Smart operations Archives

Boosting Contact Center Effectiveness with AI

Conversational AI happens at competitors’ CCs while you’re busy making other plans

Author: Janne Flinck, Data & AI Lead

Working for Nordic organizations in various industries, I have gladly noted that front-runners are already deploying modern Artificial Intelligence tools to increase their contact center efficiency and customer satisfaction. In contrast, the majority are still looking for marginal improvements via tweaks in ticket handling or streamlining the edges of their onboarding processes.

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” This familiar motto applies to many Nordic customer service and contact center decision-makers regarding conversational AI: It’s happening at competitors’ contact centers while you’re reading this blog.

Exceeding customer expectations while managing costs

Whether you’re a Nordic public sector entity or a private company running your business here, exceptional customer service is crucial. According to Salesforce, nearly 90% of customers today perceive the experience delivered as important as the actual products or services. Customer service leaders and marketing and sales officers face a common challenge: providing consistent, high-quality service while managing costs and resources effectively.

Nearly 90% of customers perceive the experience delivered as important as the products or services.

You want to ensure prompt, accurate responses to customers within acceptable wait times, regardless of the time of day. Simultaneously, you must balance the cost of contact center teams and onboarding new agents. You want to stay agile and be able to scale to meet the needs of growing organizations or seasonal peaks. Moreover, you want to gain insights into customer behavior and service performance to steer strategic decisions for optimizing operations and improving service quality. This is where Google’s Customer Engagement Suite comes into play.

Agents for agents

Generative and conversational AI agents are revolutionizing customer service, particularly in contact centers. Customer Engagement Suite is a collection of Google Cloud products designed to enhance contact center agent productivity, boost customer satisfaction, and reduce operational costs.

When your agent starts a call with a customer, Customer Engagement Suite provides live transcription, real-time answers to the customers’ questions, and a discussion summary. This helps the agent focus on customer interactions without worrying about taking notes. Customer Engagement Suite’s omnichannel support covers chat, SMS, VoIP, and video, ensuring seamless customer experiences across all channels.

Generative AI agents produce automated answers to customers’ questions by integrating to enterprise knowledge bases and other internal and external data sources. Customer Engagement Suite can also automate tasks like checking order status or updating payment details, ensuring customers always receive up-to-date information and services tailored to their needs. All this increases the efficiency of operations, and we have seen customers reduce call durations by up to 10%, yielding a significant payback to the system investment.

We have seen up to 10% reductions in call duration.

Quick access to relevant agent data will also shorten the time needed for new employee onboarding. When newcomers have speedier access to appropriate knowledge, the onboarding period can be up to 25% shorter, leading to a stark improvement in efficiency.

Many customer service calls involve tedious information-seeking, often for questions that repeat over time. Customer Engagement Suite’s virtual agent chatbots can relieve your agents of the repetitive burden by automatically finding answers to common questions using existing information sources and handling text, voice, and images in customer encounters. By reducing the need for human intervention in routine cases, the chatbots free human service agents to offer a more personal and richer interaction that increases customer and employee satisfaction.

Customer Engagement Suite offers powerful analytics tools that provide insights into customer interactions. These tools help your organization identify trends, improve processes, and make data-driven decisions.

As the Customer Engagement Suite is fully developed and managed by Google, it allows you to concentrate on extracting value for your operations. The deployments are efficient due to its seamless integration with telephony and contact center applications and tools for building custom features that adapt to your processes.

The Quantified Impact of AI in Contact Centers

In the bigger picture, AI will affect both new hires and existing employees in the coming years—in both negative and positive ways, depending on your position. In Metrigy’s AI for Business Success 2024-25 global research study of 697 companies, the following was discovered:

New hires – More than half of companies were able to reduce the number of new agents they needed to hire. The numbers are substantial: Those who did not use AI in their contact center, had to hire almost twice the number of agents during the year 2023 compared to those who used AI.
Existing employees – When contact centers were augmented with AI, nearly 40% of companies were able to reduce their headcount, with the average reduction being about one in every four employees.

For business leaders looking for technology to drive cost efficiencies, AI is doing its job. For example, with the addition of AI agent assist, the average handle time dropped by an average of 30%. At the same time, each supervisor saves nearly two hours per week when AI helps with scheduling and capacity planning. In addition to making agents and supervisors more efficient, AI-enabled self-service also helps automate customer interactions so that fewer of them even require live agent attention.

Real-world success stories in the making

I am honored to help several of our leading customers in the Nordics embrace the benefits of generative AI and conversational AI in their contact center operations. The most value can be extracted in organizations where the number of daily contacts is high, and the onboarding cost is noticeable due to complex product structures. Such fields include retail, travel and leisure, banking, and insurance. Similarly, organizations with high peak demand, such as nonprofits with surging inquiries during a fundraising campaign or public offices with specific deadlines for citizens’ input, could benefit from Customer Engagement Suite. It helps diminish the burden of agents on duty, channels routine questions directly to virtual agents, and makes onboarding seasonal employees more straightforward.

As an experienced and awarded Google Cloud Solutions integrator, Codento offers comprehensive support to ensure a smooth transition to your contact center’s era of AI. The fact that Customer Engagement Suite is a complete solution developed and managed by Google will ensure a robust platform integrated with all your relevant data sources and a foreseeable future roadmap on which to build your contact center success.

Key takeaways:

The experience delivered, e.g., by your contact center agents is as important for your business as the product or service you actually sell
Google has packaged Artificial Intelligence tools for excellent customer service into a managed solution called Customer Engagement Suite
The efficiency effect of AI in Contact Centers has already been quantified and, e.g., handling times have been seen to drop by 30%
Codento is already working with Nordic organizations to harness AI for better customer experience and more efficient Contact Center operations

About the author:

About the author: Janne Flinck is an AI & Data Lead at Codento. Janne joined Codento from Accenture 2022 with extensive experience in Google Cloud Platform, Data Science, and Data Engineering. His interests are in creating and architecting data-intensive applications and tooling. Janne has three professional certifications in Google Cloud and a Master’s Degree in Economics.

