Recruitment Powered By AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to be the buzzword doing the rounds of boardrooms of every big and small company around the world. Taking giant strides every passing week AI is set to dominate our lives in the near future. With various industries wholeheartedly embracing AI and furiously implementing it in their companies, it would be a no-brainer to say that AI would cover almost every aspect of our lives in the next five to ten years.

While wisdom says that change is the essence of life, a majority of people resist it. The same is the case for some people resisting AI in recruitment. Some scaremongers have been misinforming that AI would lead to a lot of losses in jobs. It would be foolish to fear machines which were created by us. It would be prudent to say that leveraging AI in recruitment can be a great tool in a company’s hand which can lead to various advantages for the organization.

How Artificial Intelligence in recruitment works?

By enhancing certain automated tasks which are repetitive and very laborious, AI helps to save a company’s precious time and resources. The machine learning tool of AI is very useful to screen quality candidates from thousands of applicants as ML has the ability to learn on its own. By automatically screening, sourcing and scheduling, AI-powered recruitment software helps a company focus only on the cream of candidates and thereby saving tons of time.

Some benefits of AI in recruitment

• AI reduces a recruiter’s tedious task and boosts his productivity.
• Automation streamlines the whole recruitment process and reduces the hiring time by half.
• A company’s reputation and goodwill increases as the responsiveness of the chatbots to the candidates is 100%.
• By standardizing the whole process and removing the anomalies, the quality of hire can be drastically improved.

Practical applications of AI in recruitment

Mya is a very popular recruitment assistant chatbot that automates almost 75% of the recruitment process. She can communicate with candidates with the help of popular messaging apps like Facebook and can also provide immediate feedback to applicants. Candidates can also ask Mya about the company’s culture and their hiring procedures.

This is definitely a huge step towards solving real-time business problems such as recruitment.

The future challenges

As technologies take time to evolve and mature it should be understood the same would be in the case of AI in recruitment. There are certain challenges which can slow down the AI juggernaut in the recruitment arena. Some of the challenges with AI in recruitment are:

• In the initial screening procedure of the resume the data should be accurate to make AI hiring effective.
• If recruiters feel they can do a better job at hiring, the HR department would be reluctant to implement AI in their offices.
• As MI can learn from itself, it can also pick up human biases and prejudices and that can adversely affect the whole recruitment process.

Most experts believe AI in recruitment can be a significant leap ahead in the sector. It would be pretty challenging in the coming days for manual HR to compete with it.

Lastly, this automation will definitely take out the stress from the entire hiring process and make it vastly efficient.

2017 – The Year Of UX

UX Design has totally revolutionized the arena of businesses worldwide. It has enabled business owners to shift the focus away from selling goods or services, and rather focus on selling experiences to the customer. With its growing influence, the field of UX design too is expanding rapidly.

For those who want to know what is in store for 2017 and 2018, here is a quick compilation of the UX design trends that will continue to be popular in 2017 and 2018:

1 – Platform independent UX

As we increasingly move to cross-platform solutions, we are looking to deliver a richer cross-platform experience to users. Be it responsive design to cater to different screen sizes, or fading online-offline channels for generating e-commerce sales, the entire world is now looking to have a contextual yet platform-agnostic user experience to be delivered to customers.

2 – Better personalization

Gone are the days of batch mailing and hoping for great conversions. Today it is all about personalization of the marketing messages after considering the views and opinions of users. For this, marketers will need to reach far and wide and sift through multiple sources of unstructured and structured data like diverse social media feeds.

3 – Move away from general UX

The scope of specialization within the UX domain is fast gaining momentum. As a result, we will see domain-specific UX design expertise emerging for sectors like Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, and within industry verticals like healthcare.

4 – Performance tracking beyond the interface

Traditional metrics like bounce rate, page visit, etc. will hold lesser prominence as performance indicators. Instead, there will be more emphasis on how well an experience was delivered to a customer.  Take the case of Snapchat Spectacles. The accessory is great for Snapchat users to interact with the platform without the use of a phone. This merging of an intuitive experience around the way a customer uses a product denotes the overall experience delivered to the Snapchat user.

