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In New York, CRM & Customer Experience

Yellow.ai recognized as a Challenger in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms

Yellow.ai, a leading enterprise-grade Conversational AI platform, today announced it has been recognized as a Challenger in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms. Recognized as a Niche Player in 2022, Yellow.ai’s recognition as a Challenger in this year’s report is based on the evaluation of its Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute.

Yellow.ai’s Dynamic AI agents handle over 2 billion interactions every quarter, automating customer and employee experiences across 35+ channels and 135+ languages on voice and chat. Yellow.ai’s Dynamic Automation Platform (DAP), powered by generative AI, enables businesses to reduce expenses by 60% and is complemented by a suite of solutions, including the recently launched Dynamic Conversation Designer, Yellow.ai Marketplace, Customer Data Platform (CDP) Engage, and Omnichannel Agent Assist Platform.

“We’re humbled to have been recognized as a Challenger in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms. We believe this recognition is a testament to the strength of our platform capabilities. We think our improvement from a Niche Player to a Challenger underlines our dedication to delivering cutting-edge solutions to our customers. Over the past year, we launched several cutting-edge products, including our proprietary DynamicNLP™, significantly improving time-to-market and ease of use for our customers while reducing their operational costs,” said Raghu Ravinutala, CEO and Co-founder, Yellow.ai.

 

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In San Francisco, HR & People Engagement

Censia Ranks Among Most Innovative Companies in Data Science

Fast Company Magazine named Censia to this year’s list of most innovative companies in Data Science for its AI and machine learning-driven talent intelligence solutions. Censia’s technology organizes and structures enormous amounts of talent, company, and industry data. It then delivers it through lightweight, easy-to-use solutions that deliver superior executive intelligence, talent, and workforce planning results.

“Censia’s mission is clear – we are committed to helping the world’s best organizations unlock their potential through transformative talent,” said Joanna Riley, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder. “Our AI-driven talent intelligence solutions lead the industry in identifying and engaging outstanding executive talent and delivering critical insights for any organization’s talent landscape. We’re thrilled to have our efforts recognized by Fast Company.”

Censia provides talent technology solutions for all aspects of the talent lifecycle. Censia’s platform enables its best-in-class customers to build multidimensional search models to rapidly discover the most optimal candidates, substantially increasing the inclusion of diverse candidates while improving recruiting efficiency more than sixfold.

Censia’s Executive Intelligence solution dramatically improves the efficacy of the executive search, identifying the absolute best talent for a given need while reducing the executive search cycle by more than 60%.

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In New York, CRM & Customer Experience

Yellow.ai tackles conversational AI pain points with new design tool

An industry-wide shift to greater use of conversational AI, often in the form of chatbots and voice assistants, is clearly underway. However, the success of these interactions depends on the quality of conversation design, a new domain for most developers and one that may hinge on subpar or outdated tooling. This is the challenge San Mateo, CA-based Yellow.ai seeks to address with its conversational AI platform.

Yellow.ai suggests that problems in this burgeoning area often reside in the design process itself. Though design is a crucial step in developing conversational AI, the process is often hindered by the use of flowchart-based tools that result in clunky and complicated designs. This not only slows development, it creates a disjointed experience for users, who encounter inconsistent design choices and interactions across different conversational interfaces.

One of the key pain points in conversation design is in the basic approach. Most designers are relying on flowchart-based tools that are not optimized for designing conversations. This makes the design process time-consuming and cumbersome, leading to subpar outcomes. As well, replicating design flows in development is a tedious and inefficient process.

With the launch of its Dynamic Conversation Designer, Yellow.AI looks to improve the design process for chat and voice conversational workflows using generative AI. Integrated within the Yellow.ai conversational AI platform, this conversation design tool allows teams to design chatbot conversations without writing any code, saving significant development time and effort.

The Dynamic Conversation Designer creates development flows automatically from design flows, eliminating the need for developers to start from scratch. Moreover, there is instant auto-sync between design and development flows. With this, the company claims to deliver a 50% faster time to market, along with reduced development and training time.