Stay tuned for more detailed information and examples of the use cases! If you need more information about specific scenarios or want to schedule a free workshop to explore the opportunities in your organization, feel free to reach out to us.

Living on the Edge – Google Kubernetes Engine makes edge computing finally real

Living on the Edge

Google Kubernetes Engine makes edge computing finally real

Author: Markku Tuomala, CTO

Edge computing has been an unkept promise of 5G networks for years. Industrial companies, energy and utilities, and transportation and logistics businesses have been longing for low-latency services that would allow them to monitor and react in real-time to happenings on the field. Telecom operators, in turn, have dreamt of a genuinely novel business case for their 5G network investments, in which they would offer a scalable, cost-effective edge computing solution as a service to their customers.

Google Cloud’s packaged tools enable Edge as a Service

Edge computing is the practice of processing data closer to the source rather than relying solely on centralized cloud data centers. It offers a range of practical benefits, such as reducing latency, enhancing real-time data processing, and improving system performance. The most mentioned use cases of edge computing are real-time monitoring and control of manufacturing processes, automation of production lines, fleet management, and employee safety.

Two concepts are essential to understanding the hurdles that have been blocking the widespread use of edge computing: containerization and Kubernetes. Containerization involves packaging an application and all its dependencies into a lightweight, portable unit called a container. This allows the application to run consistently across different devices, making it ideal for deployment on edge devices with limited computing capacity. Kubernetes, in turn, acts as a management system for these containers, orchestrating their deployment, scaling, and operation to ensure they run smoothly and efficiently. Jointly, containerization and Kubernetes enable efficient, scalable, and reliable edge computing by ensuring applications can be easily deployed and managed across numerous edge locations.

Managing containerized applications with Kubernetes is a complex technological endeavor that has been a showstopper for many interesting edge computing use cases until recently. In late 2023, however, Google launched a managed service called Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Enterprise that will revolutionize the opportunities to offer and deploy edge computing.

Google Kubernetes Engine Enterprise for multitenant edge computing

GKE Enterprise is a tool for managing multitenant edge environments where you can cost-effectively and safely offer computing capacity from the edge for several users. These users can be the manufacturing sites of a single corporation in the same geographical area or a group of clients of a telecom operator or water or electricity company. By using GKE Enterprise, companies can efficiently manage workloads across cloud and edge environments, ensuring seamless operation and high safety availability of applications that require extremely short latency.

Chicken and egg: are use cases awaiting the technology or vice versa?

Some have claimed that edge computing is a fad, as the network connections with 30 – 60 ms latencies in the Nordics, especially, are supposedly enough for 90% of the use cases. The ambitious goal of edge computing to diminish the latency to less than ten milliseconds. This will enable some examples described above, which cannot be realized over the current networks. From my experience, I am convinced that when the appropriately priced chicken is available, the application eggs will follow in numbers. In other words, when the cost of the mature platform technology is on the right level, the game-changing use cases and applications will follow.

Aiming at <10 millisecond latencies

We at Codento have talked with more than a hundred organizations about their plans and aspirations for using artificial intelligence. Customers have delightfully novel ideas for using video surveillance connected to AI, e.g., for identifying the crossing paths of an autonomous forklift and a maintenance worker. With real-time video and a predicting AI solution, a system could reach the upcoming incident faster than a human can, potentially saving the worker’s life.

Last week, we were thrilled to introduce our first customer case in this area to the world. Telecom operator Telia and Codento have collaborated to make edge computing available to Nordic organizations through Telia’s Sirius innovation platform, with ferry operator Finferries being the first customer to pilot the service.

Edge computing transforms industries by enabling secure, low-latency, real-time data processing. For Nordic telecom operators and industrial companies, Google Kubernetes Engine Enterprise offers a powerful platform to harness its benefits.

Codento’s expert team has extensive experience with industrial customers’ businesses and processes, in-depth understanding of the AI-related use cases that Nordic companies are investigating, and awarded capabilities in Google Cloud technologies. We are eager and prepared to help your organization fully utilize edge computing and its applications. Be it a solution you want to build for your use or a platform you want to offer as a service to your customers, we are here to help.

Key takeaways:

Edge computing will enable novel use cases like video monitoring and real-time reactions to events in, e.g., industrial processes
Google Kubernetes Engine Enterprise is a solution enabling multitenant edge computing environments, adding scalability, cost, and security to “Edge as a Service”
Codento can help industrial corporations or telecom, water or electricity companies to build use cases and services based on edge computing

About the author:

Markku Tuomala, CTO,  joined Codento in 2021. Markku has 25 years of experience in software development and cloud from Elisa, the leading telecom operator in Finland. Markku was responsible for Telco and IT services cloudification strategy and was a member of Elisa’s production management team. Key tasks included Elisa software strategy and operational services setup for business critical IT outsourcing. Markku drove customer oriented development and was instrumental in business growth to Elisa Viihde, Kirja, Lompakko, Self Services and Network automation. Markku also led Elisa data center operations transformation to DevOps.

Breathe New Life into Cornerstone Systems

Take your Salesforce, SAP, Power BI, Oracle, AWS, and VMware solutions to the next level with Google Cloud

Author: Anthony Gyursanszky, CEO

We all want AI and analytics to boost our business and enable growth, but few of us have the deep pockets needed to redo our entire IT environment.

Most Nordic organizations have invested significantly in leading technologies like Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft Power BI, Oracle, AWS, and VMware. However, the jungle of AI capabilities is scattered and a coherent AI roadmap is difficult to envision.

Integrating Google Cloud with the technologies mentioned above, allows you to unlock new synergies and use advanced AI capabilities without extensive reconfiguration or additional capital expenditure.

Turbo boost your current system environment without overlapping investments

Adding Google Cloud to your IT strategy does not necessarily mean replacing existing systems. Instead, you can compliment them, enabling them to work together more effectively and deliver greater value with minimal disruption.