5 – Merging UX into the employee workflow

A visionary management will seek to integrate UX as a management practice rather than an alienated concept in 2017 and 2018. In this, the management will employ UX and put themselves into the shoes of the employee. This will allow them to know what triggers, incentives, or limitations an employee faces at each stage of a user journey – right from suggesting an idea, to implementing it, and then seeing what happens when they fail. This UX integration will be a great motivation boost for employees to bring out their innovative steak into routine work. This trend of enabling UX design for employees is expected to gain traction in 2017 and 2018.

As evident, the forward- looking trends will play a greater role in helping businesses stay ahead competitively in a crowded digital landscape. Make sure to employ these trends into your next UX design project and enable the much needed competitive edge to your clients.

Machine Learning In Marketing

AI and its associated concepts of Machine Learning and NLP are fast affecting all major functions of a business. Digital marketing too can be counted as one of the sectors that have seen the massive influence of ML seep in.

The involvement of Machine Learning into sales and marketing activities was a natural progression considering the ease with which we can store humongous amount of data and process it in much faster time with lower cost tools and resources.

Here are some reasons why machine learning is transforming digital marketing:

1 – Better campaign customization

Traditional marketers from the era of print and TV ads were stuck on broadcasting their marketing message to one and all. However, since the digital customer is different, there is a need for one-to-one engagement for better outcomes. This calls for knowing on a deeper level the presences, needs, and behaviors of the potential customers to send targeted marketing message. Machine learning can help marketers to dig deeper and sense a pattern not readily visible. This way you can customize your marketing campaign for better efficacy.

2 – Dynamic ad display

The recent case of Jivox IQ machine learning algorithm (called as Neuron) providing a much more personalized brand messaging than a brand CPG manager is a case in point where the advantages of Machine Learning can be put to practical use. This way marketers can add a touch of ‘smart’ to their digital marketing programmes and ensure better quality conversions.

3 – Better segmentation

As evident, the ‘one size fits all’ phrase has never been more wrong as with the digital marketing ecosystem. Hence marketers have employed segmentation to show the relevant ads to the right set of people at the right time.  While you may create broad segments, in order to create micro segments for better targeting you would need the incredible data processing and insight generation prowess of machine learning.

What does this evolution means for marketers?

Does this mean that marketing automation combined with machine learning will throw the careers of marketers off-balance? Of course not. It will simply mean that marketers will be spared the labor of manually processing data, going through tons of reports, sensing patterns, uncovering insights, and aiding in management decision making.

All this will now be handled by the Machine Learning algorithm in a much more effective and swifter way. They can enhance their job responsibilities to creating media strategies, identifying effective marketing channels, and trying to understand customer behavior, and create more appealing marketing campaigns.

Machine Learning is clearly revolutionizing the world of programmatic marketing. It is affecting every function of marketing – right from what flavor of marketing campaign to be directed at which customer segment, to a new way of telling brand stories.

These reasons clearly outline why marketers can no longer shy away from embracing Machine Learning to give their digital marketing campaigns the much needed competitive edge. Adopt ML into your marketing mix and see how your outcomes will be radically different from those driven by traditional marketing approaches.

Building An AR App

The world of mobile technology has seen tremendous upgrades since the last few months and it would not be odd to say it’s changing week by week. As most of the businesses today are linked with technology, it’s prudent to stay up to date with it. Augmented reality is one such technology that is gaining tremendous traction and experts believe the technology is here to stay.

Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology which allows overlaying of digital data on top of real world items or objects. As AR integrates digital information with real-time live feeds, it has plenty of opportunities for businesses to engage with customers and improve their revenues. Fashion, Retail, and Travel were the three original trendsetters who initially started to use AR in their businesses. Now they are taking it a notch up and implementing it on a large scale.

