AI Helps Introduce My Music to Peeps

As a creative, I enjoy writing songs and creating art.  As a music producer, songwriter, and vocalist, I found myself with a catalog of songs our team created with an audience of friends, family, and business associates. Well, this is fine, but I wanted to reach out and promote the stories in my songs as I start with the story and lyrics. My team and I then craft music to match and/or alter the lyrics. While streaming helps a bit, you have to actively market your songs because every day, thousands of songs are created by folks today, and tomorrow, AI will add to the mix. So, how can I encourage my audience to grow? Well, AI now plays a role. 

AI to the Rescue

My co-producer and genius partner, Ethan Foxx was using AI videos to promote his songs. So Ethan taught me how to create AI videos synchronized with the songs we both produced. I went on my own after a couple of collaborative videos Ethan and I created. I learned how to script for Kaiber AI and create my own AI music videos. It's been a blast waiting overnight for AI to render a video, and now I see the results. It usually takes me two or three times before I get a Video I like. I figured the best way to expand my audience was to post the videos on YouTube and TikTok, targeting a younger demographic. Well,  the results have been pretty impressive, as you can see above in the image from TikTok. Over 11K likes and over 200K views. You can find me on TikTok, or click here for YouTube access. The most popular videos are "Forgive" and "Dark Star Love". The best video is "Cry for Creation"

Art of the 1st Quarter 2025

 With a new song coming out in January 2025, my art focused on an image that projects the theme of the song and an AI-generated music video. Dark Star Love is about an exciting and scary chance meeting with a kindred soul. Will it last or will they move on? It's like plunging into a black hole of sorts. Click on this link for the full video 

Art for the 1st Quarter 2024

 All of the art for the first quarter resulted from experiments with Gen AI. I used Kaiber for the videos and Microsoft Image Creator. These art projects coincided with my new album, "Ready or Not." Please click here for a summary. For a quick preview of each song, click here. I generated four videos, as listed below, but I started the videos with the following images to give the AI tool a starting point and a storyboard to tell the story of each song. Overall, I liked the experience as an artist, but it won't keep me from doing art by hand or fractals, which also require computer assistance. Here are the art pieces for each song in the order they are on the album. 

                                                        Are You Ready for Me?

                                                         Spiritual Treasure 

                                                                Forgive 

                                                            Thankful Now 

                                                            Judge Not 

                                                               Kinder 

                                                   Walking the Talk

                                                            Mercy Me

                                                          Cry for Creation

                                                           Restoration 

Related Gen AI Music Videos:

Cry for Creation

Forgive 

Kinder

Spiritual Treasure 

Generative AI Made Me Cry

Cry for Creation is the ninth song on the “Ready or Not Album,” representing the youth worried about the earth and the creation left for them. We asked Gen AI to show us creation in its prime, which is starting to burn and become desolate with no signs of life. The children cry out for the hope of restoration and a way forward. I cried thinking about my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren inheriting creation downstream. We thought someone from the next generations should sing this song. My granddaughter has sung in many plays, plus for the AZ Diamondbacks and at various other sporting events. Introducing Karson Sinur’s debut studio performance. I can’t believe she did it in one take with some additional harmony tracks. The lyrics, voice, and video are haunting. Click here for the Gen AI Video

“Ready or Not” is the name of my second album, which is about being a better human being, which we all struggle with on a daily basis. Ethan Foxx is my co-writer/creative producer/guitar/drums, and Jimmy (CAT) Caterine is our creative engineer and lead guitarist, both of whom are my mentors on my musical journey. Our team was ably assisted with great bass playing by Pete Crane. Fantastic strings by Cathie King. Significant keyboard boosts and a terrific trumpet solo from Eric Barker. A lovely harmonica outro by Robert Vincent. A steaming blues lead guitar and solo by the talented Don Supplee. Lead vocals by me. If you want to be notified when the album starts streaming, send me your email at jim.sinur@gmail.com. If you want in on a CD when they arrive, add your snail mail address, and I’ll take care of the rest of the pre-order process. Meanwhile, we hope you enjoy the music.

Can Generative AI Teach Us to Be Kinder?

