Sales professionals make critical decisions every day, deciding which prospects to reach out to, what product and service offerings to highlight, and which communication channels will work best. Many salespeople make these decisions based on intuition or follow an organizational playbook. NAVIK SalesAI offers a better alternative by making the buyer central to the process, and applying artificial intelligence to the data. It provides weekly guidance identifying the most promising contacts, specifying which products or services each contact is likely to purchase next and suggesting the most effective communication channel to use. Product recommendations outline the likely reasons motivating a purchase, giving the sales person talking points that resonate with their prospect.

According to a recent press release, "Cognonto, a new start-up in knowledge-based artificial intelligence (KBAI), announced today the dual release of its Cognonto Platform and KBpedia, a computable knowledge structure to automate much of the effort needed for machine learning. KBpedia leverages six large-scale knowledge bases -- Wikipedia, Wikidata, GeoNames, OpenCyc, DBpedia and UMBEL -- into a single structure expressly designed to support artificial intelligence (AI) within enterprises." Michael Bergman, a co-founder of Cognonto, commented, "Many of the AI advances in recent years, such as question answering on smart phones or systems that beat human contestants in Jeopardy, are built around Web knowledge bases like Wikipedia… But these are one-off systems that only the largest tech firms or research outfits can afford… The idea behind Cognonto is to democratize this process such that any enterprise can afford to train their own machine learners or gain the advantages of knowledge-based artificial intelligence." The release continues, "KBpedia combines the hundreds of thousands of concepts and 20 million entities in its source knowledge bases in a structure that separately captures entities, attributes, relations and topics, the types by which they are categorized, and the connections between them. One innovation of the system, according to Bergman, is the schema, or "knowledge graph," that organizes KBpedia according to the logic of Charles Sanders Peirce, a noted 19th century American mathematician, philosopher and polymath."

United Parcel Service (UPS) is newest competitor in the race to unleash the first fleet of delivery drones. The firm began testing the use of drones this week with a focus of bringing packages to remote or difficult-to-access locations. A mock delivery of urgent medical supplies was delivered from Beverly, Massachusetts to Children's Island as a test, which is the first drone delivery to be made by a major delivery firm in the US. United Parcel Service (UPS) is newest competitor in the race to unleash the first fleet of delivery drones. UPS announced today that it has begun testing the use of drones to make commercial deliveries of packages to remote or difficult-to-access locations, working together with drone-maker CyPhy Works.

LONDON, UK / ACCESSWIRE / September 22, 2016 / Almax Analytics, a software platform delivering actionable insights, announced today they have emerged from stealth (development) with a customer ready product for the Financial Markets. Almax debuted in January 2016 as an Innovative Company to Watch by KPMG Luxembourg and quickly built demand and investor interest, thereby closing the seed round April 2016 to develop this first to market technology. "We are excited to present our product to the market and have worked hard to deliver this technology," says Balazs Klemm, Chief Executive and Founder. "On behalf of the company I need to thank our loyal supporters and the Almax team for their commitment and patience. We look forward to growing the business and already engaged in Series A financing discussions."

SAN FRANCISCO-- LinkedIn Corp. LNKD 0.04 % rolled out new technology and products Thursday aimed at keeping members on its network longer, a move that could help generate more data and make it more valuable to Microsoft Corp. MSFT 0.10 % LinkedIn, which agreed to sell itself for 26.2 billion to Microsoft in June, debuted training, messaging and news feed features designed to keep LinkedIn's 450 million members using the social network more often and longer. If successful, members will be more likely to keep their profiles up-to-date, add new connections, and post items that offer insight into their work interests. "There's a flywheel there," LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said in an interview. "The more we understand who you are…, the more personal an experience we can create." One feature is LinkedIn Learning, training videos to help professionals learn new skills, such as computer coding, for their careers.

Artificial intelligence and big data are shaping up to have the biggest impact on the healthcare industry, and most of that money will be coming from venture capital funds, according to a new survey of digital health executives and investors. Silicon Valley Bank surveyed 122 founders, executives and investors in health technology, asking about the biggest opportunities and threats for the industry in the next year. The survey was conducted during Silicon Valley Bank's HealthTech NYC event and was attended by such companies and investment firms as Celmatix, Aledad and Andreesen Horowitz. Almost half of respondents say big data, followed by artificial intelligence (35 percent) are the most promising technologies in terms of impact on investment. "Big data has been integral to our work at Celmatix. It has empowered physicians to be able to counsel women about their chances of having a baby, based on their relevant personal metrics, and not just their age," Dr. Piraye Yurttas Beim, Chief Executive Officer of Celmatix said in a statement.

Wealth management firm and investment bank UBS is running artificial intelligence (AI) trials with some of its richest clients. AI applications being tested include tools designed to read facial expressions and uncover clients' unconscious biases towards or against certain types of investment. The aim is to help the company's cash-rich, but time-poor, clientele to ask the right questions about their decisions, according to UBS. The move comes as little surprise. The financial services market is in the vanguard of automation, AI, machine learning and robotics at a time when many customers prefer app-based mobile banking to online or bricks-and-mortar alternatives. Several international banks plan mass software automation, including HSBC and Bank of America investment arm Merrill Edge.

September 21, 2016 -- NEW YORK – LexisNexis Legal & Professional today announced its intent to acquire privately held Intelligize, Inc., provider of the industry standard for U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) intelligence. The acquisition would expand the LexisNexis securities and M&A offering with new content, innovative tools and analytics while complementing the capabilities of the company's existing securities solution, Lexis Securities Mosaic . Closing of the transaction is subject to certain customary conditions. Based in Reston, VA, Intelligize provides a leading analytics solution enabling legal, academic and business professionals to efficiently mine data and insights from SEC filings, M&A contracts, transactional agreements and corporate governance documents. This enables customers to streamline compliance processes, benchmark peer disclosures, clearly identify market standards, draft documents based on SEC filed precedent and clear SEC reviews in an efficient manner.

It was a heady mix of business and technical sessions on how to take advantage of the power of analytics. Of course there are innumerable applications for analytics, from fraud detection to supply chain optimization to garden variety business intelligence. For this post I'll focus mainly on customer-related applications, and some of the more advanced SAS capabilities discussed at the conference. Let's start with what SAS announced: SAS Viya -- billed as a new open, "cloud-ready" analytics platform. The idea is to bring together the SAS portfolio, built over some 40 years, into one platform that can be used by data scientists and other analytics professionals; business users and IT management; and senior management.

In addition, the solution reduces friction for existing trustworthy customers by eliminating time consuming and step-up challenges. For more information about iovation, please check the profile in the company database.