For example, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Enterprise enables seamless deployment and management of your existing applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Your Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, and VMware systems can work together more efficiently, with Google Cloud as the glue between them. The result is a more streamlined, agile IT environment that enhances the capabilities of your current investments.

Google Cloud VMware Engine, in turn, allows you to extend your existing VMware environments to Google Cloud without costly migrations or re-architecting. This enables your business to tap into Google Cloud’s vast computing and storage resources, advanced AI tools like Vertex AI machine learning platform, and robust analytics platforms like BigQuery—without a revolution in your current infrastructure.

Harness all your data and deploy the market-leading AI tools

Data-driven decision-making is crucial today for maintaining a competitive edge in any field of business. Integrating Google Cloud with, e.g., your existing Microsoft Power BI deployment will significantly enhance your analytics capabilities. Google Cloud’s BigQuery offers a robust, serverless data warehouse that can process vast amounts of data in real-time, providing deeper and faster insights than traditional analytics tools. By connecting BigQuery to Power BI, you can easily analyze data from various sources like SAP, Oracle, or Salesforce and visualize it in dashboards familiar to your end users. Such integration enables your teams to quickly draw informed conclusions based on comprehensive, up-to-date data without significant additional investment.

Furthermore, Google Cloud’s Vertex AI can integrate into your existing data workflows. This way, you can take advantage of Google’s advanced machine learning and predictive analytics tools, and the analysis results can be visualized and acted upon within Power BI.

You can also activate your SAP data with Google Cloud AI for advanced analytics and for building cutting-edge AI/ML and generative AI applications. This enhances the value of your data and positions your business to respond more swiftly to market changes.

For businesses using Oracle, Google Cloud’s Cross-Cloud Interconnect provides secure, high-performance connectivity between Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This allows you to continue leveraging Oracle’s strengths while benefiting from Google Cloud’s advanced AI, analytics, and compute capabilities—without being tied to a single vendor.

Start small, and grow compliantly as you go

One key advantage of Google Cloud is that you can start benefiting from the advanced capabilities almost immediately, driving innovation and competitive advantage with only minor incremental investments. Google Cloud’s pay-as-you-go model and flexible pricing allow you to start small, scaling up only as needed and as you gain tangible proof of the business value. This approach minimizes upfront costs while providing access to cutting-edge technologies that can accelerate your business growth.

As your business’s cloud capabilities expand, maintaining data security and compliance remains a top priority especially in the Nordic region, where regulations like GDPR are stringent. Google Cloud’s Hamina data center in Finland provides secure, EU-based infrastructure where your data stays within the region, meeting all local compliance requirements.

Google Cloud also offers advanced security features, such as Identity and Access Management (IAM), that integrate seamlessly with your existing systems like Microsoft Power BI and VMware. This ensures your data is protected across all platforms, allowing you to grow your cloud footprint securely and confidently.

Don’t put all your digital eggs in the same basket

Google Cloud’s open standards and commitment to interoperability ensure that you’re not locked into any single vendor, preserving your ability to adapt and evolve your IT strategy as needed. This strategic flexibility is crucial for businesses that want to maintain control over their IT destiny, avoiding the limitations and costs associated with vendor lock-in.

Google Cloud complements your existing IT investments and helps you gain a competitive edge from technology choices you have already made. At Codento, we specialize in helping Nordic businesses integrate Google Cloud into their IT strategies. We ensure that you can maximize the value of your current investments while positioning your business for future growth.

About the author:

Anthony Gyursanszky, CEO, joined Codento in late 2019 with more than 30 years of experience in the IT and software industry. Anthony has previously held management positions at F-Secure, SSH, Knowit / Endero, Microsoft Finland, Tellabs, Innofactor and Elisa. Hehas also served on the boards of software companies, including Arc Technology and Creanord. Anthony also works as a senior consultant for Value Mapping Services. His experience covers business management, product management, product development, software business, SaaS business, process management, and software development outsourcing. Anthony is also a certified Cloud Digital Leader.

Unique AI-powered Employee Experience: Employee Help Desk with Google Cloud HR Agent Technology

Overview

Based on feedback from HR peers, we have created a unique AI solution that allows employees to easily find answers to HR-maintained guidelines, practices, and policies through a chat window embedded in the intranet. No more digging through files or web pages. This streamlines employee onboarding, saves time for staff, supervisors, and the HR department, and boosts employee satisfaction.

Challenges

Challenges facing organizations:

Increasing cost pressures and resource challenges for HR
Delayed productivity of new employees due to slow onboarding and difficulty finding information
Loss of tacit knowledge due to employee turnover
Increased workload for supervisors
Competition for skilled employees
Growth of information and challenges in finding the right information
Increased time pressures on employees
Remote work and reduced face-to-face interactions
Impact of employee motivation on performance
Less time and opportunity for employee training

Our Solution

Google Cloud and Codento offer a solution: AI-powered Employee Help Desk. This provides quick, accurate answers to employees seeking information on complex HR processes or documents (compensation, benefits, etc.) through:

Chatbot/Q&A and Search engine capabilities for HR documents without requiring engineering expertise, tuning, or configuration.
Agent Builder allows users to simply describe the configuration of the chat agent instead of defining it manually.

Implementation

Based on unique Google Cloud HR AI Agent technology and its turnkey lightweight implementation.

- A Generative AI HR Agent is an application that aims to achieve a goal by observing the world and acting upon it using the tools at its disposal
- User interface is the current HR intranet or equivalent HR portal, into which the HR agent’s chatbot is seamlessly integrated
- The agent has access to all necessary HR guidelines and documentation
- Learns over time to provide better and more relevant answers
- Adapts to updated materials
- Supports multiple languages

Codento, a Google Cloud Partner of the Year, configures and deploys the solution
- The client needs to create 25 test questions and 25 corresponding sample answers based on HR documentation. Codento handles the rest
- The solution is operational within few weeks of decision
- Can be implemented in the client’s existing Google Cloud environment, a new environment (additional setup cost), or Codento’s provided Google Cloud platform

Benefits

Speed: operational in just few weeks
Low cost: ask for an offer
Low risk: Codento has extensive experience with similar deployments using Google Cloud technology
Solution quality: Codento’s NPS is consistently over 70

The Executive’s Guide to Generative AI: Kickstart Your Generative AI Journey with a 10-Step Plan

Not sure where to start with generative AI?See what your industry peers are doing and use Google Cloud’s 10-step, 30-day plan to hit the ground running with your first use case

AI’s impact will be huge. Yet right now, only 15% of businesses and IT decision makers feel they have the expert knowledge needed in this fast-moving area.This comprehensive guide will not only bring you up to speed, but help you chart a clear path forward for adopting generative AI in your business. In it, you’ll find:

A quick primer on generative AI.
A 30-day step-by-step guide to getting started.
KPIs to measure generative AI’s impact.
Industry-specific use cases and customer stories from Deutsche Bank, TIME, and more.

