Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: FusionOps CEO Shariq Mansoor (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Other than demand forecasting, what are some other use cases?

Shariq Mansoor: We are focused on things that many providers can’t even do right now. They do demand forecasting, but we do it better. Today, they are using machine learning and AI, but we can still do it much better. We have scenarios that we’ve created in our system that no other company has been able to.

An example is how can you predict the shortage of my competitors before the competitors even know. We combine data like what people are searching on Google. If you have one drug, we search for symptoms of that drug. How many prescriptions are getting written outside? What is the shortage historically? The data is spread out everywhere.

Our crawlers not only get internal data but also external data. Then we can predict. We showed one of our customers that there is a 92% correlation that somebody searched for these terms and that within 30 days, they’re going to start seeing the shortage. If you can imagine that beforehand, you can take advantage of that.

Sramana Mitra: How do you arrive at that conclusion?

Shariq Mansoor: The data is all there. If you’re looking for the drug, you see trends. If you have prescription data written, suddenly there are outbreaks happening. Now you start seeing that information coming in. By the time CDC gets that information, there is a delay of two to three weeks.

Sramana Mitra: What are the top verticals where you have your maximum business?

Shariq Mansoor: Our biggest business is pharmaceutical and life sciences. We’re seeing a huge demand for that. The reason is, they’re unable to solve it themselves. There’s a lot of things happening in the pharma industry today. If you look at it, there’re not many blockbuster drugs coming out. Now you have genetics, which are becoming very sophisticated. They cannot just raise pricing.

The next big focus is, how do they capture the emerging markets? All of that requires data to be able to make decisions. This part is very complex. Pharma supply chains are very complex supply chains. Packaging also has to be very unique because you can have shortage in UK or in Germany, but you cannot move that inventory because you cannot sell German-labeled drugs to the UK. It’s a very complex environment.

They also have very high margins. They want to get into the new market. That’s why they’re seeing a lot of demand on how to operate their supply chains as a competitive weapon. Their world is changing from supply chains, giving them an advantage to do what Amazon is doing. They’re using supply chains as a competitive weapon. One of the things which we’re seeing is that most of the customers are in the top tier.

Sramana Mitra: I’m sure your system is very expensive.

Shariq Mansoor: Yes, but the value we deliver is very significant.

Sramana Mitra: Sure. Is this a seven-figure deal to buy your system?

Shariq Mansoor: Yes, seven-figure deals are common in our environment. That’s why we are so excited about this because we believe all the cognitive parts are going to become more sophisticated.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: FusionOps CEO Shariq Mansoor
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