Kinder is the sixth song on the album (see below), which encourages us to focus on being kinder. The harmonies in this song illustrate the collaboration needed to make it through life. We asked AI to show happy people in a pretty park who were gathered together in a loving way. Next, we asked AI to show people how loving and kind people are to animals. After that segment, we asked AI to show people being kind to older folks who are in need of help. Then we asked AI to show friendly folks at a food pantry that were welcoming and warm. AI finishes with a walk down a path, waving a greeting to all who pass by. AI can show us kindness with a bit of scripting and prompting from humans. Click here for the short Generative AI Video

“Ready or Not” is the name of my second album, which is about being a better human being, which we all struggle with on a daily basis. Ethan Foxx is my co-writer/creative producer/guitar/drums, and Jimmy (CAT) Caterine is our creative engineer and lead guitarist, both of whom are my mentors on my musical journey. Our team was assisted by Pete Crane, with great bass playing. Wonderful strings by Cathie King. Great keyboard boosts and a terrific trumpet solo from Eric Barker. A lovely harmonica outro by Robert Vincent. A steaming blues lead guitar and solo by the talented Don Supplee. Lead vocals by me. If you want to be notified when the album starts streaming, send me your email at jim.sinur@gmail.com. If you want in on a CD when they arrive, add your snail mail address, and I’ll take care of the rest of the pre-order process. Meanwhile, we hope you enjoy the music.

Additional AI Videos

Forgive 

Spiritual Treasure

Another Assist From Genereative AI

Spiritual Treasure is the second song on the album(see below) that speaks about some of the distractions that take us all away from being the true spiritual creatures we are under the veneer of our carbon-based presence. We asked AI to show a busy city where many of us hustle for our existence as the opening of this video. Next, AI helped depict people seeking attention online to expand their digital presence. AI depicts the spiritual aspects of us represented by a cathedral and the family tribe in various activities of love and community. Click here for a short video generated by AI for our song.

“Ready or Not” is the name of my second album, which is about being a better human being, which we all struggle with on a daily basis. Ethan Foxx is my co-writer/creative producer/guitar/drums, and Jimmy (CAT) Caterine is our creative engineer and lead guitarist, both of whom are my mentors on my musical journey. Our team was assisted by Pete Crane, with great bass playing. Lead vocals by me. If you want to be notified when the album starts streaming, send me your email at jim.sinur@gmail.com. If you want in on a CD when they arrive, add your snail mail address, and I’ll take care of the rest of the pre-order process. Meanwhile, we hope you enjoy the music.

Additional AI Videos

Forgive 

Generative AI and Music

Sitting in the middle of arts mixed with science, I get to have fun with the mixology of some of the ingredients. In the past, I've published posts about art and AI and written white papers on AI and processes. This time the mixology includes generative AI and Music where AI matches my music with a script I've written. The Script lays the basic storyline, and AI fills in the details, creating marketing music videos. I have one link below pointing to one of my experiments. I hope you like it. Comments are welcome.

Click here for a short AI-generated video designed to match the music. 

“Ready or Not” is the name of my second album, which is about being a better human being, which we all struggle with on a daily basis. Ethan Foxx is my co-writer/creative producer/guitar/drums, and Jimmy (CAT) Caterine is our creative engineer and lead guitarist, both of whom are my mentors on my musical journey. Our team was ably assisted with great bass playing by Pete Crane. Wonderful strings by Cathie King. Lead vocals by me. If you want to be notified when the album starts streaming, send me your email at jim.sinur@gmail.com. If you want in on a CD when they arrive, add your snail mail address, and I’ll take care of the rest of the pre-order process. Meanwhile, we hope you enjoy the music.

Forgive is the third song on the album that speaks about the weight of unforgiveness that plagues the forgiver until they let go. The stones in the video represent the unforgiveness in this AI-generated video. Click here for a short AI-generated video designed to match the music. 