Dive in today to discover how generative AI can help deliver new value in your business.

Submit your contact information to get the report:

Get Your Copy of Google Cloud 2024 Data and AI Trends Report

Your company is ready for generative AI. But is your data? In the AI-powered era, many organizations are scrambling to keep pace with the changes rippling across the entire data stack.

This new report from Google Cloud shares the findings from a recent survey of business and IT leaders about their goals and strategies for harnessing gen AI — and what it means for their data.

Get your copy to explore these five trends emerging from the survey:

Gen AI will speed the delivery of insights across organizations
The roles of data and AI will blur
Data governance weaknesses will be exposed
Operational data will unlock gen AI potential for enterprise apps
2024 will be the year of rapid data platform modernization

Submit your contact information below to get the report:

Google Cloud Next’24 Top 10 Highlights of the First Day

Authors: Codento Consulting Team

Google Cloud Momentum Continues

The Google Cloud Next event is taking place this week in Las Vegas showcases a strong momentum with AI and Google Cloud innovations with more than 30 000 participants.

Codento is actively participating to the event in Las Vegas with Ulf Sandlund and Markku Pulkkinen and remotely via the entire Codento team. Earlier on Tuesday Codento was awarded as the Google Cloud Service Partner of the Year in Finland.

As the battle is becoming more fierce among the hyperscalers we can fairly observe that Google Cloud has taken a great position going forward:

Rapid growth of Google Cloud with a $36 Billion run rate outpacing its hyperscaler peers on a percentage basis
Continuous deep investments in AI and Gen AI progress with over a million models trained
90% of unicorns use Google Cloud showcasing a strong position with startups
A lot of reference stories were shared. A broad range of various industries are now using Google Cloud and its AI stack
And strong ecosystem momentum globally in all geographies and locally

Top 10 Announcements for Google Cloud Customers

Codento consultants followed every second of the first day and picked our favorite top 10 announcements based on the value to Google Cloud customers:

1. Gemini 1.5 Pro available in public preview on Vertex AI. It can now process from 128,000 tokens up to 1 million tokens. Google truly emphasizes its multi-modal capabilities. The battle against other hyperscalers in AI is becoming more fierce.

2. Gemini is being embedded across a broad range of Google Cloud services addressing a variety of use cases and becoming a true differentiator, for example:

New BigQuery integrations with Gemini models in Vertex AI support multimodal analytics, vector embeddings, and fine-tuning of LLMs from within BigQuery, applied to your enterprise data.
Gemini in Looker enables business users to chat with their enterprise data and generate visualizations and reports

3. Gemini Code Assist is a direct competitor to GitHub’s Copilot Enterprise. Code Assist can also be fine-tuned based on a company’s internal code base which is essential to match Copilot.

4. Imagen 2. Google came out with the enhanced image-generating tool embedded in Vertex AI developer platform with more of a focus on enterprise. Imagen 2 is now generally available.

5. Vertex AI Agent Builder to help companies build AI agents. This makes it possible for customers to very easily and quickly build conversational agents and instruct and guide them the same way that you do humans. To improve the quality and correctness of answers from models, a process called grounding is used based on Google Search.

6. Gemini in Databases is a collection of AI-powered, developer-focused tools to create, monitor and migrate app databases.

7. Generative AI-powered security: number of new products and features aimed at large companies. These include Threat Intelligence, Chronicle to assist with cybersecurity investigations) and Security Command Center.

8. Hardware announcements: Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell platform coming to Google Cloud in early 2025 and Google Cloud joins AWS and Azure in announcing its first custom-built Arm processor, dubbed Axion

9. Run AI anywhere, generative AI search packaged solution powered by Gemma designed to help customers easily retrieve and analyze data at the edge or on-premises with GDC, this solution will be available in preview in Q2 2024.

10. Data sovereignty. Google is renewing its focus on data sovereignty with emphasis on partnerships, less to building its own sovereign clouds.

There were also a lot of new announcements in the domains of employee productivity and Chrome, but we shall leave those areas for later discussion.

Conclusions

So far the list of announcements has been truly remarkable. As we anticipate the coming days of the Next event we are eager to get deeper into the details and understand what all this means in practice.

What is already known convinces us that Google Cloud and its AI approach continues to be completely enterprise-ready providing capabilities to support deployments from pilot to production.

To make all this real capable partners, like Codento, are needed to assist the entire journey: AI and data strategy, prioritized use cases, building the data foundation, implementing AI projects with strong grounding and integration, consider security and governance, and eventually build MLOps practices to scale the adoption.

For us partners, much anticipated news came in the form of a new specialization: Generative AI specialization will be available in June 2024. Codento is ready for this challenge with the practice and experience already in place.

To follow the Google Cloud Next 2024 event and announcements the best place is Google Cloud blog.

Smart Operations: Embracing AI for Efficiency and Growth

Author: Antti Pohjolainen, Codento

As mentioned in the previous blog post, AI is not just a technological leap; it’s a strategic asset, revolutionizing how businesses function, make decisions, and serve their customers. This also holds true for the domain of operations, where AI is poised to revolutionize traditional processes, driving efficiency, enhancing productivity, and paving the way for sustainable growth.

