT as a tech trend has been advancing rapidly due to the immense value it has displayed across various facets of our lives. It will continue to grow and influence people in a positive way in 2018 and beyond.