Additional Reading:

Generative AI & Art Examples

Generative AI + Art Gains Momentum 

A Creative Use Of AI

Top 5 Business Trends for 2024

Adapting to Dynamic Business Conditions

The first trend is around businesses staying dynamically adaptive to change. Organizations must go beyond scenario planning exercises that sit on the shelf. While the planning exercises are proactive and sound, they also allow businesses to develop strategies for the various likely and unlikely scenarios. Savvy organizations will test the most likely scenarios, making an organization better prepared to adapt when change occurs. This means organizations must cultivate a culture of innovation that builds on leveraging agile methodologies and employee training/development. Cross-functional teams with individuals who embrace technologies by staying abreast of technological advancements will often develop solutions that support executive goals within alternative scenarios. Strategic partners will also help craft solutional alternatives, including backup partnerships. Remember that organizations are moving to real-time data/event-driven decisions that will adjust processes and applications. Careful planning will help legacy platforms and packages remain in a changing business environment. Managing change is essential in a world that is speeding up to new rates of change. This is not a "one-and-done" exercise, as adaptability is an ongoing process that needs regular reassessment.

 
Augmenting Your Customers

While most organizations think they are creating and refining user-friendly interfaces, the reality from the customer side is another thing. Customers find most interfaces are designed from the inside out, leveraging existing software and support teams. While multi-channel engagement and responsive customer service go a long way to helping the customer reach your organization's goals, the reality is that the customer journey is rarely just about your transactional efficiency when working with them. Think about how organizations had outsourced the keystrokes to the customer and the dumb chatbots they must deal with daily. To add insult to injury, the surveys are designed to get managers their rewards, not the customers' perspective. It's time to think "outside-in" from the customer's goals through the interaction with your organization and its legacy systems. This will give organizations new insights to personalize the experience, including smarter chatbots that recognize feedback in voice or visual cues to include sentiment, both positive and negative responses, in real-time with transparency. Let's assist our customers in their journeys, not just optimize costs for organizational goals based only on transactions your organization controls. Let's shift from reactive cost containment to proactive customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Augmenting Your Employees and Partners

Often, employees become the shock absorbers between your organization and other constituents. This means that they deal with the lack of integration across internal stovepipes that live with conflicting internal and external goals. What employees want is better job satisfaction, recognition/rewards, flexible work arrangements, and mostly career growth opportunities. They are driven by the need to keep up with ever-rising costs in their life situations. While some of these needs can be managed with a change in management tactics, employees need help. They need a better collaborative work environment with effective communication that helps them develop and learn to augment their career growth. Why not remove their "dirty work" with automation and let them become more knowledgeable workers through AI augmentation and reward-driven employee empowerment? Giving employees more autonomy and decision-making authority within their roles or across stovepipes with collaboration with others and AI bots is desirable. The best suggestions for continuous improvement will come from happy employees. All organizations need the table stakes of wellness programs, diversity, and workplace perks, but augmentation for advancement will be a key theme as we advance.

Managing Elusive and Shifting Costs

While the traditional methods of cost analysis, budgeting, expense monitoring, and control will still deliver savings for organizations, there are additional issues to consider. Negotiating with suppliers and partners to seek better deals, discounts, and more favorable payment terms is a great place to find incremental savings. Some big numbers in process optimization employ cost-reduction technologies that are now smarter than those of previous generations. Process mining and AI monitoring are good places to find nuggets of opportunity. Organizations may have to invest in technologies that streamline processes, automate repetitive tasks, and improve efficiency. It can lead to long-term cost savings and increased productivity. Cross-training and workforce optimization can help leverage existing employees or bots to handle various types of tasks and responsibilities. It creates excellent leverage and flexibility when experiencing peaks that typically require hiring additional staff. Telecommuting and remote work is a great cost-cutting trend for office costs. Ensure cost cutting is not arbitrary to meet numbers only to hurt long-term trends. Often, overzealous cost-cutting on minutia sometimes backfires with unexpected behaviors.

