Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Florian Eggenschwiler, Chief Product Officer of Xovis (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Is there an online-offline data overlay as well? You’re not trying to map that customer to a real customer in retail to be able to market to that person?

Florian Eggenschwiler: When you’re online, you don’t tend to be anonymous. In our basic setup, you’re an anonymous dot with attributes like gender.

Sramana Mitra: In retail, you do have the opportunity to make it non-anonymous. You can correlate POS with behavior. You can market to that person using data.

Florian Eggenschwiler: Retail is a much more fragmented space than airports. It’s a much more heterogeneous space. With retail, we work exclusively through analytics partners who take our sensors and the data from the sensors and build customized solutions for retailers. Quite often, it’s integrated with other data sources. If there is the opportunity to integrate loyalty card data, then it’s a different story.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do the next use case.

Florian Eggenschwiler: Public transportation. This is a bit more centered around Europe and less relevant in North America simply because of the prevalence of public transportation in Europe. There are two main use cases that are used in public transportation. Our sensors are mounted on the vehicles.

Whether that’s railway carriages or buses, we count how many passengers enter the vehicle including whether they bring with them certain objects that are relevant in public transportation. It can be prams, wheelchairs, or bicycles. This information is then used, on one hand, within fair communities to understand which provider gets reimbursed and how much.

You can use the bus, train, or ferry with the same ticket. These companies need to figure out who gets how much of the pot. They do this based on automatic counts from our sensors. The second use case is around the passenger experience by giving data or making it available, through mobile apps, to figure out how occupied are certain connections. I can figure out things like do I get in at the front or the back or do I take the next train.

Sramana Mitra: How are you going to be notified about that?

Florian Eggenschwiler: At the core of our philosophy of rethinking people flow is API that makes this data available. The idea is that you can integrate this into a mobile app and display this to passengers so they can make conscious decisions themselves. Similar to airports – many of the airports that use our solution display wait times on their mobile apps or website so that you know what to expect.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you are doing a PaaS strategy. You are doing one use case fully which is the airport use case. Then you’re doing an API integrations strategy where you are giving people domain knowledge in those spaces. They are building the apps and the use cases on top of your platform.

Florian Eggenschwiler: That’s correct. For airports, it’s a homogeneous market. We’re domain experts. The clients are of a certain size, so it makes sense to do this ourselves. Other markets such as retail or public transportation are much more fragmented plus the use cases tend to be heterogeneous. We work exclusively with partners who know this domain. We also include other data sources to make sure this addresses the needs of that segment.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Florian Eggenschwiler, Chief Product Officer of Xovis
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