Category Archives: Software Development

How AI Developers Drive Innovation in Your Business

Posted on by Jean Patayon
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From boosting software security in banking to minimizing vehicle downtime, companies are discovering an ever-expanding range of use cases for AI and the advantages of AI development services. 

Let’s explore practical strategies for harnessing the power of AI and integrating this technology into your business operations. We’ll start by answering the question “Why hire AI developers?”.

Why Hire AI Developers to Promote Innovation?

The impact of AI on the modern world is comparable to, if not greater than, the invention of the printing press or the rise of the internet.

While AI is creating unparalleled new opportunities for nearly every sector, many businesses are still uncertain about how to implement it within their industries.

This is where AI developers step in. They have knowledge and expertise needed to help organizations capitalize on the next-generation AI innovations.

So, do you really need to hire artificial intelligence engineers to stay ahead of the curve? 

The answer is YES. 

Just as no company can operate without an accountant, no business aspiring to be competitive in this new reality can afford to ignore AI developers. 

Whether your aim is to improve operational efficiency, enhance customer satisfaction, or gain a competitive advantage, you’ll definitely benefit from integrating AI into your business.

AI Development for Innovation Across Industries

We’ve selected real-life examples from various industry giants that have adopted AI (and likely hire AI engineers) to use the transformative potential of this technology. 

Take a look at this non-comprehensive list and consider how AI can revolutionize your business: perhaps it’s time for your company to be featured in the next success story.

Healthcare

United States’ pharmaceutical and biotechnology company, Moderna, has been collaborating with OpenAI in the field of mRNA (messenger RNA) medicine. In particular, Moderna leveraged artificial intelligence for accelerating the development of mRNA vaccines. 

AI helped Moderna in analyzing vast datasets to optimize the design of mRNA sequences, which sped up the vaccine development process and improved the precision of their formulations.

Finance

A remarkable finding for financiers: one of the world’s leading financial institutions, Bank of America, holds nearly 1,100 AI and machine learning patents in its patent portfolio — a 94-percent rise from 2022! 

An example of how the organization is leveraging AI and machine learning to benefit its clients and employees is the Bank of America Intelligent Receivables solution. 

This is a reconciliation system that uses AI to bring together payment information and associated remittance details from various payment channels. 

The solution matches payments to outstanding invoices, thus reducing time and costs associated with manual processing.

Additionally, the system uses AI to learn customer patterns and behavior to improve the accuracy of remittance data over time.

E-commerce

One of the most common uses of AI in e-commerce is recommendation systems, which analyze customer behavior and preferences to suggest products that are most likely to be of interest. 

Online sellers, from video streaming platforms like Netflix to marketplaces like Amazon, rely on AI-powered recommendation algorithms to suggest their products based on previous user interactions. 

Another notable example comes from the European book publisher Eksmo, which partnered with a US-based company DevTeam.Space to develop a natural language processing engine for classifying their books by genre. The AI-driven system enabled Eksmo to create a recommendation solution that tailored its advertisements, highlighting specific books to targeted audiences.

Yet another application of AI in e-commerce is customer service through chatbots and virtual assistants. Companies like Sephora and H&M utilize AI-powered chatbots to guide customers through their shopping journey.

Energy and Utilities

According to a study by IBM, 74% of energy and utility companies are embracing AI in their operations. 

For instance, Shell uses AI for predictive maintenance which helps them spot problems before they become big and expensive to fix. 

Additionally, AI helps the company to reduce the emissions from its own operations. Shell’s process optimiser for liquefied natural gas, for example, takes information from sensors and uses AI to calculate efficient settings for equipment. 

Shell is also using AI to sort through seismic data in order to speed up the process to help find oil and gas more quickly, at a lower cost. Their smart-charging algorithm helps customers to charge their electric vehicles more cheaply.

Logistics and Transportation

Logistics and transportation are another example of sectors that extensively hire artificial intelligence developers to boost productivity. 