Providing Secure Digital Commerce

Ensuring secure digital commerce is crucial to protecting your business and customers from potential security threats. While customer education on best security practices, adherence to payment standards, and continuous fraud detection in real-time to mitigate suspicious activity leveraging machine learning are table stakes, there are additional efforts to take for organizations. Two-factor authentication is a must for user accounts. It adds a layer of security by requiring users to verify their identity. Regular backups of critical data combined with comprehensive data plans are essential in the event of a security incident. Encryption of all stored data protects data in case of a breach. Organizations are encouraged to choose secure hosting providers and cloud services that prioritize data security. Hosting environments should have robust security measures, including firewalls, intrusion, and detections. All your infrastructure and business software needs to be updated by patching and updating your systems. Regular software updates can close vulnerabilities and protect against known security threats. Above all, conduct regular security audits and vulnerability assessments of your e-commerce platform. Identify and address potential weaknesses in your systems to stay ahead of emerging threats. Remember that this is a war with bad actors.

Life is an Amazing Journey

 We are pleased to bring you seven new original songs that follow an amazing journey seeking self-understanding and love. Please enjoy the short clip that samples each song by clicking here. Join us in this exciting pre-release by ordering the CD and learning how this multi-generational team got together Just send an email to jim.sinur@gmail.com to start the process. The full release will happen in October if all goes well. 

                                                            Cover

                                                            

                                                               Song list 

                                                          Contributors

Don't miss your opportunity to be part of our musical journey by emailing me at jim.sinur@gmail.com

Data Infrastructure Debt is Hampering Business Returns

There is a great deal of effort and cost associated with keeping technological components up to date and easy to use for more organizational leverage. Some folks estimate that this can reach near 90% of the budget allocated for technology. Every time we add another technological component, the more debt an organization builds. It is excruciating for data infrastructures as data can be used repeatedly to leverage business benefits. It gets in the way of delivering the newly desired outcomes of better customer journeys, more automation for cost savings, and leveraging an organization's resources in new and innovative ways. This post will concentrate on the data infrastructure portion of the technical dept. At the same time, it explores the causes, adverse effects, and how to solve them for data infrastructures and the ever-growing data sprawl.

Data Infrastructure Debt Causes

•        An industry trend implies that modern applications need to be built on top of one or more special-purpose databases, thus adding more technical debt for each database. What makes this particularly difficult when combining and translating data for more use and leverage.
•        Over the past decade, applications have become more data-hungry themselves. As a result, they require particular data dynamics, analytics, and models, implying more cross-use of existing data and new and unique databases.
•         The explosion of free software tempts folks to leverage what software is already there, leading to more unique data infrastructure components. As a result, it creates a specialty database explosion.

Effects of Data Infrastructure Debt

•         Data infrastructure debt is insidious and accumulates fast, and is very difficult to undo. It is a multiplier to the existing debt dragging back initiatives that organizations want.
•         Initiatives that are given the green light are slowed down by the need to aggregate and translate data from many more sources than it would typically take. 
•        Data infrastructure debt keeps the CIO on the sidelines instead of in the critical driver seat for digital efforts in the future. When the CIO is fighting a cost war instead of a results war, digital efforts wane in priority. 
•         We have to hire all the specialty skills to keep the variety of special purpose and legacy databases.
•         The drag causes businesses to set up their own technology efforts. But, unfortunately, they are often naïve to the problems they are creating and throw the debt over the fence to the CIO after making decisions the CIO would not have allowed.

How to Start Solving Data Debt?       

•         It is essential to stop on-boarding new databases even though the software that comes with the new data might be free or low-cost. 
•         Assuming organizations do not want to rip and replace databases immediately but slowly retire many, buying a modern DBMS that works well in the cloud as a No-SQL approach while still supporting SQL commands and databases is ideal.
•         It is not by giving up on innovations and digital transformation efforts by prioritizing these great business outcome efforts overpaying past technical debt. However, it may mean not taking advantage of new features on old databases.

Net; Net:

Smart CIOs are reaching for single modern, scalable relational databases that can support the many needs of applications. It would include mixing real-time data with operational, warehouse, big, and archive data with ease. These databases can operate across cloud providers and on-premises. There is a big trend towards capable databases that can act as a data mesh while reducing the data infrastructure technical debt that promotes unnecessary data sprawl and the difficulties with protecting and leveraging that same data.

