Elliot Newsham is the commercial manager at Peak, a decision intelligence company which aims to place AI at the centre of all commercial decision-making. In his role, he helps champion Peak’s Decision Intelligence. Decision Intelligence is an AI engine targeted toward driving growth, increasing profitability, and improving efficiencies and sustainability by placing artificial intelligence at the heart of commercial decision-making, in order to increase competitive advantage.
Speaking to The Leaders Council, Elliot told us more about Decision Intelligence and how this example of AI could be applied in industry for commercial benefit in the future. Initially, he lifted the lid on how Peak came to be founded in the wake of a frustration around the difficulties of harvesting and analysing data, and the thinking behind the company’s Decision Intelligence engine which essentially amounts to using AI for commercial value.
Elliot said: “I joined Peak around four years when we had around 45 employees. We've since gone on a bit of a journey and we're at just shy of 400 employees now, so it is a massive trajectory of growth. Peak was founded by three people that sat together eight years ago and had general frustrations at trying to get data from siloed systems across a business. So, this would be data that you might be using such as spreadsheet data that would typically be sat in a source system, like a CRM or ERP.
“They shared this frustration that trying to connect to data and then start to run analytics on top of it to drive decision and action was a really difficult thing to do. They founded the business with that belief that there's got to be an easy way to start to do this sort of thing. Fast-forward to where we are today, a lot has changed over the past eight years. But that core value of trying to get value from data still remains at the heart of it.
“In terms of what we do, we're a decision intelligence business. Really, that’s the next step on from artificial intelligence. The definition for Peak is that it’s the commercial application of AI to guide decision-making. Something that we're really passionate about is using AI and technology to drive a business outcome. I think you hear a lot about artificial intelligence being this amazing, sexy technology that’s always in the news. But we want it to be more than just a fancy science project. It's got to drive some sort of commercial outcome. That’s how we position ourselves.”
When one talks about artificial intelligence, it can be easy to become bogged down in the ethical issues around its application. In Elliot’s view, however, a lot of the caution around AI is largely down to misconception.
“AI as a topic has been around for a long time. The first form of it was used in the 1950s but I think we've only just heard about it in the past 10 years. I think what's changed today, what's massively accelerated it as a sector of technology is the computing power and the technological advancements that have happened recently. If you compare the amount of data that data scientists and data engineers can analyse now versus 60 years ago, it's wildly different. So being able to apply AI at scale, is really what's changed the game. Being able to use multiple data sets, query spot trends, analyse very quickly at the click of a finger is really what's helping organisations use AI now to drive that decision-making at speed.
“There is a split room still when we go and speak to businesses though. I think there are people who believe that AI is the future, and they can really see the value. Then there's maybe the second half that believe that AI is like a robot and it's here to take over the world and make people redundant when it’s not. A lot of what we do is really about educating people that AI isn’t after your job, it’s there to help you make better decisions day-to-day.”
Explaining how Decision Intelligence AI can be practically applied, Elliot continued: “The really simple way to think about it is this: as long as there's a frequency of transaction or frequency of movement, you can capture that data and start to make predictions. Most industries have that sort of pattern. For instance, we work with a large grocery retailer where we managed to reduce their fresh food wastage bill by a million pounds a month, and equally from a transportation perspective, remove 147 tonnes of CO2 out of their network. That’s real impact thanks to AI and it’s happening day-to-day.
“I think the fastest growing sector for the application of AI in financial services. The ability to predict fraud for instance is a super valuable thing to help retain customers and it makes things better for banks. So, there's a lot of that technology being applied across those sectors. We're also having a lot of conversations with more traditional, old school manufacturing businesses who are taking the leap to use AI to really advance as a business and outdo their competition. It is rapidly expanding across multiple sectors.”
While the use of AI is being used positively to help save money and resource in some of its applications, Elliot emphasised that its full potential could also involve enhancing the customer experience as well as making businesses more efficient in their operations.
“One of the AI applications that we see daily without realising is around marketing. Marketing departments can use AI to predict consumer behaviour and better target customers with communications, which can be super powerful. But where this becomes really clever, is when you connect that to the back end of your business. Let’s say for instance we’re predicting when somebody is in the market to buy their next pair of trainer shoes for instance. We can then push out a discount code a week before the AI believes that person is going to purchase.
“If you then connect that data to your supply chain to make them aware that somebody is out in the market to buy a particular pair of shoes with a discount code in hand, we can then go and make sure that this product is then actually in stock when they go to buy, to avoid any disappointment. This creates a superior customer experience and becomes super transformational. I’d say this is really the Nirvana of where businesses want to get to: connecting AI models and solutions across the whole business, because this is really where you unlock the value, create better customer experiences, become more efficient and out-leap the competition.”
Peak is also looking to publicly promote the vast potential of AI technologies in creating commercial value for businesses. AltitudeX is a global event series hosted by Peak each year across Manchester, UK and New York City, US, which brings together business leaders, commercial teams, engineers and data scientists who want to leverage technology and AI to reach new heights in business.
Elliot said: “AltitudeX is around gathering data leaders, people who've got a genuine interest in AI data technology, as well as prospective customers from multiple sectors. There are some great speakers all sharing how AI is delivering value and I’d invite anyone to come along.”
Further information on the AltitudeX event for those interested in attending can be found here.
Elliot Newsham's interview with The Leaders Council will be published as part of our podcast series on Monday, September 26.
Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash
