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While many in sales fumble around with automated blasting and spamming, some of the best minds in the world are quietly revolutionizing sales forever. Make no mistake, all professions are facing the great disruption of the machine age as the bots steadily take over the trickiest of surgeries and medical procedures, legal research and precedent analysis, driving in the most hazardous of roads and mines, navigating and piloting the airways, automating banking and accounting, making the most complex decisions for marketing and advertising within markets. Relationships alone cannot save your sales career. You'll need technology if you are to achieve the level of efficiency and effective needed to thrive.

Complexica's CEO, Matthew Michalewicz, speaks with Noah from the Enterprise Sales Podcast on what Artificial Intelligence can do today, and where the limitations are, particularly around the sales function. To listen to the full podcast, please visit: https://soundcloud.com/user-678808760/matthew-michalewicz-how-ai-today-can-help-you-sell-and-how-it-cant

Servicing a "long tail" of customers with a large SKU range represents a huge challenge for sales reps in terms of investing time in the right areas. Imagine you're a sales rep working in the wine industry. You have hundreds of licensed premises in your territory and knowing who is best to call on and what to talk about, beyond your specials this month, is a massively difficult thing to figure out. In Australia, the average restaurant or licensed premise has 30 different alcohol sales reps calling every month, let alone all the other suppliers competing for their 'share of wallet'. Hundreds of sales people banging away at them... no wonder it is so difficult to get cut-though as a sale person!

Complexica Pty Ltd, a leading provider of Artificial Intelligence software for optimising sales & marketing activities, announced today that it has signed a contract with Detmold Group to explore the application of Complexica’s AI-based computational engine – Larry, the Digital Analyst® – to various sales & marketing functions within Detmold Group.

The Detmold Group is a leading manufacturer of paper and board based packaging products for a diverse range of customers. The company was founded in 1948 in Adelaide, South Australia by Mr Colin Detmold and after over 65 years of growth and expansion, is still owned and managed by the Detmold family. The Detmold Group employs around 2500 people worldwide in offices and factories strategically located to support customer operations and future growth.

“As an innovator in the packaging industry, the Detmold Group is always seeking new ways to deliver maximum value and service to our growing base of customers,” said Alf Ianniello, CEO of Detmold Group. “Given the rise of Artificial Intelligence and big data analytics in recent years, we are keen to explore what’s possible in this exciting new field using the cloud-based software applications developed by Complexica.”

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.”

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

A software robot with an algorithm-based persona is being used to help companies make data-driven decisions in real time.

South Australian company Complexica has developed Larry, the Digital Analyst, which is basically a set of algorithms tuned to complex problems to quickly generate answers that would otherwise take people a very long time to work out. Big Data software algorithms are taking decision-making to a new level, delivering solutions and efficiencies like never before. The global Artificial Intelligence market is forecast to exceed USD $5 billion by 2020.

Complexica Pty Ltd, a leading provider of Artificial Intelligence software for optimising sales & marketing activities, announced today that it has signed a contract with Coventry Group (ASX: CYG) for the delivery of its cloud-based Order Management System (OMS). Coventry will use OMS along with Larry, the Digital Analyst® to provide its telesales operators and in-field reps with intelligent quotation and guided selling capabilities.

“The goal of modern sales & marketing is to provide the right offer to the right customer at the right time using the right channel. This problem is not easy to solve and requires a lot of analytics,” said Peter Caughey, CEO of Coventry Group. “Rather than building out an internal analytics team to investigate and analyse countless data sets, we have engaged Complexica to provide our sales reps with the answers they need, when they need them, on a fully automated basis through their cloud-based Order Management System. We are excited about the benefits that OMS and Larry, the Digital Analyst will deliver to our business.”

Artificial intelligence (AI) – and robotics –  has been around for a long time but it has not yet disrupted white collar work very much yet – or has it? And surely our sales profession is safe – no robot could ever sell – or could it? As it turns out AI development has accelerated in recent year and it is now contributing considerably to the sales world and influencing significant change.

Salespeople are great with relationships… Relationships are a value; the problem today is that relationships alone are not enough. We need to have great relationships, and bring insight, and bring value to customers. People don’t want a relationship with an AI entity or a computer or an algorithm, they want a relationship with a person, but the person needs technology to bring more value to the table.