Various types of Augmented Reality Apps

Marker based AR Apps

You must have identified, searched or installed something using QR code. If so, then that technology is enabled using Marker-based Augmented Reality. A device like Smartphone or any other device having a camera can be used to see virtual superimposed on real life objects. Animated and 3D images can also be seen with the help of AR technology.

Location-based AR Apps

The GPS of each mobile device helps to provide the accurate location of the user. Location based AR apps use this feature of a mobile app to send personalized deals and offers to a consumer.

Some things to know before developing an AR-based app

1) Imagery

A user-friendly Imagery should be the primary consideration while developing an AR-based consumer app. It should not be over the top but be realistic and easy on the eye.

2) Programming Languages

The programming languages of choice to create AR based apps for businesses are C# and C++. Also, some other skills which are essential for the successful creation of the app are practical knowledge of 3D modeling and Imaging.

3) Factors to consider

• Finalizing the use case and appropriately selecting the SDK’s suitable for the business requirements.
• Create the target objects and take use of the cloud recognition technology if required.
• SDK selection is of critical importance for the success of the project. The important and commonly used SDK features are Reliable Target Recognition, Multiple Targets Recognition, and Dynamic Target Recognition.

Prospects of Augmented Reality

There is tremendous scope for AR in the future in not just fashion and retail but across multiple industries of the business spectrum. Education is one such field where it can be a Game changer. Also it can be very useful while learning a new language as can be seen from some popular apps which have been downloaded million of times.

For a developer building a new app for AR can be highly rewarding but for a business’s it can bring multiple benefits in terms of revenue gains and enhanced user engagement.

The Favorite Search Engine

If you haven’t heard the name Google then you are definitely from another planet. Today Google is synonymous with the word “search”. Nowadays, plenty of people say “Google it” instead of “search it”. For a majority of the people, no other product or service is as important as Google. Founded in the year 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, it has rapidly evolved from a simple search engine at Stanford to a modern technological giant.

Today it is working on multiple products and services including driverless cars and providing internet by floating balloons in the sky. On the cusp of its 19^th anniversary, we provide you some interesting milestones of Google.

1) July 2000

Google establishes its monopoly by becoming the world’s largest search engine with an indexes capacity of around a billion. It dethrones the current reigning champion of search engines “Yahoo” from the top spot.

2) March 2004

Most people think that Gmail was launched with Google, but the truth is it was launched six years later in March 2004. Initially the service was invitation only as the release was a beta one. The general public had to wait another 3 years to experience its advanced features. Currently Gmail is the leader in email space while the followers are lagging way far behind.

3) June 2005

The year 2005 was a major milestone for Google as it released multiple products and services that proved to be a blockbuster in the coming years. The Landmark year had seen the release of Google Maps. With the help of Google Maps you can visit any part of the planet and be sure that you won’t get lost. It has made travelling fun and an exhilarating experience. Other products also launched in the same year were Google Earth, Talk and Video. It also purchased technology company Urchin which helped to create Google Analytics.

4) July 2005

“Android” the word synonymous with Smartphones today, was purchased by Google. Based on the Linux operating system it was basically designed for the touch screen devices. Today the majority of Smartphones and tablets have android as their operating system.

5) October 2008

Today most of us think YouTube as a product created by Google. But the truth is, it was purchased by Google in the year 2008. From then to now the video sharing site has seen enormous growth. Today it’s the biggest platform for video sharing leaving its competitors way far behind.

6) March 2012

Although there were many innovations and launches of products between 2008 and 2012, the launch of the Google Play store was the biggest significant event by Google in 2012. The play store has millions of apps in various categories such as games, education, entertainment, healthcare etc. It is single handedly responsible for more than a billion download of apps and installs.

7) September 2016

The year 2016 saw the launch of the smart messaging app “Allo” by Google. People were waiting for a messaging app from Google and it delivered on it. The app provides customizable emojis, stickers and doodles to make the chat interesting.

If we would put the whole list of products and services launched and offered by Google it would take plenty of pages to fill, as the innovation factory at Google continues to create exciting products year after year.

Got any other interesting Google milestone worth knowing about? Then share your views and let us know.

