Tag Archives: business-tools

Machine Learning in Business Analytics

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What is business analytics? Using data to improve business outcomes | CIO

Analytics is an essential part of every business. It helps to assess a market and company’s sales, identify customers’ needs and modern trends, realize which products or services of an organization are in demand, and overall gives a perspective on possibilities of growth. Machine learning for analytics is the process of using ML algorithms to aid the analytics process of evaluating data and discovering insights with the purpose of making decisions that improve business outcomes.

Customer Segmentation

Machine learning algorithms can automatically segment customers into distinct groups based on various criteria, such as purchasing behavior, location, or product preferences. This segmentation allows marketers to target each group with highly relevant content and offers.

Predictive Analytics

Machine learning models can predict future customer behavior, such as which products of the company a customer is likely to purchase next or when they are most likely to make a purchase. This information enables businesses to time their marketing campaigns effectively.

Demand Anticipation

By analyzing historical sales data, competitor activity, and external factors like weather and economic trends, ML models can predict future demand with remarkable accuracy. This empowers businesses to optimize inventory levels and respond effectively to fluctuating market conditions.

Personalized Recommendations

You’ve probably seen personalized product recommendations on e-commerce websites like Amazon. Machine learning algorithms analyze a customer’s past behavior and recommend products or content that are most likely to interest them, increasing the chances of conversion.

Fraud Detection

Machine learning-based fraud detection systems rely on ML algorithms that can be trained with historical data on past fraudulent or legitimate activities to autonomously identify the characteristic patterns of these events and recognize them once they recur.

Moreover, by analyzing transaction patterns and identifying anomalies of a particular entity, ML models can flag suspicious activity in real-time, preventing fraudulent transactions and mitigating financial losses. This proactive approach safeguards not only businesses but also their customers, fostering trust and security.

Operations Optimization

ML algorithms can analyze vast operational data to identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and potential areas for improvement. This allows businesses to optimize resource allocation, scheduling, and logistics, leading to cost savings and increased productivity.

Employee Performance and Human Resources

Machine learning can be used in HR analytics to assess employee performance, predict employee turnover, and identify factors contributing to job satisfaction. This helps in making data-driven decisions related to workforce management and employee engagement.

Text Analytics

Machine learning models can analyze text data from sources like social media, customer reviews, and surveys to gauge sentiment. This information is valuable for understanding public opinion, improving customer satisfaction, and managing brand reputation.

These are some functions of machine learning in business analytics. It’s a very powerful tool which sheds light on the market and ongoing processes in economy, resulting in enhanced accuracy of predictions and, therefore, contributes to the success and margins of a company.

Sources:

  1. https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/feature/10-common-uses-for-machine-learning-applications-in-business
  2. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/role-machine-learning-personalized-marketing#:~:text=Machine%20Learning’s%20Contribution&text=Machine%20learning%20algorithms%20can%20automatically,highly%20relevant%20content%20and%20offers.
  3. https://www.itransition.com/machine-learning/fraud-detection#:~:text=Machine%20learning%2Dbased%20fraud%20detection,recognize%20them%20once%20they%20recur.
  4. https://www.oracle.com/business-analytics/what-is-machine-learning-for-analytics/#:~:text=Machine%20learning%20for%20analytics%20is,Providing%20analytics%2Ddriven%20insights.
  5. https://bard.google.com/chat/616ccd3957c0cc71 (as a source for some features of ML)

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Unlocking the Power of Machine Learning in Ecommerce

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https://www.prefixbox.com/blog/machine-learning-for-ecommerce/

Machine learning has become an integral part of the ecommerce industry. It is a powerful tool that helps businesses make more optimal decisions and improve their overall performance. It already has a plethora of implementations, from demand forecasting and inventory management, through dynamic pricing and personalized ad targeting, to chat bots or picture generators. Nevertheless, in this blog post, I will explain two of the most common implementations of machine learning in ecommerce, specifically forecasting demand and pricing strategies.

Forecasting demand is a crucial aspect of ecommerce, as it allows to predict future sales and adjust the inventory accordingly. Machine learning algorithms can analyze large amounts of historical data to identify patterns and trends that would be difficult for humans to spot, which can then be used to make accurate predictions about future demand. For example, retailers can use time series forecasting models or regression models, which take into account historical data collected, market trends, and consumer behavior to predict how many units of a particular product will be sold in the future, which they can also use to help with inventory management. Although the accuracy depends on the amount and quality of data collected, this can help avoid stockouts, which can lead to lost sales, or overstocking, which can result in wasted resources. Additionally, retailers can use machine learning to forecast demand for new products, which can help them make more informed decisions about when to introduce new items and how much inventory to stock.