Coping with Communications in Chaos

 The amount of confusion and disorder around communications is just growing by the second in the real world. Conservative numbers say we waste over 30% of our effort just dealing with communication issues. Aggressive numbers say that 60% of work is about the work, not the work itself. Much of this work about work is communications. Chaotic communications are a massive drag on productivity. It only gets compounded in organizations changing to meet their changing customer needs and demands for better services and products—all of this while having to produce bigger and better outcomes often measured in profitability. Let’s explore the problems that we all have with chaotic communications and what are the best coping mechanisms going forward.

Dealing with Noise Communications

We get so many communications simultaneously that it is overbearing. Sure we can make rules to put unique touches in our respective spam files/folders, but the influx of contacts is just overwhelming. We need to turn down the noise level by prioritizing communications. Often the coping mechanism is political and topic-based. Unfortunately, this is barely a minimum.

 Grappling with Multiple Roles

Most roles have multiple and many reporting responsibilities, both solid and dotted lines. Many times people are playing various roles, thus adding another dimension to deal with daily. Sometimes the role is a crucial contributor, and sometimes the role is a manager who is responsible for the contribution of others. Each role over time requires a shifting set of emerging priorities which changes which communications are the most important at any given moment.

Keeping Pace with Expected Results.

Because there are so many communications and roles to associate them with, it is hard to keep pace with efforts. Everyone expects all players "to be up on the latest developments", so we find ourselves scrambling to be pertinent to actions and their highly desired results. Speed is increasing, not decreasing, so this is a tiring effort filled with stress.

I'm sure we all can identify with these problems and more, but the big question is, "What are we going to do about it?" We can do several things besides getting "Sick of Slack" and getting "Tired of Teams." So here are some coping mechanisms.

Simplifying Communications

Instead of showing people how much we know or how important we are by droning on with detail, try summarizing and netting things out. It needs to be done carefully not to offend others but still speed up the communication process. It means that we each become "good citizens of communications".  Let others ask for the detail.

Linking Communications to Results

The very best way to prioritize communications is to link them to desired results. If the touches don't deliver results, they become noise and should be set aside or ignored. It requires a simple discipline of prioritizing results and link only essential documents to them.  It will require a new kind of tool that focuses on results, not just to speed up noise communications that we often see in modern collaboration tools.

Proactively Leveraging Shared Content

Often we have to scramble to find all the communications associated with the following activity about to hit us. Imagine all the content saved on a  shared repository organized by results. It will cut the preparation time and link all the key participants to the latest content. Care must be taken not to collect too much stuff and name the content in obvious ways. The best content will float to the top by results pulling content there.

Net; Net:

It's time to focus on the organizational drag that chaotic communications are costing organizations dearly. The digital overload is real and climbing. There continues to be a significant increase in digital meetings, chats, emails, and document reviews. The preparation time it takes to be up to date to contribute is overwhelming and is often done in a reactive mode. Something has to change and will when communications are tied to results. The significant results and their focused activities must be supported by shared and up to the second content in various forms and formats. It’s time to turn chaos to order. It will put passion back into hybrid work and take the struggle out of communications.

 

Additional Reading:

Results-OrientedCommunications Post

Hybrid Work Model Post

 

Digitizing Voice; A Great Source for Organizations to Tap

Organizations need to take every advantage that their data mesh affords. A truly underutilized data source is digitized speech turned into actions based on reusable and leveraged voice data. Savvy organizations are learning to rely on machine learning (ML) combined with natural language processing (NLP) to quickly and accurately take advantage of voice transcriptions for organizational leverage and business advantage. What are the major benefit streams for organizations to tap? What are some essential functions to look for in a voice-based vendor?

Understand and Improve Your Customer Experience

It is essential to understand what your customer is saying and keep their goals in mind while serving them within your organization’s interactions and goals. Striking a balance requires your organization to quantify your customers' sentiment to understand and respond to the customer's authentic voice. This balance means that you need help to analyze that sentiment in real-time and predict the sensed sentiment's likely outcomes. Once the possible outcome is determined, organizations can coach customer service representatives to take actions on behalf of the customer and meet their organizational goals. While this helps any interaction, organizations can gather data for reputation and competitive analysis in the background.