Big Data in Business Today

With 2.5 quintillion of data produced every day, Big Data is gaining tremendous traction in analyzing this humongous volume of data from disparate structured and unstructured sources. It has proven to drive enhanced business performance with the help of real time analytics and enable smart decision making backed by strong data analysis.

Here are some examples of how our daily lives are changed for the better with the help of Big Data applications:

1 – Big Data in healthcare

As healthcare costs keeps rising, Big Data and related technologies are stepping in for more efficient patient care. It can reduce clinic visits with the help of vitals monitoring devices fitted on the patient. These monitors relay information such as heart rate or BP level, so that the physician can take real time action to prevent escalation of deteriorating health condition. This remote physician care can be administered even if the physician is located miles away from the patient.

2 – Big Data in e-commerce

An online shopper’s entire journey from visit to sale is tracked by Big Data to provide insightful information about buying behavior, preferences, and socio-economic demographic profiling. This helps in segmenting the shoppers into appropriate groups so that deeply customized and targeted marketing messages can be relayed to the appropriate group at the right time.

Big Data also tracks purchases made 3 to 4 months prior to a big ticket event like Black Friday or Big Billion Day Sale. This helps in a better understanding of what products need to be stocked and thus ensure proper inventory management.

3 – Big Data in Navigation Assistance

Our Maps services are enabled by GPS. This in turn is made more precise with the help of tons of reports fed into the systems so that the coordinates are made as accurate as possible. Big Data relies on diverse sources of information such as individual data from apps, incident reports, or road traffic reports for value added services like depicting the shortest route or the fastest route from the source to destination.

4 – Big Data in Entertainment

See recommendations in music based on your music playing preferences? This is nothing but Big Data at play. Apps like Pandora and Spotify have mastered the use of Big Data to generate personalized recommendations to music lovers based on their listening preferences. Spotify’s work in this sector is particularly interesting. It has acquired The Echo Nest to power up their music recommendation engine algorithm. The algorithm isn’t limited to simply analyzing and classifying music. It also uses web crawling to obtain information about the artist, the song, or the music label and includes this insight into the analytics engine.

To conclude

These real life use cases aptly denote the extent to which Big Data has entered our lives. From healthcare to education, there is no sector is left untouched by Big Data. As a smart business owner, it will be unwise to ignore these trends.

Augmented Reality Applications

The phenomenal success of Pokemon Go showed the world the limitless possibilities of Augmented Reality in the field of entertainment and gaming. However not many are aware of the possibilities Augmented Reality opens up in the field of medicine and healthcare.

Today, we take a look at the ways in which AR can influence the realm of healthcare.

1 – Telementoring

This application of AR vastly expands the range and expertise of the physician working on a complex procedure. Suppose if a given operation requires deeply expert ands of a specialist but he/ she is not available on the hospital premises (or may be present in an altogether different geography), AR can come in handy.

With AR, a medical professional can become actively involved in an on-going procedure. This is achieved by virtually superimposing his/ her hand using Google Glasses for showing the right way to do a detailed task during the operation.

2 – Vision aid

Most of the legally blind people have a little bit of vision left in them. However this is not sufficient to do daily tasks like recognizing faces or reading or evading obstacles in their path. The startup VA-ST helps them to recreate some sense of vision using Augmented Reality. This will create a rough outline of a face (somewhat like a stenciled sketch). This will enhance the level of vision available to the user in poorly lit areas and those with lower level of visibility can figure out an object or a person in front him or her, to a better degree.

3 – Nursing aid

Nurses often find it difficult to find a vein on the patient’s vein to draw blood or inject drugs. While many can do so precisely, there are other who need 2-3 attempts before they are able to locate a vein. Accuvein is integrating Augmented Reality into its handheld scanner that makes this task quicker and more efficient. Using this scanner, nurses can easily locate the patient’s vein. The device has been tested on almost 10 million patients and the outcome has been exceptional. The device has proved to be 3.5x more likely to locate a patient’s vein on the first go itself.

