Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: FusionOps CEO Shariq Mansoor (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Big Data is AI. To me, the difference between Big Data and regular data is that you have to use machine learning to make sense of Big Data. With small amounts of data, you can do it without machine learning.

Shariq Mansoor: One of the challenges that everybody is running into right now is what to do with all the data. That’s the biggest problem. You can create data lakes. You can create everything there, but what are you doing to do with it? How are you going to deliver the data?

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about where in the supply chain your customers are using your technology. What kinds of dramatically additional value are you adding?

Shariq Mansoor: Overall in the enterprise, there’s a new layer emerging. It’s the cognitive layer. So far for the last 15 to 20 years, a lot of investment happened in the automation layer. A majority of the technology was built in 1990’s and early 2000’s. Their goal was to automate. What is happening now is there is a whole new layer emerging in the enterprise which is the cognitive layer, which sits on top of the other layer.

You have the cellphones. When you use your iPhone today, you still have to go through the other layers. You connect from the tower from here to the tower on your cell, but you’re still using 15- to 20-year-old underlying infrastructure. This is where we’re seeing the opportunity. What do we do with the customers? We are not going and trying to replace existing systems.

When companies ask, “Are you going to replace your system?” We say, “No, we focus on the opportunities.” We sit on top of it. We are now showing them what they can do with this data and the investments they have made in the past 15 to 30 years. We connect on top of the systems and extract all these data. We have very sophisticated technology. We allow them to be able to start seeing things that they have never seen before.

For example, for one of our customers, we actually predict the demand better than anything they have today. No matter what software they’re using, we just take their data and cut their forecast error in half. That has a significant impact on their business.

Sramana Mitra: Walk me through this use case. What does your system do to be able to deliver that value?

Shariq Mansoor: FusionOps does something similar to what Google has done to the content. We’ve built a massive cloud. We go to into the crawlers and extract all the information.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: FusionOps CEO Shariq Mansoor
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