Unlocking the Potential of AI for Operations

AI’s impact on operations extends across various facets of business, including:

Predictive Maintenance: AI algorithms can analyze vast amounts of data, including sensor readings and historical performance records, to predict equipment failures before they occur. This proactive approach minimizes downtime, reduces maintenance costs, and enhances overall asset utilization.
Smart Scheduling: AI-powered scheduling solutions can optimize resource allocation and task assignment, ensuring that employees are matched with the right tasks at the right time. This leads to improved productivity, reduced overtime costs, and improved employee satisfaction.
Supply Chain Optimization: AI can analyze demand patterns, identify disruptions, and optimize inventory levels, resulting in a more efficient and responsive supply chain. This translates into reduced costs, improved delivery times, and enhanced customer satisfaction.
Risk Mitigation: AI can monitor operational data and identify anomalies or patterns that could indicate potential risks. This allows businesses to take preemptive action, avert costly incidents, and protect their assets and reputation.

Codento has been working together with some of the Finnish forefront companies in manufacturing to implement AI in their operations. Take Fastems for example where Codento implemented AI-powered Smart Scheduling and predictive maintenance capabilities. For more information, please see our reference case stories here and here.

The Journey Towards Smart Operations

Implementing AI in operations requires a strategic approach that considers the specific needs and challenges of each organization. Key steps include:

Identifying Pain Points: The first step is to identify areas where AI can bring the most significant benefits, such as reducing costs, improving efficiency, or enhancing decision-making.
Data Preparation: High-quality data is essential for AI to function effectively. This involves cleaning, organizing, and standardizing data to ensure its accuracy and reliability.
Model Development and Deployment: AI models are developed using machine learning algorithms that train on the prepared data. These models are then deployed to production environments to automate tasks and provide insights.
Continuous Monitoring and Improvement: AI models are not static; they need to be continuously monitored and updated as data and business conditions evolve. This ensures that they remain accurate, relevant, and effective.

About the author: Antti “Apo” Pohjolainen, Vice President, Sales, joined Codento in 2020. Antti has led Innofactor’s (Nordic Microsoft IT provider) sales organization in Finland and, prior to that, worked in leadership roles in Microsoft for the Public sector in Finland and Central & Eastern Europe. Apo has been working in different sales roles longer than he can remember. He gets a “seller’s high” when meeting with customers and finding solutions that provide value for all parties involved. Apo received his MBA from the University of Northampton. His final business research study dealt with Multi-Cloud. Apo has frequently lectured about AI in Business at the Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences.

Introduction to AI in Business Blog Series: Unveiling the Future

Author: Antti Pohjolainen, Codento

Foreword

In today’s dynamic business landscape, the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative force, reshaping the way industries operate and paving the way for innovation. Companies of all sizes are implementing AI-based solutions.

AI is not just a technological leap; it’s a strategic asset, revolutionizing how businesses function, make decisions, and serve their customers.

In discussions and workshops with our customers, we have identified close to 250 different use cases for a wide range of industries.

Our AI in Business Blog Series

In addition to publishing our AI.cast on-demand video production, we summarize our key learnings and insights in the “AI in Business” blog series.

This blog series will delve into the multifaceted role AI plays in reshaping business operations, customer relations, and overall software intelligence. In the following blog posts, each post has a specific viewpoint concentrating on a business need. Each perspective contains examples and customer references of innovative ways to implement AI.

In the next part – Customer Foresight – we’ll discuss how AI will provide businesses with better customer understanding based on their buying behavior, better use of various customer data, and analyzing customer feedback.

In part three – Smart Operations – we’ll look at examples of benefits customers have gained by implementing AI into their operations, including smart scheduling and supply chain optimization.

In part four – Software Intelligence – we’ll concentrate on using AI in software development.

Implementing AI to solve your business needs could provide better decision-making capabilities, increase operational efficiency, improve customer experiences, and help mitigate risks.

The potential of AI in business is vast, and these blog posts aim to illuminate the path toward leveraging AI for enhanced business growth, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. Join us in unlocking the true potential of AI in the business world.

Stay tuned for our next installment: “Customer Foresight” – Unveiling the Power of Predictive Analytics in Understanding Customer Behavior.!

100 Customer Conversations Shaped Our New AI and Apps Service Offering

Author: Anthony Gyursanszky, CEO, Codento

Foreword

A few months back, in a manufacturing industry event: Codento just finished our keynote together with Google and our people started mingling among the audience. Our target was to agree on a follow-up discussions about how to utilize Artificial Intelligence (AI) and modern applications for their business.

The outcome of that mingling session was staggering. 50% of the people we talked with wanted to continue the dialogue with us after the event. The hit rate was not 10%, not 15%, but 50%.

We knew before already that AI will change everything, but with this, our confidence climbed to another level . Not because we believed in this, but because we realized that so many others did, too.

AI will change the way we serve customers and manufacture things, the way we diagnose and treat illnesses, the way we travel and commute, and the way we learn. AI is everywhere, and not surprisingly, it is also the most common topic that gets executives excited and interested in talking.

AI does not solve the use cases without application innovations. Applications integrate the algorithms to an existing operating environment, they provide required user interfaces, and they handle the orchestration in a more complex setup.

We address your industry- and role-specific needs with AI and application innovations

We at Codento have been working with AI and Apps for several years now. Some years back, we also sharpened our strategy to be the partner of choice in Finland for Google Cloud Platform-based solutions in the AI and applications innovation space.

During the past six months, we have been on a mission to workshop with as many organizations as possible about their needs and aspirations for AI and Apps. This mission has led us to more than a hundred discussions with dozens and dozens of people from the manufacturing industry to retail and healthcare to public services.

Based on these dialogues, we concluded that it is time for Codento to move from generic technology talks to more specific messages that speak the language of our customers.

Thus, we are thrilled to introduce our new service portfolio, shaped by those extensive conversations with various organizations’ business, operations, development, and technology experts.

Tailored precisely to address your industry and role-specific requirements, we now promise you more transparent customer foresight, smarter operations, and increased software intelligence – all built on a future-proof, next-generation foundation on Google Cloud.