4 – Better drug knowledge

Patients can get step by step dosage, mode of action, and its benefits simply by scanning across a bottle of the medicine. Users have the option to scan both the packaging as well as the printed text stuck on the bottle to uncover richer information about a particular drug’s benefit and probable side effects.

5 – Medicinal study

None of the fields within healthcare has seen the phenomenal benefits of AR as it is with the medicinal education field. Examples will be ARnatomy that uses OCR in its app to match a specific word like cranium and flash important details with visuals and information.

These are the different ways in which AR can interact with healthcare IT and create an immersive 3d world for precision based medical science education and procedures carried out by medical professionals.

Understanding Cognitive Computing

Gartner has rated cognitive computing as a platform that will bring about a digital disruption unlike any seen in the last 20 years. This makes it worthwhile for your business to check out cognitive computing capabilities and how it can deliver advantages to your business.

Cognitive computing systems bring about the best of multiple technologies such as natural language queries and processing, real time computing, and machine learning based technologies. By using these technologies, cognitive computing systems can analyze incredible volume of both structured and unstructured data.

The objective of cognitive computing is to mimic human thoughts and put it in a programmatic model for practical applications in relevant situations. This biggest name in cognitive computing – IBM Watson, relies on deep learning algorithms aided by neural networks. They work together to absorb more data, learn more, and mimic human thinking better.

Advantages Of Cognitive Computing

Today, we have compiled a list of some key benefits of cognitive computing through real life use cases:

1 – Better data analysis

Take the example of healthcare industry. Cognitive computing systems can collate information, reports, and data from disparate sources like medical journals, personal patient history, diagnostic tools, and documentation of similar lines of treatment adopted in the past from different hospitals and medical care centers.

This provides the physician with data backed and evidence based recommendation that can enhance the level of patient care provided to the patient. So here, cognitive computing will not replace the doctor, it will simply take over the tedious job of sifting through multiple data sources and processing it in a logical manner.

2 – Efficient processes 

Swiss Re is a great example of how a complex process can be made simpler by employing cognitive computing. According to officials, using cognitive computing helps them to identify and take action based on emerging patterns. It also helps them to spot opportunities and uncover issues in real time for faster and more effective response.

Its underwriting process for the Life and Health Reinsurance business unit was revolutionized when it used IBM Watson to analyze and process huge amount of unstructured data around managing exposure to risk. This enabled them to purchase better quality risk and thus add to their business margins.

3 – Better level of customer interactions

Hilton partnered with IBM to enable better quality of interactions and drive a superior front desk and hospitality experience to guests. The result is Connie, a Watson enabled robot concierge. It can provide amazingly relevant, contextual, and accurate information on broad subjects around travel and hospitality, like, informing about local tourist attractions, providing information on hotel amenities, and providing fine dining recommendations. Hilton is reimagining the entire travel experience with Connie, to make it smarter, easier and more enjoyable for guests.

These advantages highlight the massive potential that cognitive computing possesses. Embracing it at an early stage will help you experiment and personalize the tremendous power of cognitive computing to deliver incredible gains to your business.

IoT – Challenges

With IoT, the concept of smart cities is rapidly gaining ground. Bolstered by bullish sentiments in the tech landscape (Cisco estimates 50 billion smart connected devices by 2020), the Indian government too has grand plans for developing 100 smart cities across the nation. Once it figures out the infrastructure and ecosystem within which a smart city will work, we will truly be on the path to having a fully functioning smart city.

The premise of better safety levels, decreased pollution, efficiency in energy utilization, and superior quality urban lifestyle, have placed the spotlight on what IoT can do to enable the concept of smart cities.

IoT systems are versatile and flexible enough to support and drive a huge range of local municipal goals and government objectives. Taking just one case in point – the use of sensors can bring about a remarkable change in the way collaboration happens across different regional, state level, or national level government departments. Then, there is the concept of smart grids that ensures optimal utilization of resources, prevents wastages and enables zero shortages of basic utilities like power and water supply.

Hence, the potential of IoT for smart cities is exciting for today and exhilarating for tomorrow.