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In Munich, Supply Chain Management

With AI, accurate demand forecasting is possible

Many businesses struggle with demand forecasting. Whether you run a small business or a large enterprise, the challenge of predicting customer behavior and stock levels never gets easier. Even major organizations like Target and Walmart that are able to afford teams of data scientists have recently reported struggles with excess inventory due to poor demand forecasting.

During this time of global uncertainty, many businesses have adopted a just-in-case mindset. They’ve relied on archaic methods of forecasting, scouring old data and drawing poor conclusions based on past problems.

But understanding demand accurately shouldn’t be so much of a struggle in 2023. Even as we battle post-pandemic turmoil, we now have clear alternatives to legacy forecasting tools — thanks to artificial intelligence (AI). And we don’t need endless reams of historical data to access the real-time patterns necessary to accurately forecast demand. In fact, AI-driven demand sensing has been shown to reduce inventory errors in supply chain management by up to 50%, according to McKinsey & Co.

Every company produces data, of course, but it’s almost all trapped in siloes and walled-point solutions that have evolved for specific tasks over many decades. Siloes emerge for noble reasons — they represent a business’s attempts to organize and become structured.

Truthfully, siloes are useful in many scenarios, but if the boundaries between them are too sturdy and there’s a lack of effective communication, siloes will negatively impact business, putting more pressure on processes. Inaccuracies are most common in silo-heavy organizations because teams and departments just don’t have enough of a shared language. Rigid siloes also make data, even good data, less credible.

When working with ThroughPut’s clients, I’ve seen AI make all the difference in demand forecasting. That’s because it can pull from disparate datasets, using real-time patterns to sense the demand around the corner rather than just assuming future demand from past events.

Using an AI-driven system will pick out time-stamped data — regardless of barriers — and rapidly stitch together a global vision of your virtual supply chain network. Supply chain AI processes the best signals from the noise that is constantly being generated by your disparate data systems and turns the din into a song you can understand.

Furthermore, AI is superior at analyzing and making sense of data in vast quantities; yet it also doesn’t need much information to learn. AI trained for real-world applications already intuits which data signals to extract from an ocean of noise, so it can solve needs before they cause problems.

The quality of data is most important, not the quantity, and delaying the use of AI to sense demand is only going to cause current supply challenges to stagnate and potentially get worse. From there, share prices and shareholders suffer. We are seeing this today across industries: innovation laggards and slow adopters paying the price for relying on old forecasting methods.

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In Blog, Global, Venture Studio, Funding Announcement

Brilliant Hire by SAP Shines Bright in Venture Capital Round

By Jacqueline Prause, SAP Global Content Team

The future shines bright at Brilliant Hire by SAP, a dynamic startup that believes in giving job candidates the agency to bring their whole selves to the companies of their dreams. Fresh off a round of venture capital funding, the employee-led startup has been given an extended runway to execute on its ambitious product vision for the talent acquisition market.

The new round of Series A funding, awarded by principal investor SAP, comes as businesses are struggling to fill jobs left open as a result of the global phenomenon known as the Great Resignation. Hiring has never been more fast-paced and competitive, with recruiters bearing the brunt of the pressure to hire workers more efficiently and achieve new standards for quality of hire. To gain an edge in attracting qualified and diverse job candidates, businesses are increasingly integrating AI-powered solutions in their talent acquisition strategy.

SAP is stepping up to address this need on behalf of customers that run SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting with an infusion of venture funding for Brilliant Hire by SAP, an employee-led startup in the SAP.iO Venture Studio, an innovation hub that helps employees start up and scale with SAP. As an organically innovated solution, Brilliant Hire by SAP brings customers the advantage that it integrates with and is developed in parallel to SAP SuccessFactors.

Delivering the Candidate-First Experience

With the successful validation of Brilliant Hire’s three-year product roadmap, Jeanine LeFlore, General Manager, Brilliant Hire by SAP, says the team is already building out the solution with new features to address some of the toughest challenges in recruiting. For many recruiters, providing an amazing candidate experience is now top of the agenda.

“The industry is at a crucial juncture right now,” LeFlore says. “Delivering a powerful candidate-first experience is paramount to the success of any company in the talent acquisition landscape today. At Brilliant Hire, we put the candidate at the core of everything we do, and this in turn is what drives the highest value for our customers.”