Lower Compliance Risk

It is imperative to improve an organization's compliance by automatically scrubbing sensitive data such as credit cards to protect your customers' data. Organizations often employ automatic detection and redaction of credit card numbers and other sensitive information. Automated redaction of call center recordings and transcripts scrubs payment information, social security numbers, and other sensitive data so others can’t use it for illegal or immoral activities. The minimum here is to enable payment protection.

Optimize Sales Activities

It is often hard to teach your people to sell, upsell or cross-sell for increased revenue. Sales will be helped significantly by discovering via voice discovery, analysis, and optimization. The best techniques can be replicated across your organization’s teams to increase conversions. Machine learning algorithms can be fine-tuned to measure emotion, keywords, and sales signals. Teams can optimize techniques, spot weaknesses, and bring in more revenue. Using voice, organizations can identify approaches that overcome sales objections and use that knowledge to arm others. Also, failed sales attempts can be analyzed for keywords and topics to improve the entire sales process.

Essential Voice Data Functions

What critical functions help provide fast and accurate voice transcriptions to sense, decide, and take actions upon voice data?

Transcription allows you to read, search, edit and click-to-play all of your transcripts. Good transcription usually provides transcripts in TXT, Word, RTP, or SRT format.

 

Stereo Speaker ID locates each voice in stereo recorded content to enable speaker ID, while improving accuracy and filtering keywords by a speaker.

 

Custom Vocabulary allows you to add unique words such as pronouns, company names, product names, or acronyms specific to your industry to improve accuracy.

 

Number Formatting transcribes numbers to digits giving you the option to properly format currency, addresses, and phone numbers formatted for click-to-call.

 

Video Captioning generates subtitles or closed captions for your video project and retrieves your audio or video file transcript.

 

Voicemail Transcription automatically transcribes voicemails with a number formatting and callback capabilities, delivered to you via email or SMS.  

 

Net; Net:

 

While it might seem mundane, digitizing voice data is essential for downstream advantage. There are significant benefits in gathering, aggregating, analyzing, and leveraging appropriate actions from voice data. There are obvious benefits in customer service, sales management, and compliance. Voice data is an equal tributary in the growing data mesh that organizations are dealing with for now and the future. We are only at the beginning of leveraging voice data, so expect a big push in brand monitoring next.

 

 

 

 

Turning Voice Insights into Action

We all know that we can detect what is happening by listening to customers or employees and turning those insights into better long-term success actions. It is essential to think about the bigger picture when doing the small things because what you hear from your customers today shows up in your financials tomorrow. By listening to the vocabulary, speed of talking, the speech's energy along with the pitch can unlock some critical trends. By matching the descriptions, insights, and potential problems to positive actions, organizations can steer outcomes in their direction. So, what actions can organizations take to affect the results they want for their reputation and financials? This post will identify several actions to take when voice data indicates a need for change.

Actions for Customers

Better link to Customer Goals

Often organizations are focused on their own goals and short-term KPIs without considering the customer's goals or where they are on their journey. Focusing on customer goals helps move organizations from just performing their transactions at their doorstep in a minimum time window to solve the customer's real needs.

Adapt Real-Time for a Better Experience

When customer representatives encounter a problematic situation or customer, voice sentiment can help intercept negative emotions, predict potential outcomes and suggest appropriate responses.

Collect Ideas for Product/Service Improvements

Often representatives are too busy servicing the “now request’ and don’t hear the suggestion for a new or better product/feature. Even if the rep understood the hint, often completing the immediate transaction overrides collecting the good ideas.

Defuse Emotions by Better Listening

Sometimes predicting negative emotions can trigger the representative to go into the listening mode to show empathy. Voice sentiment can warn all of a conversation headed for difficulty.

Collect Ideas for Better Customer Journeys

There are often suggestions for better products/services, but sometimes a tweak in the journey, even if only at your organization's doorstep is helpful long run. In rare cases, organizations can look at the more significant customer journey and link to other partners for a seamless experience.

