In this contributed article, editorial consultant Jelani Harper suggests that perhaps no other single entity has done more to spur cloud adoption rates than Salesforce has. By democratizing Customer Resource Management (CRM) with this architecture, the ubiquitous CRM vendor considerably popularized the movement of shifting data, applications, and attendant tools like Master Data Management (MDM) offsite.

In this special guest feature, Richard Smullen, CEO of Pypestream, discusses how moving forward, conversational experiences, not automated text transactions, need to be the priority for brands. Companies using CI and other automation will provide the seamless experiences customers expect and create true engagement using AI.

In this contributed article, Sylvain Rougemaille PhD, Price Optimizer Product Manager, and Gabriel Smith, Chief Evangelist and Vice President of Innovation, at Pricefx, discuss how AI as applied to pricing must be transparent, defensible and pragmatic with proven ways to help sales win more business and increase deal size. It is also not a “one size fits all” problem, so the models must reflect the insight of the management team in order to be most effective.

Above the Trend Line: your industry rumor central is a recurring feature of insideBIGDATA. In this column, we present a variety of short time-critical news items grouped by category such as M&A activity, people movements, funding news, financial results, industry alignments, customer wins, rumors and general scuttlebutt floating around the big data, data science and machine learning industries including behind-the-scenes anecdotes and curious buzz.

As the algorithms and data-driven methods continue to develop, venture capitalists are becoming more interested to invest in artificial intelligence startups providing the most beneficial solutions. According to data gathered by BuyShares.co.nz, the total amount of funds AI startups raised over time reached $61.6bn in the second quarter of 2020, a 35% increase in a year.

In this contributed article, Diederik Verkest, Ph.D. from imec, points out that to make predictions, AI relies on the processing of large amounts of data, a process that takes a lot of energy. Imec develops solutions to drastically reduce that energy consumption. A new chip, in which these calculations are performed directly in the memory by means of analogue technology, is a major breakthrough in this field.