Page 23 - bne IntelliNews monthly magazine December 2023

bne December 2023 Companies & Markets I 23
Russian businesses embrace AI
bne IntelliNews
Lately, Russian businesses have been actively adopting solutions based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), while the government is also incentivising the use of these technologies.
Industries that are looking at AI and ML solutions run the gamut – from retail and finance to telecom, construction and real estate sales.
Exploring opportunities in retail
Among the industries with the highest adoption rate of AI solutions is retail. AI-based systems are often used as "advisors": they help to determine what goods exactly that a customer is likely to be interested in and automatically generate special offers for them.
All major Russian marketplaces, including Wildberries, Ozon and Sbermegamarket, actively use AI. X5 Group, Magnit, Lenta and many others also analyse customer behaviour in offline stores, such as frequency and amount of purchases, lifestyle, acceptable price level and favourite categories of goods.
Dmitry Demidov, head of the innovation laboratory at Norbit, told Russian business daily Vedomosti that retail companies often use a solution called BPMSoft, developed by local firm Lanit Omni.
With BPMSoft, AI tools built into the product can be used for automating various processes, including – in addition to sales – logistics, pricing, work with suppliers and service.
For instance, AI in BPMSoft can determine the probability
of a delivery deadline failure, predict customer churn
or analyse feedback from customers. Feedback texts are processed by ML-models that are able to determine customers' emotions and even independently decide whether it is necessary to engage a human for further communication
with the customer.
"The system facilitates automating different stages of
sales management, marketing, service and accompanying processes," said Demidov. "At the same time, data is collected
Russian Industries that are looking at AI and ML solutions run the gamut – from retail and finance to telecom, construction and real estate sales.
in a common digital space, forming a single end-to-end process. It turns out that management decisions can be made quickly, with less effort and, which is most important, in a more educated way."
Striving for efficiency
Apart from increasing sales, ML and AI technologies can be used to monitor employees' working hours and various tasks. Time management has always been important for productivity growth.
There are many software solutions that monitor employee activity: how much time a person spends online, what sites they visit, who they talk to on the phone and for how long.
There are also solutions that allow you to monitor physical labourers, such as an intelligent monitoring system from a Russian firm named Solut.
Alexander Belousov, the founder and director of Solut, told Vedomosti that the system recognises any working and non-working actions of a person by the movements of their hands.
“All major Russian marketplaces, including Wildberries, Ozon and Sbermegamarket, actively use AI”
Each worker is given a wristwatch with sensors that accumulate data on hand movements during the shift and, with the help of AI, recognise activities typical for each specialty, process or task. Solut analyses the data and presents it in the form of reports. With their help, management can optimise processes and increase the efficiency of manual labour, Belousov explained.
The system identifies the time of inactivity of each worker, providing tools to combat it and understand why a specific employee isn't working at a specific moment. As Belousov
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