Actions for Employees/Stringers

Assist Employees with Better Responses

By listening to situations, management can assist employees with additional collaborations with other employees or knowledge bots to help while clients are on the line or online at the web.

Manage Remote Workers More Effectively

By listening to workers, management can hear the interactions to help employees proactively manage their technologies and businesses better.

Rollout New Processes & Scripts for Outcomes

Employees are often the lightning rods for organizations and ideas for tweaks to the processes. This focus is genuine for remote workers who feel alone and isolated.

Build Assists for Balancing Corporate KPIs with Customer Goals

To change the balance from KPIs and to get the customer off the phone as fast as possible, organizations can listen between the lines for satisfying customers better.

Listen for Training & Promotional Opportunities

By analyzing conversations, organizations can find stars to promote and train those employees that are struggling.

Actions for Management

Identify New Segments/Personas

By listening to voice data, management can identify new and emerging groups of prospects or customers to build unique paths for them,

Update Scripts for Better Outcomes

By listening to sticking points in scripts or exceptions to the well-worn paths in a script, management can adapt for better future outcomes.

Identify Automation Potentials

By listing to typical patterns of activities and areas of too much manual activity while the client is sitting there in silent lucidity, automation opportunities will rise for attention. 

 Identify Churn Threats

Analyzing specific phrases and sentiments, individual customers or segments can be identified for future churn. Management can respond with an exceptional follow up instead of a rigged survey.

Competitive Differentiation via New Products/Features

Customers always have great ideas, but if they slip through the cracks, organizations lose and future interactions with other clients.

Net; Net:

By leveraging voice data and analytic insights, organizations can not only understand issues and opportunities, but they can proactively respond to immediate needs and build for future outcomes. This habit requires turning insights into the proper actions at the appropriate time. Voice analytics is one of the more powerful methods for organizations to leverage in their digital transformation journey. 

Specialty Digital Business Platforms are Flourishing

 Digital Business Platforms (DBPs) are springing up worldwide because of the need for more combined functionality that works seamlessly together for the business professional. While there are still many richly featured/complete business platforms out there that are thriving well, there is also an explosion of specialty digital business platforms that focus on outcomes that are immediately appealing to organizations. This post will try to identify and describe the business-focused digital platforms instead of technical and infrastructural digital platforms. I have found 10 of these categories so far that I have described below.  I give some example vendors, but my lists are not exhaustive. Click on the names of the vendors if you wish to link to their web presence.  

All-Inclusive DBPs

These DBPs bring together as close to fully functional digital features that typically business function for core transactions,  business process for automation combined with friendly customer/employee experiences, analytics/AI for the added insight, low code data integration (aka Fabric/Mesh) and development and a comprehensive internet of things (IoT) with digital twins. These first started to emerge in 2015 and rapidly grew with the digital transformation emphasis. They bring the advantage of holistic and integrated platforms that need little augmentation. DBPs put the integration of many silo technology stacks in the rearview mirror. The degree of integration quality and the amount will vary by vendor. Please see one of the first posts on DBP with one of the first illustrations to reach the light of day by clicking here.

Example Vendors Include:

Genpact

Oracle

Pegasystems

Salesforce

SAP

Specialty Digital Business Platforms

Specialty DBPs combine/integrate two or more needed technology silos for significant benefit to organizations in their digital transformation journey, even if it is only a portion of that journey. The key driver for these decisions is often tactical to deliver a sorely needed set of business outcomes as quickly as possible. They are not necessarily aimed at becoming an all-inclusive DBP, but they can play a role in creating their own all-inclusive digital business platform.

 

1.      Business Application Driven DBPs

These platforms concentrate on a business application or specific business processes that contribute to horizontal business outcomes, such as human resource (HR) onboarding or enterprise resource planning (ERP). Additionally, vertically based suites of processes and applications revolve around specific industries such as insurance claims, oil and gas platforms management, mortgage loan processing, or banking systems. The list is relatively long of vertical applications or services available.

