Business & Technology Snapshot by TUATARA – October 2022

Hi there! ?? November has started, so it's time to welcome you to the 2nd edition of TUATARA’s newsletter.

We started with a bang – the first edition brought over 380 subscribers! ?? Not bad for the first time, right?

Now let's get down to business (& technology)!

1.?????The 2022 State of Marketing AI Report?(Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute)

?? How do marketing and sales understand AI in 2022? Key findings from this new report by Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute are exciting:

• The majority of marketers believe AI will transform their work and automate the majority of their tasks. In fact, some marketers are already using AI to achieve outcomes in personalization, revenue acceleration, and analytics.
• But the majority of those who want to start—or expand—AI implementations are held back by a lack of education and training.
• That's because their companies overwhelmingly don't offer formal AI training, or AI ownership is highly fragmented.

It seems that the key takeaway for these insights is that marketers are willing to use AI to their advantage – but they need to feel that they need to be trained to use it to its fullest capabilities.?

2.?????E-commerce in Poland Report 2022?( Gemius )

?? Staying further on the topic of 2022 reports, we move to our home backyard – Gemius has published their full 2022 report on e-commerce. Key insights:

• The results of this year's study confirm that Poles have grown fond of online shopping and are consistent in that fondness. The increased popularity of e-commerce during the pandemic has held up, and those who started using online stores due to lockdowns or concerns about their health have largely stayed with this form of shopping. Buying online is also seen as convenient and uncomplicated.
• The percentage of Internet users who say they buy online has stabilized and is now 77%, with significantly more people buying on Polish sites (75%) than foreign ones (32%)
• For the first time in the history of the survey, we noted the advantage of the smartphone over the laptop when it comes to the devices most frequently used in the e-commerce process. While a year ago, m-commerce was particularly popular among young respondents, this year, it is already a trend that includes respondents in general.

If you are focused on the e-commerce sector in Poland (or this part of Europe in general), then this is a "must-read" for you.?

(Please note that the report is in Polish)

3.?????Is your conversational AI setting the right tone??( IBM )

?? Dial in your tone – don't be afraid to allow your virtual agents to express human emotions. A very interesting article about IBM Watson's (used in actionbot ) new technology of expressive voices that can become the next level of conversational AI authenticity:

As humans, we convey emotion in the words we speak, whether we realize it or not. We tend to sound empathetic when apologizing to one another. We sound uncertain when we don't know the answer to something and perhaps cheerful when we finally discover the answer. The ability to convey emotion is what makes us human. IBM Watson's expressive voices can express emotion in order to better convey the meaning behind the words, ultimately reducing customer frustration when dealing with today's phone experiences. Your voice bot will sound empathetic when telling the customer their package is delayed or cheerful when they've successfully helped the customer book an airline ticket.

Emphasis is another important aspect of human speech. Did you say Austin or August? Did you say you lost the card ending in 4876? IBM expressive voices support word emphasis so that your bot can better convey the desired meaning of the text. Users can indicate the location of the stress with four levels – none, moderate, strong, and reduced.

Making virtual assistants more human-like and believable is a big step in improving customer support automation – people that are greeted by a "very obviously robotic" chatbot in a call can become quickly frustrated and quickly hang up.

4.?????Top AI investors reveal State of AI in 2022 ( VentureBeat )

?? …and we are back to reports and yearly summaries (well, it's this time of the year!). More on the topic of AI – it is evolving at a break-neck speed, it seems that we reach a new milestone every week, and there are already early signs of developer satisfaction and productivity gains.

Interesting excerpt about AI art:

In 2021, diffusion AI models were overtaking GANs, the previously dominant AI models for image generation, on a few benchmarks. Today, diffusion AI models are used to power the likes of DALL-E 2, Imagen, Mid journey and Stable Diffusion, spreading to text-to-video, text generation, audio, molecular design and more.

This meteoric rise has given birth to both opportunities and open questions. It seems anyone can now create stunning imagery (and more) with the click of a button. Does that mean everyone is an artist now? Does that mean graphic designers will be out of work soon? And who owns the AI-generated art? These are just some of the questions that pop up, the answers to which seem to be "no," "no," and "we don't know," respectively.

Beach pointed out the obvious: this is an evolving topic, and it will take a while for people to figure it out. There will be goofs and controversies, like people winning art contests with AI-generated art, while others are forced to take down AI-generated images. Some art communities are banning AI art altogether, while some artists are not at all happy that their art is included in datasets used to train those AI models.

Check out this thorough article based on State of AI 2022 research by AI inventors Nathan Beach and Ian Hogarth.

5.?????What fintech experts hate that you get wrong about embedded finance?( Verdict )

?? Embedded finance's impact is rising – make sure to get things right! Learn about common mistakes in approaching the topic that drives fintech experts crazy:

• Ultimately, embedded finance isn't a finance consideration, it's a tech consideration. Payment infrastructure, banking as a service and all the things that enable embedded finance are just tech rails, designed to run in the background. Embedded finance has the ability to make people's lives better – if it performs as intended, most people won't even realize how frequently they interact with financial products on a day-to-day basis.
• One aspect people get wrong about embedded finance is the interchangeable use of the term with [BNPL]. BNPL does not equal embedded finance. Embedded finance is a method of providing access to financial services, such as lending products, and BNPL is a type of lending product. A well-designed BaaS solution should allow financial institutions to choose which products they want to offer in the market, and which merchants and verticals they want to serve.
• Enablers also make the key mistake of not looking wider in their engagement of smaller financial institutions alongside bigger players, fintech companies with bank charters and neo-banks. Technology has levelled the playing field, and anyone can play.

Embedded Finance is buzzing as searches for it in Google have skyrocketed in the past 18 months. Stay caught up!

If you are interested in the topic, check out Fintin – our innovative, flexible financing platform, which provides embedded finance solutions (among other tools).

Actionbot for Medyk Otwock – case study: a chatbot for a medical school

The post-secondary medical school in Otwock, ‘Medyk Otwock’, has been training the medical and social professions for over 60 years. In order to relieve the workload of secretarial staff and increase the access of students and candidates to information about the school, ‘Medyk’ decided to implement an intelligent digital assistant, named ‘Vita’, on its website. Now, website’s visitors can quickly find information they are looking for using an intuitive conversational interface.

Cloud computing in the financial sector – Fintin

The migration of companies and institutions to the cloud is in full swing, with over 64% of Polish enterprises already using this type of solution and a further 26% planning to do so in the near future. Meanwhile, although not new, cloud computing in the financial sector is still not used to its full potential. Why is this the case??

Product Customizer – flexible implementation of any financial product – Fintin

Fintin provides a few flexible modules that adapt to the individual needs of financial service providers, car dealers, brokers and their clients. One of these modules is the Product Customizer, developed to build and implement selected financial services in a flexible and user-friendly way.

Improving Customer Service processes with Cognitive Automation – watch the full webinar

Cognitive solutions are becoming increasingly popular. It is a new level of automation that, by imitating human cognitive abilities, helps employees to read documents, analyze them, and even make decisions in business processes. Watch the full recording of the training, where experts from TUATARA showed how Cognitive Automation and conversational interfaces increase the efficiency and profitability of customer service teams.

That's all for this month – don't forget to?subscribe?to the newsletter and follow us for more information about enchanting experiences in business!