These four solution areas will form the pillars of Codento’s future business. Here we go.

AI and Apps for Customer Foresight

As we engaged with sales, marketing and customer services officers we learned that the majority is stuck with limited visibility of customer understanding and of the impact their decisions and actions have on their bottom line. AI and Apps can change all this.

For example, with almost three out of four online shoppers expecting brands to understand their unique needs, the time of flying blind on marketing, sales, and customer service is over.

Codento’s Customer Foresight offering is your key to thriving in tomorrow’s markets.

Use data and Google’s innovative tech, trained on the world’s most enormous public datasets, to find the right opportunities, spot customers’ needs, discover new markets, and boost sales with more intelligent marketing.
Exceed your customers’ expectations by elevating your retention game with great experiences based on new technology. Keep customers returning by foreseeing their desires and giving them what they want when and how they want it – even before they realize their needs themselves.
Optimize Your Profits with precise data-driven decisions based on discovering your customers’ value with Google’s ready templates for calculating Customer Lifetime Value. With that, you can focus on the best customers, make products that sell, and set prices that work.

AI and Apps for Smart Operations

BCG has stated that 89% of industrial companies plan to implement AI in their production networks. As we have been discussing with the operations, logistics and supply chain directors, we have seen this to be true – the appetite is there.

Our renewed Smart Operations offering is your path to operational excellence and increased resilience. You should not leave this potential untapped in your organization.

By smart scheduling your operations, we will help streamline your factory, logistics, projects, and supply chain operations. With the help of Google’s extensive AI tools for manufacturing and logistics operations, you can deliver on time, within budget, and with superior efficiency.
Minimize risks related to disruptions, protect your reputation, and save resources, thereby boosting employee and customer satisfaction while cutting costs.
Stay one step ahead with the power of AI, transparent data, and analytics. Smart Operations keeps you in the know, enabling you to foresee and tackle disruptions before they even happen.

AI and Apps for Software Intelligence

For the product development executives of software companies, Codento offers tools and resources for unleashing innovation. The time to start benefiting from AI in software development is now.

Gartner predicts that 15% of new applications will be automatically generated by AI in the year 2027 – that is, without any interaction with a human. As a whopping 70% of the world’s generative AI startups already rely on Google Cloud’s AI capabilities, we want to help your development organization do the same.

Codento’s support for building an AI-driven software strategy will help you confidently chart your journey. You can rely on Google’s strong product vision and our expertise in harnessing the platform’s AI potential.
Supercharge your software development and accelerate your market entry with cutting-edge AI-powered development tools. With Codento’s experts, your teams can embrace state-of-the-art DevOps capabilities and Google’s cloud-native application architecture.
When your resources fall short, you can scale efficiently by complementing your development capacity with our AI and app experts. Whether it’s Minimum Viable Products, rapid scaling, or continuous operations, we’ve got your back.

Nextgen Foundation to enable AI and Apps

While the business teams are moving ahead with AI and App initiatives related to Customer Foresight, Smart Operations, and Software Intelligence IT functions are often bound to legacy IT and data architectures and application portfolios. This creates pressure for the IT departments to keep up with the pace.

All the above-mentioned comes down to having the proper foundation to build on, i.e., preparing your business for the innovations that AI and application technologies can bring. Moving to a modern cloud platform will allow you to harness the potential of AI and modern applications, but it is also a cost-cutting endeavor.BCG has studied companies that are forerunners in digital and concluded that they can save up to 30% on their IT costs when moving applications and infrastructure to the cloud.

Future-proof your architecture and operations with Google’s secure, compliant, and cost-efficient cloud platform that will scale to whatever comes next. Whether you choose a single cloud strategy or embrace multi-cloud environments, Codento has got you covered.
You can unleash the power and amplify the value of your data through real-time availability, sustainable management, and AI readiness. With Machine Learning Ops (MLOps), we streamline your organization’s scaling of AI usage.
We can also help modernize your dated application portfolio with cloud-native applications designed for scale, elasticity, resiliency, and flexibility.

Sharpened messages wing Codento’s entry to the Nordic market

With these four solution areas, we aim to discover the solutions to your business challenges quickly and efficiently. We break the barriers between business and technology with our offerings that speak the language of the target person. We are dedicated to consistently delivering solutions that meet your needs and learn and become even more efficient over time.

Simultaneously, we eagerly plan to launch Codento’s services and solutions to the Nordic market. Our goal is to guarantee that our customers across the Nordics can seize the endless benefits of Google’s cutting-edge AI and application technologies without missing a beat.

About the author:

AI in Manufacturing: AI Visual Quality Control

Author: Janne Flinck

Introduction

Inspired by the Smart Industry event, we decided to start a series of blog posts that tackle some of the issues in manufacturing with AI. In this first section, we will talk about automating quality control with vision AI.

Manufacturing companies, as well as companies in other industries like logistics, prioritize the effectiveness and efficiency of their quality control processes. In recent years, computer vision-based automation has emerged as a highly efficient solution for reducing quality costs and defect rates.

The American Society of Quality estimates that most manufacturers spend the equivalent of 15% to 20% of revenues on “true quality-related costs.” Some organizations go as high as 40% cost-of-quality in their operations. Cost centers that affect quality in manufacturing come in three different areas:

Appraisal costs: Verification of material and processes, quality audits of the entire system, supplier ratings
Internal failure costs: Waste of resources or errors from poor planning or organization, correction of errors on finished products, failure of analysis regarding internal procedures
External failure costs: Repairs and servicing of delivered products, warranty claims, complaints, returns

Artificial intelligence is helping manufacturers improve in all these areas, which is why leading enterprises have been embracing it. According to a 2021 survey of more than 1,000 manufacturing executives across seven countries interviewed by Google Cloud, 39% of manufacturers are using AI for quality inspection, while 35% are using it for quality checks on the production line itself.