Example Vendors Include:

Oracle

SAP

Workday

2.      Sales/Customer Experience Enablement Platforms

This class of platforms combines customer relationship management from sales through the servicing of customers. Customer Experience platforms are usually a collection of tools that help companies establish their customer interaction experiences and goals. The breadth of channels through which customers can interact with a company is often so spread out that it's difficult for just one solution to manage them all. The sales process is where the interaction starts with the customer, and these platforms also include sales automation capabilities that speed sales and revenue pipeline management.

Example Vendors Include:

Oracle/Netsuite

Pegasystems

Salesforce

3.      Business Process/Workflow Platforms (BPM)BPM software

A BPM platform provides a framework and tools for managing the tasks and workflow related to people or systems. Typically, BPM software helps define, automate, and report processes to help businesses optimize businesses to deliver on organizational goals. The processes often span an organization's full operations and are aimed at monitoring the effectiveness of operations. They manage the full process lifecycle and processes instances.

Example Vendors Include

Appian

Nintex

Pegasystems

 

4.      Hyperautomation Platforms

Hyperautomation is the application of various combinations of advanced technologies like robotic process automation (RPA), Artificial Intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML), low-code, and Process Mining (PM) to augment workers, accelerate task completion, and even automate processes in ways that are significantly more impactful than traditional automation capabilities. An example would smart bots who collaborate with knowledge workers to complete work.

Example Vendors Include

Appian

Automation Anywhere

Blue Prism

UI Path

WorkFusion

 

5.      Collaborative Work Platform

A collaborative platform is a virtual workspace where resources and tools are aggregated to facilitate communication and personal interaction, particularly in projects or casework. Often sharing content is involved even if it is real-time or leveraged in work schedules.

Example Vendors Include

Microsoft

Monday.com

Slack

Zoom

6.      Data Science/Analytic Platform

These platforms rely on transparent data access, consistent metadata, strong enterprise governance, automated machine learning, deep learning, and model building, operationalized model management, and tools that measure and improve its impact on business. You might think of a data science platform as a factory for creating analytic models. These platforms are for organizations that are always listening and analyzing for innovation.

Example Vendors Include

Apache Spark

SAS

Tibco

 

7.      Data Mesh/Fabric Platform

Data mesh/fabric is an architecture and set of data services that provide consistent capabilities across a choice of endpoints spanning on-premises and multiple cloud environments. The Data Mesh/Fabric simplifies and integrates data management across cloud and on-premises to accelerate digital transformation. It allows for creating dynamic data views quickly in real-time to manage to the moment.

Example Vendors Include

Informatica

SingleStore

Tibco

 

 

8.      Digital Twin Platform

Digital twin software provides a virtual representation or simulation of a physical asset and is used to monitor the asset's performance in real-time. These tools are used to simulate performance, predict potential maintenance needs, and ultimately optimize the asset for peak performance.

Example Vendors Include

Bosch

IBM

Microsoft

Siemens

9.      Cybersecurity Platform

Cybersecurity platforms should be able to prevent, detect, and respond to threats across an enterprise IT infrastructure (i.e., endpoints, networks, servers, or cloud-based workloads). In simple terms, a Data Security Platform (DSP) is a type of data security solution that aims to combine a suite of traditionally siloed security tools. Most Data Security Platforms will combine functionality designed to locate and protect data on-premises and in the cloud.

Example Vendors Include

CrowdStrike

HP/Microfocus

IBM

 

10   Emerging Hybrid Platforms

Emerging Hybrid Platforms combine various siloed technologies into a more usable combination of functionalities. We are still in the emergent stage of the specialized and generalized digital business platforms.

Example Vendors Include

ABBYY                 Process and Content Intelligence

Parallel                   Collaboration and Process Improvement

VoiceBase              Analytics, Sentiment, and Voice Data

Wizly                     Corporate Performance and Data Science                      

 

Net; Net

Specialty DBPs started sprouting up around specific outcomes that organizations wanted early in their digital journeys. Vendors that chased these outcomes became popular, and some are even growing to all-inclusive DBPs while delivering impressive and focused benefits along the way. I expect this convergence for convenience to accelerate and continue before a consolidation that will likely be economically and advantage driven. Over time some of these specialty vendors will grow to compete with the all-inclusive DBPs and possibly collaborate with the all-inclusive DBPs.