LeFlore sees the next stage of development as a golden opportunity to leverage the momentum Brilliant Hire generated in 2021. The team plans to build out its vision for an intelligent data platform that enables recruiters to develop authentic relationships with both active and passive candidates, while using data to create personalized journeys for candidates. She says, “We are seeing tremendous traction in the recruiting space with our smart job matching AI/ML- powered technology, and we’ve just scratched the surface. With this new round of funding, we will double down on building the most compelling candidate-first experiences that connect recruiters with both active and passive candidates — to meet them in their environment, rather than making candidates have to search.”

Attracting More Qualified and Diverse Talent

For companies seeking to hire more qualified and diverse talent, Brilliant Hire by SAP helps increase the visitor-to-applicant ratio on careers sites and empowers diverse candidates to apply for roles best fit to their qualifications. In an example of how SAP runs SAP, the global software company runs Brilliant Hire on its career page, which is a vital hub for the one million-plus members of its talent communities.

“With Brilliant Hire by SAP, we are able to leverage AI to elevate the candidate experience and help candidates find the SAP job that is best fit to their skills,” says Elke Manjet, Global Head of Talent Attraction, SAP, and Member of the Executive Board of Advisors for Brilliant Hire. “We are seeing strong results from our use of Brilliant Hire’s smart job matching feature, both in terms of KPIs and qualitative feedback from candidates. Candidates really like that they can immediately see if they are a strong match for an open position or if they qualify for other positions they had not considered — so that the best-fit jobs find the candidates and not the other way around. We want people to have an amazing experience along their SAP journey from the start, and we do that by presenting the very best of SAP technology and innovation.”

Brilliant Hire by SAP offers a pilot of smart job matching for SAP SuccessFactors customers on SAP Store with self-sign-up for customers in the U.S., Germany, and India. The team recently presented smart job matching during its Be Brilliant! webinar series, available for on-demand viewing here.

What is Series A funding for an intrapreneurial venture?

The SAP.iO Venture Studio supports employee-led ventures from small, entrepreneurial teams. Although these ventures are housed within SAP, they experience all the same growth opportunities and challenges that are typical for startups, including technology innovation, market fit and funding.

“Series A funding for an intrapreneurial venture is not unlike funding for an external startup,” says Ram Jambunathan, senior vice president and general manager, SAP.iO Venture Studio. “Our approach is to ‘build fast and learn things.’ Investments are made based on achieving aggressive milestones aligned to product development and business execution. Each venture in the Venture Studio has an executive board that holds it accountable to meeting milestones. What makes the Venture Studio such an exciting opportunity for SAP employees is that we empower employees to drive and own the progress and success of their venture. The Venture Studio provides an incubator environment that offers these ventures runway to develop transformational solutions that will ‘future-proof’ SAP and its customers.”

From Pilot to Venture — The Story of Brilliant Hire by SAP

The story of Brilliant Hire by SAP began with a passion for creative problem-solving, when a small team of developers at SAP Labs India pitched the winning solution at an SAP internal hackathon in 2016. It was the start of a remarkable entrepreneurial journey for the team and their pilot project.

“The inspiration for Brilliant Hire came from our own hiring experience,” says Hemant Shetty, co-founder, Brilliant Hire by SAP. He recalls his astonishment as he was interviewing many candidates to scale the team. “There was a 90 percent rejection rate in the first round of interviews. We realized that finding the right candidate is like finding a needle in a haystack.”

The experience gave the team insight into the pitfalls of the hiring process and opened the way for the launch of Brilliant Hire by SAP, which found seed funding after a successful pitch to the SAP Innovation Center Network (ICN) in 2017. “Hiring is time consuming and it includes human unconscious bias. At Brilliant Hire, we wanted to solve this and create experiences for recruiters as well as candidates,” Shetty says.

In 2018, the team joined the SAP.io Venture Studio to begin working full time on Brilliant Hire by SAP as an independent venture. Brilliant Hire has grown from a three-person pilot to a dynamic team of twenty passionate experts spread across India and the U.S., who bring a diverse range of experience to solving challenges in recruiting. With its third round of funding, Brilliant Hire by SAP shines a bright light on the possibilities for AI to elevate the candidate experience in talent acquisition.