Top 5 areas where AI is currently deployed in day-to-day operations:

Quality inspection 39%
Supply chain management 36%
Risk management 36%
Product and/or production line quality checks 35%
Inventory management 34%

Source: Google Cloud Manufacturing Report

With the assistance of vision AI, production line workers are able to reduce the amount of time spent on repetitive product inspections, allowing them to shift their attention towards more intricate tasks, such as conducting root cause analysis.

Modern computer vision models and frameworks offer versatility and cost-effectiveness, with specialized cloud-native services for model training and edge deployment further reducing implementation complexities.

Solution overview

In this blog post, we focus on the challenge of defect detection on assembly and sorting lines. The real-time visual quality control solution, implemented using Google Clouds Vertex AI and AutoML services, can track multiple objects and evaluate the probability of defects or damages.

The first stage involves preparing the video stream by splitting the stream into frames for analysis. The next stage utilizes a model to identify bounding boxes around objects.

Once the object is identified, the defect detection system processes the frame by cutting out the object using the bounding box, resizing it, and sending it to a defect detection model for classification. The output is a frame where the object is detected with bounding boxes and classified as either a defect or not a defect. The quick processing time enables real-time monitoring using the model’s output, automating the defect detection process and enhancing overall efficiency.

The core solution architecture on Google Cloud is as follows:

Implementation details

In this section I will touch upon some of the parts of the system, mainly what it takes to get started and what things to consider. The dataset is self created from objects I found at home, but this very same approach and algorithm can be used on any objects as long as the video quality is good.

Here is an example frame from the video, where we can see one defective object and three non-defective objects:

We can also see that one of the objects is leaving the frame on the right side and another one is entering the frame from the left.

The video can be found here.

Datasets and models overview

In our experiment, we used a video that simulates a conveyor belt scenario. The video showed objects moving from the left side of the screen to the right, some of which were defective or damaged. Our training dataset consists of approximately 20 different objects, with four of them being defective.

For visual quality control, we need to utilize an object detection model and an image classification model. There are three options to build the object detection model:

Train a model powered by Google Vertex AI AutoML
Use the prebuilt Google Cloud Vision API
Train a custom model

For this prototype we decided to opt for both options 1 and 2. To train a Vertex AI AutoML model, we need an annotated dataset with bounding box coordinates. Due to the relatively small size of our dataset, we chose to use Google Clouds data annotation tool. However, for larger datasets, we recommend using Vertex AI data labeling jobs.

For this task, we manually drew bounding boxes for each object in the frames and annotated the objects. In total, we used 50 frames for training our object detection model, which is a very modest amount.

Machine learning models usually require a larger number of samples for training. However, for the purpose of this blog post, the quantity of samples was sufficient to evaluate the suitability of the cloud service for defect detection. In general, the more labeled data you can bring to the training process, the better your model will be. Another obvious critical requirement for the dataset is to have representative examples of both defects and regular instances.

The subsequent stages in creating the AutoML object detection and AutoML defect detection datasets involved partitioning the data into training, validation, and test subsets. By default, Vertex AI automatically distributes 80% of the images for training, 10% for validation, and 10% for testing. We used manual splitting to avoid data leakage. Specifically, we avoid having sets of sequential frames.

The process for creating the AutoML dataset and model is as follows:

As for using the out-of-the-box Google Cloud Vision API for object detection, there is no dataset annotation requirement. One just uses the client libraries to call the API and process the response, which consists of normalized bounding boxes and object names. From these object names we then filter for the ones that we are looking for. The process for Vision API is as follows:

Why would one train a custom model if using Google Cloud Vision API is this simple? For starters, the Vision API will detect generic objects, so if there is something very specific, it might not be in the labels list. Unfortunately, it looks like the complete list of labels detected by Google Cloud Vision API is not publicly available. One should try the Google Cloud Vision API and see if it is able to detect the objects of interest.

According to Vertex AI’s documentation, AutoML models perform optimally when the label with the lowest number of examples has at least 10% of the examples as the label with the highest number of examples. In a production case, it is important to capture roughly similar amounts of training examples for each category.

Even if you have an abundance of data for one label, it is best to have an equal distribution for each label. As our primary aim was to construct a prototype using a limited dataset, rather than enhancing model accuracy, we did not tackle the problem of imbalanced classes.

Object tracking

We developed an object tracking algorithm, based on the OpenCV library, to address the specific challenges of our video scenario. The specific trackers we tested were CSRT, KCF and MOSSE. The following rules of thumb apply in our scenario as well:

Use CSRT when you need higher object tracking accuracy and can tolerate slower FPS throughput
Use KCF when you need faster FPS throughput but can handle slightly lower object tracking accuracy
Use MOSSE when you need pure speed

For object tracking we need to take into account the following characteristics of the video:

Each frame may contain one or multiple objects, or none at all
New objects may appear during the video and old objects disappear
Objects may only be partially visible when they enter or exit the frame
There may be overlapping bounding boxes for the same object
The same object will be in the video for multiple successive frames

To speed up the entire process, we only send each fully visible object to the defect detection model twice. We then average the probability output of the model and assign the label to that object permanently. This way we can save both computation time and money by not calling the model endpoint needlessly for the same object multiple times throughout the video.

Conclusion

Here is the result output video stream and an extracted frame from the quality control process. Blue means that the object has been detected but has not yet been classified because the object is not fully visible in the frame. Green means no defect detected and red is a defect:

The video can be found here.

These findings demonstrate that it is possible to develop an automated visual quality control pipeline with a minimal number of samples. In a real-world scenario, we would have access to much longer video streams and the ability to iteratively expand the dataset to enhance the model until it meets the desired quality standards.

Despite these limitations, thanks to Vertex AI, we were able to achieve reasonable quality in just the first training run, which took only a few hours, even with a small dataset. This highlights the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach of utilizing pretrained models and AutoML solutions, as we were able to achieve promising results in a very short time frame.

Please contact us for more information on how to utilize artificial intelligence in industrial solutions.

Leading through Digital Turmoil

Author: Anthony Gyursanszky, CEO, Codento

Foreword

Few decades back during my early university years I bacame familiar with Pascal coding and Michael Porter’s competitive strategy. “Select telecommunication courses next – it is the future”, I was told. So I did, and the telecommunications disruption indeed accelerated my first career years.