Pricing is a critical component of any retail business, as it directly impacts customer behavior and ultimately affects a retailer’s bottom line. Traditionally, retailers have relied on manual methods, their experience, and gut instincts to set prices, but these methods can be time-consuming and prone to error. Since experience is a component there, you can improve it by having more data, and thus this is another area where machine learning can make a significant impact. By analyzing data on competitor prices, consumer behavior or demand spikes, retailers can use machine learning to optimize their pricing strategies and maximize their profits. For example, retailers can use dynamic pricing algorithms, or data-driven pricing strategies, which adjust prices in real-time based on factors such as supply and demand, to ensure that prices are always competitive and to maximize revenue, a strategy that Amazon is using since 2013. Additionally, retailers can use machine learning to analyze customer reviews, ratings and feedbacks to determine which products are most popular and adjust their pricing accordingly.

Price optimization with machine learning

To sum up, machine learning is a powerful tool that helps ecommerce businesses improve their overall performance. By analyzing vast amounts of data available to them, with the ever-increasing data collection practice, machine learning is becoming an essential tool to gain an edge and stay competitive in the ecommerce industry, and as the technology continues to evolve, it is only likely that in the coming years, we will see even more innovative applications of machine learning.

Sources:

https://mobidev.biz/blog/machine-learning-methods-demand-forecasting-retail

https://tryolabs.com/blog/price-optimization-machine-learning

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187705091401309X

https://www.prefixbox.com/blog/machine-learning-for-ecommerce/

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=49523

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Should you care about your calendar’s privacy?

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People use calendar apps on daily bases to organize their time. In organizations, we utilize calendars like Google Calendar to setting up events, syncing with coworkers, etc. Privately, we use calendars to organize our private time and private events from meeting with friends to shopping at Biedronka. Did you ever wonder if events you put into your calendar and share with others’ calendars are really private?


According to the Forbes article, Google Calendar had a potential privacy issue in 2017: when you wanted to share your calendar with others with the use of a calendar link, the URL to your calendar was indexed in Google Search which meant that anyone could access data from your schedule. It was not only a problem for individuals that someone could access their private calendars but also for organizations – that privacy issue could be a reason for leaks of company’s confidential data like meetings, events, zoom links, files to documents, etc. Another privacy concern related to calendar apps is that through creating events and shared meetings we give data about our life events and people we meet to companies like Google which are considered not to be the best firm in terms of privacy. Also, rumors from the internet state that companies may be using calendar data for targetting.


More and more companies that offer encrypted solutions enter the market to address these problems. One of the largest players is ProtonMail which recently rebranded to Proton and offers encrypted email services, calendars, cloud drives, etc. According to Proton’s blog about calendar privacy: “A calendar is more than just a tool. It’s a record of the moments that make up your life.” which indicates that our calendars should be private by design, and no one should even try to take advantage on that. Proton’s CEO Andy Yen in an interview with Wired states that Proton’s ultimate policy is to provide users with useful tools with collecting as little data as possible. Data from ProtonMail and ProtonCalendar are fully encrypted and protected from data leaks, and data-exploiting by the cloud provider or government requesting information on users.


I believe that in the era of raising awareness and the importance of data privacy, companies like Proton have huge opportunities to stand out and even compete with tech giants like Google or Apple. The question is, whether users and companies are ready to abandon the big providers and their perfect solutions and switch to smaller data privacy-oriented entities?

References:

  1. https://www.wired.com/story/proton-mail-calendar-drive-vpn/#intcid=_wired-verso-hp-trending_349bf67d-2f68-4dae-be84-804acaa60d40_popular4-1
  2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2019/09/17/exclusive-1-billion-google-calendar-users-are-one-click-away-from-privacy-disaster/
  3. https://www.newsbytesapp.com/news/science/protonmail-launches-new-encrypted-calendar/story
  4. https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/1/21045836/protonmail-launched-encrypted-protoncalendar-beta-2020
  5. https://proton.me/news/protoncalendar-beta-announcement
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