“We believe in creating a world where a candidate’s dream job finds them,” says Swetha PB, co-founder, Brilliant Hire by SAP. “We’ve focused on building an intelligent and inclusive platform that provides companies the ability to build authentic relationships with candidates they want to hire and candidates to own their successes.”

The future of talent looks bright indeed at Brilliant Hire by SAP!

About Brilliant Hire by SAP

Brilliant Hire by SAP is a dynamic startup in the HR Tech space with teams in San Francisco and Bangalore. It offers an AI-powered application that integrates with SAP SuccessFactors to deliver a more personalized and inclusive candidate experience on companies’ careers sites, and streamline processes for recruiters. Brilliant Hire by SAP is a venture within the SAP.iO Venture Studio.

Find out more on www.brillianthire.io

About SAP.iO Venture Studio

SAP.iO Venture Studio drives a new era of organic growth at SAP. It invests in new ventures founded by small, entrepreneurial teams inside of SAP who are focused on building the future of enterprise business processes. SAP.iO Venture Studio provides design, development, and sales support to help these ventures launch.

Find out more on www.sap.io/studio

In Singapore, Supply Chain Management, Sustainability

SAP Startup Spotlight: Streamwise D.I.

SAP invests in a lot of promising startups, and it’s sometimes hard to keep track of all of them. E-3 Magazine has selected the most interesting companies to showcase in our SAP Startup Spotlight Series. In this article, we will take a look at Streamwise D.I.

Paul Hatten, CEO of Streamwise D.I., has over 25 years of experience driving corporate strategic international business management roles within the global water and wastewater sectors in high value Australian and U.S. companies. The companies he has managed include BioGill Group and Anue Water Technologies. He holds an Associate of Engineering Applied Science Construction Hydraulics from Technical and Further Education Queensland and is currently completing his Master of Business Administration from La Trobe University Melbourne. In this interview, Paul Hatten will talk about what Streamwise D.I. has to offer, how it is connected to SAP, and what’s next for the startup.

E-3 Magazine: What does Streamwise D.I. offer?

Paul Hatten: Streamwise D.I. is an enterprise-grade artificial intelligence (AI) software solution to drive digital transformation in industrial applications through data automation and decision intelligence. Our target market is the wastewater management of industrial operators across multiple verticals including food and beverage (F&B), mining, chemical distributors, and water authorities. Streamwise D.I. delivers value to enterprise customers by lowering operational costs, improving compliance, reducing operational risk, and increasing data transparency. On average, our solution reduces the operating expenses of wastewater operations by 60 percent through significant savings on chemical, asset management, compliance and energy costs.

How does your solution work?

Hatten: An industrial operator, such as a food and beverage manufacturer, with complex wastewater operations may have high operating costs, overuse of chemicals, and be out of compliance. They engage Streamwise D.I. to improve their operational efficiency and lower costs. The first step is to install sensors and probes on site at the wastewater treatment facility and install the ‘Monitor & Learn’ capability at the client site. The second step is an online analysis and deep dive into the operations data in order to identify inefficiencies and calculate the expected savings across asset management, energy, chemical use, and compliance. The third step is to fully utilize the power of Streamwise D.I.’s artificial intelligence capability to unlock decision intelligence and set optimization targets. The fourth step is reducing operating costs, often by around 60 percent, and to calculate the value-share pricing.

Why was Streamwise D.I. founded?

Hatten: Our founder and Chief Technology Officer, Alastair Lockey, has over 30 years of experience in technology innovation in wastewater management globally, with previous roles at global water giant Ecolab. Alastair saw opportunities to significantly improve data transparency and data analytics in wastewater operations through new software solutions with artificial intelligence capabilities to automate decision-making and reduce operating costs.

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In CRM & Customer Experience, San Francisco, Portfolio News

Conga Acquires Contract Wrangler

Conga, the global leader in Commercial and Revenue Operations transformation, today announced the acquisition of Contract Wrangler, a leader in applying AI and ML to understand the terms and obligations in contracts that impact revenue, risk and cost once the contract is executed. With the combination, companies of all sizes will be able to holistically manage all of their contracts, whether on the company’s or third-party paper, to manage risk while optimizing revenues.

