AI and Real-Time Data

By Stefan Edqvist, COO of Starcounter

In the digital world, speed is ever increasing. This is true for the business world as well. Fast websites, speedy data collection, transaction handling and more are necessary to compete. If your information processing and decision making isn’t fast enough, opportunities will be lost.

Gone are the days when you could load data in a data warehouse overnight and make decisions based on business intelligence (BI), the next day. Today, organizations need actionable insights faster than ever before to stay competitive, reduce risks, meet customer expectations, and capitalize on time-sensitive opportunities.

Today’s applications need to operate at the speed of light. They need to collect data, analyze it and then buy relevant ads, sell shares in a company or adjust consumer prices on a service in the blink of an eye. Or, someone else will get the ad space needed, you might loose money on a falling stock price, or someone else will win the customer looking for something to buy. And there are many possible scenarios where speed is key and the consequences of being too slow are even worse – it all comes down to fractions of a second.

For transactions, applications must provide real-time information to internal teams as well as customers. Often, technology working with artificial intelligence (AI) is overlooked. But, the reasons for this are unclear. The arguments for incorporating AI in business applications are, however, legion.

AI has the ability to make applications integrate with each other seamlessly and even form large enterprise systems from many small microapps or microservices. This allows for both faster development and faster applications.

AI can also be used to perfect the user experience. Being able to interact with an AI-driven application directly, maybe even through speech, will increase efficiency and make applications much easier to use. Of course many actions can be taken by AI directly, eliminating unnecessary user interactions.

Based on the data, AI curates greater business intelligence (BI) and takes action on the analysis – all in a fraction of a second. This is of vital importance for business applications. When an ad space opens up, and your DSP (demand side platform) provides you with all the data needed for an analysis, an AI can take immediate action. It can not only lower your advertising costs, it will make your ads more relevant to the target groups.

AI has the potential to revolutionize forecasting. Instead of just assessing raw data, AI can take into account historical patterns on the nature of the business and the dynamics of a specific market. Add to that the enormous amount of data we can obtain today, and real-time BI could be more accurate than ever before. Pattern recognition and forecasting is an important advantage to have. Not only for efficiency but for security as well. AI can tell if a network is safe or under attack, and it might even be able to predict the next move of the attackers.

A new generation of software needs to be intelligent to handle large amounts of data in real time while simultaneously doing real-time analysis.

With AI handling enormous amounts of data in real time, many applications can be perfected. Plane tickets could always have the exact right price to meet demand, and deliver a nice margin at the same time. Traffic, planes, cars, trains, boats, can be directed much more efficiently as power can be produced and distributed in a smarter way – all based on real-time data. Supply chain management has always been complex and hard to handle. With AI and real-time data, that will change.

To compete, companies need to stay a step ahead, AI and its analytical and predictive capabilities will be critical in achieving success.

About Stefan Edqvist

Stefan is currently the COO of Starcounter, helping and guiding ISVs to build the next generation software with extreme performance and interoperability. Stefan has more than 20 years of experience within enterprise software and IT. He started his career as a software developer for a company specializing in real-time critical systems for the National Defense. After acquiring vast experience in the development processes and patterns within systems design, Stefan joined Rational Software afterward where he taught companies software development processes (RUP) and object oriented design expressed with UML.

Before joining Starcounter, Stefan worked at as a technical manager and IT architect at IBM for 10 years, in which he dealt with information management, collaboration and social software, software integration and digital experience. He has an M.Sc. in electrotechnical engineering from the Faculty of Engineering at Lund University in Sweden.