Uber Freight, a division of Uber, uses AI to connect trucking companies with shippers.

One of the key AI applications is in route optimization, where machine learning algorithms analyze traffic patterns, weather conditions, and historical data to suggest the most efficient routes for drivers. 

AI also plays a crucial role in enhancing the matching algorithm, ensuring that shipments are assigned to the most suitable carriers based on capacity, location, and performance history.

Manufacturing

AI developers can utilize generative design algorithms to assist in the creation of new products. AI can propose new product designs that are optimized for performance and cost. 

For instance, Siemens and NVIDIA have partnered to integrate AI into manufacturing through digital twins and advanced simulation. 

By combining Siemens’ Xcelerator platform with NVIDIA’s AI and Omniverse technology, manufacturers can create real-time, virtual replicas of production lines.

This allows for improved monitoring, predictive maintenance, and process optimization.

Digital twins help predict machine failures, optimize supply chains, and streamline operations by simulating various variables and testing new designs in virtual environments. This reduces errors and shortens time-to-market for new products.

Telecommunications

In the telecommunications industry, AI is increasingly being used to enhance customer experience, optimize network performance, and enable predictive maintenance. 

AT&T, for example, leverages AI and machine learning to monitor network traffic, detect anomalies, and predict potential issues before they cause disruptions. AI-powered algorithms help AT&T optimize its network infrastructure.

Also, the company launched Ask AT&T, a generative AI platform that employees can use to summarize phone calls and documents, write code, and dig into databases to find insights to better serve the company’s customers.

Advantages of Implementing AI in a Business

If you’re looking to hire artificial intelligence developers, you should know that they can significantly promote innovation within your company by creating and implementing AI-driven solutions.

Here are some specific examples of AI integration in businesses:

  1. Automating Complex Processes
  2. Personalized Customer Experiences
  3. Predictive Analytics for Decision-Making
  4. Natural Language Processing for Enhanced Communication
  5. AI in Product Development and Innovation
  6. AI for Enhanced Security
  7. Supply Chain Optimization
  8. Advanced Marketing Strategies

When considering AI integration, businesses should focus on identifying specific challenges that AI can address. This is an additional reason to hire AI/ML developers who’ll help you select the right technologies to meet your strategic objectives.

Conclusion

AI presents fantastic opportunities for all sectors and business domains. Aspiring to tap into unchartered territories, organizations of all scales tend to hire AI developers for building innovative, cutting-edge AI-powered solutions. Just ensure you hire the right ones.

Fundamentals of Efficient Resource Allocation in Project Management: How Resource Management Software Can Assist 

Posted on by Diana Kharchenko
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No projects can be delivered without resources. Resources are the prime engine of any project, and the success of any project depends of resource efficiency and productivity, especially if we’re talking about multi-project environments with a shared resource pool. Efficient resource allocation is a guarantee of smooth and timely project delivery. Let’s figure out how to ensure that the right resources work on the rights projects and tasks at the right time and what hurdles can be on the way to flawless resource management and how to resolve them.

The role of resource allocation in project management 

Resource allocation is an essential part of any project management strategy. To put it simply, it’s a process of assigning tasks to employees based on projects’ and tasks’ priorities and resources capacity, availability, skills, and experience. The main goal of resource allocation is to make the right people do the right tasks at the right time to ensure smooth project delivery. 

What are the most common resource allocation challenges?

Though a plenty of resource allocation challenges can happen at all the stages of the project life cycle, let’s distinguish the most common ones:

Bridging the demand for resources coming from projects with available capacity

Examining your resource pool is an essential step in project planning and further resource allocation. Being sure that you have enough resources to staff the required projects is a guarantee of their on-time completion and prevention of extra expenditures because of last-minute hiring. 

Coping with changing project requirements

If project’s requirements are unexpectedly changed which results in adding extra tasks to the schedule, this may significantly affect resource workload. In this case, a project manager should either control and prevent project requirement changes or implement some resource optimization techniques to deliver the required scope of work with available resources. 

