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Today, many customers are better informed than the salespeople they engage with, largely due to the substantial amount of research they do beforehand. This well-documented phenomenon – of information asymmetry swinging from the salesperson to the customer in recent times – is manifesting itself across countless industries, and is being compounded by another trend called ‘mass personalisation’. Better informed and educated, customers are increasingly dictating what they want and demanding a more personalised service when they buy. 

Where will it all lead? Enter artificial intelligence. Although much has been written about the potential loss of jobs to artificial intelligence software and robots, a far more interesting and immediate application of articifial intelligence revolves around its ability to make certain jobs more productive – in particular, within sales and marketing departments. In fact, the ability of artificial intelligence to quickly shift through very large amounts of data and convert generic information into specific knowledge, is fundamentally changing the face of sales and marketing departments in many industries.

ADELAIDE, SOUTH AUSTRALIA, 20 December 2016 – Complexica Pty Ltd, a leading provider of Artificial Intelligence software, announced today that it has signed a contract with Boehringer Ingelheim for the deployment of its What-if Simulator, powered by Larry, the Digital Analyst®.

“Like most innovative multi-national companies, Boehringer Ingelheim operates in a dynamic environment that has many moving parts,” said Jon Simpson, Head of Sales for Boehringer Ingelheim Australia and New Zealand. “Conducting timely and accurate data analysis is often a challenging and time-consuming endeavour, which requires significant human expertise. Complexica’s What-if Simulator, powered by Larry, the Digital Analyst, is ideally suited for the analytical challenges within our business and operating environment.”

Complexica Pty Ltd, a leading provider of Artificial Intelligence software for optimising sales and marketing activities, announced today that it has signed a contract with Bunzl for the deployment of its Order Management System (OMS) for in-field sales reps and customer service staff. Complexica’s Order Management System (OMS) is powered by Larry, the Digital Analyst®, and provides sales, telesales, and customer service staff with advanced capabilities for intelligent quoting, order processing, CRM, and guided-selling.

“Given we supply over 10,000 customers with an extensive product range in excess of 40,000 SKUs, there is a high level of complexity our team needs to manage on a day-to-day basis,” said Kim Hetherington, CEO of Bunzl Australasia. “To help our sales team focus on what they do best – provide maximum customer service and value to our customers – we have partnered with Complexica to provide real time information by automating processes to reduce inherent complexity, particularly in the areas of in-field quoting and order processing. Complexica’s Order Management System and Larry, the Digital Analyst will provide our sales team of more than 300 with real-time analytics, insights, to empower decision making and enhanced support. This will create more time for our teams to enable them to see more customers each day and provide the Bunzl personalised experience.”

Bunzl Australasia, the local division of the 13,000-staff worldwide outsourcing giant, has turned to artificial intelligence vendor Complexica to help its team manage the "high level of complexity" that comes with 10,000 customers and more than 40,000 SKUs. Complexica, based in Adelaide, has won the contract to deploy its order management system (OMS) for in-field sales reps and customer service staff. The system, which runs on Amazon Web Services, is powered by 'Larry', which Complexica dubs a 'Digital Analyst'.

Larry was the creation of a company rich in PhD talent; Complexica boasts a deep bench of scientific advisors and is run by managing director Matthew Michalewicz, his father and chief scientist Dr Zbigniew "Mike" Michalewicz, and chief software architect Constantin Chiriac. The roster boasts data scientists and is supported by multiple universities.

Complexica Pty Ltd, a leading provider of Artificial Intelligence software for optimising sales & marketing activities, announced today that the company’s CEO will be a keynote speaker at the 2016 Australian Payroll Association’s annual conference held in Melbourne on the 21^st of October.

Matthew Michalewicz’s keynote will focus on the topics of big data, disruption, and Artificial Intelligence, and how these trends and market forces will change the future of the workforce. He will provide real-world examples of how Artificial Intelligence has already been applied to payroll and HR data to drive tangible improvements to the bottom line, and how Artificial Intelligence is automating the most complex of tasks in organisations around the world. Engaging and educational, Matthew’s keynote will draw on facts, studies, and real-life examples from his 20-year career running Artificial Intelligence software companies in the United State, Europe, and Australia.

Complexica Pty Ltd, a leading provider of Artificial Intelligence software for optimising sales & marketing activities, announced today that it has added three international experts in the field of Artificial Intelligence to its Scientific Advisory Board, namely: Dr. Pablo Moscato from the University of Newcastle; Dr. Vic Ciesielski from RMIT, and Dr. Łukasz Brocki from Primespeech.

Through the use of Artificial Intelligence, data can be automatically captured, automatically analysed, and automatically delivered to a salesperson in the form of actionable insights, such as “visit this customer”, “deliver these messages and insights”, and “offer this mix of products at this price”. By automatically providing such insights to in-field salespeople and telesales operators, productivity and yield increase because they begin targeting better opportunities, with the correct mix of products, at the optimal price, with the customer receiving a higher quality engagement and personalised service. Science fiction? It’s already a reality.

The news that Foxconn, the world’s biggest contract electronics maker, is developing industrial robots to target 30% automation in its Chinese factories by 2020, has shaken the manufacturing industry. As machines and robotics become more sophisticated and specialised than ever, we can’t help but ask: will manufacturing soon be taken over entirely by robots?

Automation is not just impacting manufacturing; business process outsourcing (or BPO) services are vulnerable too. Companies such as Mattel, Apple and Facebook are well along the road of exploring AI and working out how to transform today’s inferior chatbots into leading-edge, messenger-based interfaces. Experts are predicting this is the kind of digital disruption with the potential to upturn industries. After all, a chatbot messaging service could replace the most common interfaces we currently use on connected devices, completely revolutionising the way consumers connect with companies online and offline in customer service departments. Will it be long before they replace human workers in contact centres?

This IDC Retail Insights Perspective discusses cognitive technology trends in retail and introduces Larry, an enterprise software application based on cognitive analytics developed by Complexica to help retailers increase their revenue, margin, and customer engagement. Artificial intelligence (AI) and business intelligence (BI) have been with us for decades, but this time, the reality almost matches the rhetoric, driven by the exponential growth in technology capabilities, smarter analytics engines, and the surge in data, especially in the retail sector. This perspective is a review of several of these trends and how Larry solves complex analytical tasks and workflows