The telecom disruption layed up the foundation for an even greater change we are now facing enabled by cloud capabilities, data technologoes, artificial intelligence and modern software. We see companies not only selecting between Porter’s lowest cost, differentation, or focus strategies, but with the help of digital disruption, the leaders utilize them all simultaneously.

Here at Codento we are in a mission to help various organization to succeed through digital turmoil, understand their current capabilities, envision their future business and technical environment, craft the most rational steps of transformation towards digital leadership, and support them throughout this process with advise and capability acceleration. In this process, we work closely with leading cloud technology enablers, like Google Cloud.

In this article, I will open up the journey towards digital leadership based on our experiences and available global studies.

What we mean by digital transformation now?

Blair Franklin, Contributing Writer, Google Cloud recently published a blogpost

Why the meaning of “digital transformation” is evolving. Google interviewed more than 2,100 global tech and business leaders around the question: “What does digital transformation mean to you?”

Five years ago the dominant view was “lift-and-shift” your IT infrastructure to the public cloud. Most organizations have now proceedded with this, mostly to seek for cost saving, but very little transformative business value has been visible to their own customers.

Today, the meaning of “digital transformation “has expanded according to Google Cloud survey. 72% consider it as much more than “lift-and-shift”. The survey claims that there are now two new attributes:

Optimizing processes and becoming more operationally agile (47%). This in my opinion, provides a foundation for both cost and differentiation strategy.
Improving customer experience through technology (40%). This, in my opinion, boosts both focus and differentiation strategy.

In conclusion, we have now moved from “lift-and-shift” era to a “digital leader” era.

Why would one consider becoming a digital leader?

Boston Consulting Group and Google Cloud explored the benefits of putting effort on becoming “a digital leader” in Keys of Scaling Digital Value 2022 study. According to the study, about 30% of organizations were categorized as digital leaders.

And what is truly interesting, digital leaders tend to outperform their peers: They bring 2x more solutions to scale and with scaling they deliver significantly better financial results (3x higher returns on investments, 15-20% faster revenue growth and simlar size of cost savings)

The study points out several characteristics of a digital leader, but one with the highest correlation is related how they utilize software in the cloud: digital leaders deploy cloud-native solutions (64% vs. 3% of laggers) with modern modular architecture (94% vs. 21% laggers).

Cloud native means a concept of building and running applications to take advantage of the distributed computing offered by the cloud. Cloud native applications, on the other hand, are designed to utilize the scale, elasticity, resiliency, and flexibility of the cloud.

The opposite to this are legacy applications which have been designed to on-premises environments, bound to certain technologies, integrations, and even specific operating system and database versions.

How to to become a digital leader?

First, It is obvious that the journey towards digital leadership requires strong vision, determination, and investments as there are two essential reasons why the progress might be stalled:

According to a Mckinsey survey a lack of strategic clarity cause transformations to lose momentum or stall at the pilot stage.
Boston Consulting Group research found that only 40% of all companies manage to create an integrated transformation strategy.

Second, Boston Consulting Group and Google Cloud “Keys of Scaling Digital Value 2022” study further pinpoints a more novel approach for digital leadership as a prerequisite for success. The study shows that the digital leaders:

Are organized around product-led platform teams (83% leaders vs. 25% laggers)
Staff cross-functional lighthouse teams (88% leaders vs. 23% laggers)
Establish a digital “control tower” (59% leaders vs. 4% laggers)

Third, as observed by us also here at Codento, most companies have structured their organizations and defined roles and process during the initial IT era into silos as they initially started to automate their manual processes with IT technologies and applications. They added IT organizations next to their existing functions while keeping business and R&D functions separate.

All these three key functions have had their own mostly independent views of data, applications and cloud adoption, but while cloud enables and also requires seemless utilization of these capabilities ”as one”, companies need to rethink the way they organize themselves in a cloud-native way.

Without legacy investments this would obviously be a much easier process as “digital native” organizations, like Spotify, have showcased. Digital natives tend to design their operations ”free of silos” around cloud native application development and utilizing advanced cloud capabilities like unified data storage, processing and artificial intelligence.

Digital native organizations are flatter, nimbler, and roles are more flexible with broader accountability ss suggested by DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering models. Quite remarkable results follow successful adoption. DORA’s, 2021 Accelerate: State of DevOps Report reveals that peak performers in this area are 1.8 times more likely to report better business outcomes.

Yes, I want to jump to a digital leadr train. How to get started?

In summary, digital leaders are more successful than their peers and it is difficult to argument not to join that movement.

Digital leaders do not only consider digital transformation as an infrastructure cloudification initiative, but seek competitive egde by optimizing processes and improving customer experience. To become a digital leader requires a clear vision, support by top management and new structures enabled by cloud native applications accelerated by integrated data and artificial intelligence.

We here at Codento are specialized in enabling our customers to become digital leaders with a three-phase-value discovery approach to crystallize your:

Why? Assess where you are ar the moment and what is needed to flourish in the future business environment.
What? Choose your strategic elements and target capabilities in order to succeed.
How? Build and implement your transformation and execution journeys based on previous phases.

We help our clients not only throughout the entire thinking and implementation process, but also with specific improvement initiatives as needed.

To get more practical perspective on this you may want to visit our live digital leader showcase library:

You can also subscribe to our newsletters, join upcoming online-events and watch our event recordings.

About the author: Anthony Gyursanszky, CEO, joined Codento in late 2019 with more than 30 years of experience in the IT and software industry. Anthony has previously held management positions at F-Secure, SSH, Knowit / Endero, Microsoft Finland, Tellabs, Innofactor and Elisa. Gyursanszky has also served on the boards of software companies, including Arc Technology and Creanord. Anthony also works as a senior consultant for Value Mapping Services. Anthony’s experience covers business management, product management, product development, software business, SaaS business, process management and software development outsourcing. Anthony is also a certified Cloud Digital Leader.