Challenges with smart cities implementation with IoT

In order to achieve this goal, it is necessary that town planners factor in the below limitations of IoT with smart solutions:

1 – Vulnerable to hacks

Most of the connections with objects will be enabled through RFID and these are vulnerable to hacks. Enabling a hack-proof IoT ecosystem will ensure a faster realization of smart cities development.

2 – Security and privacy concerns

Right from your toaster and refrigerator to your TV and car will be connected in a smart city. This magnifies the risk of leaving privacy and security vulnerabilities open to hackers. By providing a secure access mechanism, this risk can be bought down significantly.

3 – Problems with interoperability

While open standards has been around as a concept for the last 25-30 years, nothing concrete has come out of it. Rather than using interoperable systems, we see a user taking a side (think Google and Apple in case of mobility) and then building an entire ecosystem around this. This limitation posed by interoperability too will pose a problem in the future.

The continued tech advancement has led to a spurt in the number of tools, resources, and devices that can facilitate the value derived from IoT. This in turn will propel the development of smart cities at an accelerated rate. Advantages like reduced traffic congestion, better transit ecosystem between two points, can be effectively driven by smart town planning associated with smart cities.

However, this can happen only with active long term support from technology expertise and infrastructure enablers. Here, partnerships with smart IT providers and IoT experts will provide the necessary building blocks needed for the municipal town planner’s accomplishment of the smart city dream.

Progressing The Right Way

Irrespective of the platform, responsive and progressive mobile apps have always enjoyed immense popularity amongst users. The number of iOS app downloads for the year 2015 is around 25 billion. The amount exactly doubles to 50 billion in case of Android apps.

These statistics speak a lot about the immense significance of mobile web apps. It’s because of this popularity that numerous business owners and entrepreneurs make it a point to invest in enterprise app development.

Enter progressive mobile apps

With the ubiquitous presence of mobile applications, the biggest global search network, Google, has come up with a great proposal, keeping in mind the growing mobile users worldwide. Google has recommended a stronger ranking signal for progressive mobile apps that aligns with the mobile-first ethos of a growing number of organizations.

By leveraging browser capabilities and modern web, progressive apps aim to offer immersive experiences on web applications. In simple words, the term ‘progressive web apps’ represent technologies capable of bringing native application-like performance to web applications.

Essential browser features

Knowing the features of progressive mobile applications will help you understand their functioning. Browser makers will require adding some unique features for progressive apps. Some of these features include:

• Service workers: Independent scripts, running in backgrounds at browser side.
• Web-app manifest files: With the help of these files, developers can specify app attributes.
• Enhanced cache (offline): It maintains the state of apps in between visits.

These are some necessary changes that web browsers need to make for successful progressive web app development and functioning.

On that note, let’s check out some of the amazing features or highlights of progressive applications.

Tracking the difference

Progressive web apps mark the arrival of a new age in mobile app development. By ensuring an amazing and immersive experience for users, these apps redefine the way businesses can target customers, personalize their mobile browsing experience, and elevate overall user experience to an altogether new level. The following features are totally characteristic to progressive mobile apps and come across as its biggest USP:

1. Progressive: Offers perfect functioning across browsers
2. Responsive: Seamless operations across numerous platforms
3. App-like experience: Users will have the opportunity to experience app-style navigation and use app integrations.
4. Connectivity-independent: With these applications, users can also operate in poor connectivity.
5. Secure: Operates only through HTTPS
6. Installable: You can also install it on your home screen
7. Discoverable: Search engines can identify them easily as applications.
8. Linkable: Share your progressive web apps via a URL. No need to rely on app-store installations

Although the browser support for progressive web apps is not quite impressive currently, Chromium-based browsers such as Opera and Chrome are on the way to provide the necessary support. With Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge developing their interface, it won’t be long before progressive web applications find a strong foothold in the tech arena.

Let’s not forget that Google Inbox and Flipkart have already joined the progressive web bandwagon. With such developments, the future of mobile web and progressive apps seems to be quite bright and impressive.