Collecting and managing resource-related information: experience, skills, location, and other attributes

In enterprises with hundreds of projects and thousands of resources involved, keeping track of all essential data is extremely difficult. At the same time, efficient resource allocation is impossible without managing and matching the resources’ and tasks’ attributes. 

Real-time tracking of resource availability and performance

Even if resources are properly allocated from the first glance, some problems may occur in the middle of the process, at the project execution stage. This is why it’s so important to track not only project progress but also resource performance in real time to make sure resources are effectively handling their duties.  

Timely detection of bottlenecks and optimizing the workload

A resource bottleneck occurs as a result of overload of even one employee and its harmful effect spreads throughout the whole project team blocking the workflow. Timely detection, and even better – prevention, of bottlenecks is a key to smooth project flow and timely delivery. 

Uncertainty and risks

Any employee may fall ill, and a project manager cannot predict things like this. But what any project manager can and should do is to be prepared for uncertainty and be able to mitigate risks. Capacity planning, project prioritization, and proper buffer management are the examples of how to get prepared for uncertainty in project management. 

What is efficient resource allocation?

Efficient resource allocation is using your resources’ potential to the full for the project’s sake. The efficiency of resource allocation is difficult to evaluate but at the same time, if they’re allocated improperly, you’ll notice some signs that will show you that you need to change something. 

What are the signs of inefficient resource allocation?

Overloaded and idle resources

Uneven workload is one of the first signs of bad resource allocation. It happens when some resources are overloaded, while others become idle waiting for their tasks to be completed by predecessors. The more overloaded the employee, the more unbalanced workload through the whole resource pool. 

Unmotivated employees

People lose motivation and become disengaged if they’re constantly assigned to the tasks that don’t match their skills and experience levels. Too difficult tasks can overwhelm inexperienced employees while too simple tasks can disengage competent and experienced resources. 

Constant errors and need for rework

Multi-tasking and overload are one of the main reasons for errors. Unfocused employees can’t do their job at a high-quality level and regularly do mistakes. This, in turn, increases waiting times and can lead to overload in other resource groups and result in missed deadlines. 

Missed due dates

If milestone due dates are regularly missed, this is one of the most critical signs of bad resource allocation in project management. This means that resources can’t cope with their job, which may result in missed project due dates and cost overrun. 

How a resource management software solution can simplify and improve resource allocation

Let’s have a look at some of the benefits resource allocation software can provide project managers with:

It helps plan resource capacity before starting your projects.

Predictive analytics automatically bridges the demand with available capacity within minutes, which contributes to more efficient and faster project planning with confidence in project success. 

It helps assign tasks to resources based on their competence and experience levels.

Machine learning tools easily detect coincidences and simplify resource allocation by suggesting the best matches between resources and tasks taking all related data into account. 

It lets you track real-time resource performance.

Project managers can be always in the know of the states of their projects and the efficiency of their resources by examining the analytics that a resource management software solution provides in handy graphs, boards, or tables,  

It helps you keep your workflow smooth even if project requirements change.

Resource management tools adjust project schedules and resource allocation in real time if any changes to the project plan happen. 

With its help, you can test resource allocation decisions. 

Some resource management tools like Epicflow have AI-powered features like scenario analysis, which helps project managers test resource allocation and project management decisions and see their consequences in the future. Therefore, this contributes to stressless delivery because a project manager is always confident in the reasonableness of every project management action. In fact, Epicflow has all the functionality described above, so if you’re looking for a resource management tool, this innovative software solution can be a good choice for your company.

Conclusion

Efficient resource allocation is a cornerstone of effective project management and successful delivery. Correctly allocated resources can deliver excellent results and contribute to flawless project outcomes, while bad resource allocation can lead to cost overrun and missed due dates. The best recommendation one can get to improve resource allocation at an organization is to adopt a resource management software solution which will significantly improve resource allocation and enhance resource productivity, contributing to stressless delivery of projects.