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In Blog, Global, Venture Studio

Elevating the Candidate Experience with Brilliant Hire’s Smart Job Matching

Between searching through job postings, refining and revising resumes and cover letters, and prepping for interviews, applying for a job can feel like a full-time job in and of itself. There’s also the additional stressor of potentially falling through the cracks of a company’s applicant tracking system (ATS).

Not only that, but because there are so many open roles to choose from, prospective candidates can be overwhelmed by job sites. So overwhelmed that they end up exiting the page all together. According to a report, 91% of candidates leave career pages without ever applying to a single job.

The numbers are even more grim when diving into applicant demographics. A frequently cited Hewlett-Packard study found that men will apply for a job when they meet just 60 percent of the qualifications, while women will only apply if they meet 100 percent of the qualifications. What’s more, a LinkedIn Business’s Gender Insights Report also found that women were 16 percent less likely than men to apply to a job after viewing it and apply to 20 percent less jobs than men in the first place.

This isn’t what the team at Brilliant Hire by SAP envisions when they think of the future of inclusive recruiting.

“For us, the future of recruiting is one where candidates can easily find the best roles for their skillsets and companies can find the most qualified and diverse talent for their open roles,” said Jeanine LeFlore, General Manager of Brilliant Hire. “We believe that job applicants and companies alike benefit from a personalized candidate experience and we’re making that a reality with Smart Job Matching.”

Launched last fall, Brilliant Hire Smart Job Matching leverages artificial intelligence to deliver a curated list of best matched roles to each candidate. This bespoke experience doesn’t just help candidates, but also helps companies increase their visitor-to-applicant ratio. It also gives recruiting teams valuable insights on where candidates are dropping off as well as the types of positions and skills job seekers are searching.

How Smart Job Matching works

When a candidate visits an SAP SuccessFactors careers page that has been integrated with Smart Job Matching, the Skill Matcher will ask a few short questions about their professional background and skills. The answers will be analyzed to match them with top jobs based on their experience while also ensuring candidate privacy by not collecting any personally identifiable information.

In doing so, Brilliant Hire can recommend a tailored list of opportunities to each candidate, pointing out jobs that are strong match for their unique background and thus encouraging them to apply. The hypothesis is that this personalized experience can also boost applicant pool diversity by enabling minority groups of candidates that have traditionally been outnumbered (such as females) to send in their resume for the top recommended jobs.

“My personal experience as a woman of color navigating a tech career across various sized companies and industries has shown me that the playing field is not always level when it comes to the recruitment and hiring process,” LeFlore said, adding that Smart Job Matching enables candidates to apply to the roles that fit their skillsets with confidence which in turn helps make recruitment more inclusive.

SAP launched Smart Job Matching capabilities on its own careers site late last year and saw an 11 percent increase in the visitor-to-applicant ratio in just a few weeks because applicants were able to find a matching job more quickly. Another early adopter of Smart Job Matching is leading global supplier of specialty chemicals, W.R. Grace, who will be participating in a session during this year’s virtual SAPPHIRE NOW conference.

“Brilliant Hire by SAP integrates with SuccessFactors and helps us achieve our recruitment goals by attracting more qualified candidates to our open jobs.” said Stephanie Wheeler, Head of Global Talent Acquisition at W.R. Grace.

With goals of optimizing hiring by providing a personalized experience for candidates through Smart Job Matching, Brilliant Hire aims to further inclusive recruiting practices for customers.

“A great candidate experience should be at the center of the hiring process in a way that could also help make recruitment more inclusive for all applicants,” LeFlore said. “And we’re making that happen at Brilliant Hire.”

About Brilliant Hire by SAP

Founded in 2018 within the SAP.iO Venture Studio, Brilliant Hire by SAP believes that everyone deserves a fair chance at landing their dream job. Built to unlock diversity and inclusion in the workforce, Brilliant Hire continues to innovate.

To learn more about Brilliant Hire by SAP, visit www.brillianthire.io/

About SAP.iO Venture Studio

The SAP.iO Venture Studio drives a new era of organic growth at SAP. It invests in new ventures founded by small, entrepreneurial teams inside of SAP who are focused on building the future of enterprise business processes. SAP.iO Venture Studio provides design, development, and sales support to help these ventures launch.

To learn more about SAP.iO, visit www.sap.io/studio