We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - 28. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. The revenue and margin leaks that services businesses never see coming tend to hit their financials the hardest. When there are gaps in customer success coverage combined with little visibility and control of services revenue, leaks can grow. Turbulent economic conditions make the leaks grow faster, giving customers a reason to question if they're getting the value they expect. Sure signs a customer success organization is experiencing revenue leaks include not knowing the costs of upsells, cross-sells, not having a financially based view of every customer engagement, growing churn rates and more.

IBM Thailand, the local unit of the US tech giant, is highlighting its cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies as a way to help drive business transformation to ensure organisations thrive following the Covid-19 crisis. Ms Patama says artificial intelligence and cloud technology are crucial to help companies digitally transform. "Over the past four months, Covid-19 has accelerated Thailand's digital transformation, which was earlier expected to take shape over three years," Patama Chantaruck, vice-president for Indochina expansion and managing director of IBM Thailand, told the Bangkok Post. The pandemic has forced organisations, including those in the business, government and education sectors, to proceed with stress tests for their business and financial models as well as management of their operations and workforce, she said. Organisations need to revisit their business mission, vision and value and consider whether they still cater to customer needs.

The robotic process automation (RPA) services market is booming around the world, according to a recently published Forrester Research report, titled'The RPA Services Market will Grow to Reach $12 billion by 2023'. In 2018, the market was estimated to be worth only $3.9 billion. Furthermore, Forrester's research indicates that over the past three years, annual revenue growth for the top services vendors has topped 100%, rising from around $0.6 billion in 2017 to an estimated $4.2 billion by 2023. After surveying 25 of the top RPA service providers about their customers, geographic focus, revenue and scale of implementations for the report, which was published last month, the authors – Leslie Joseph and Craig Le Clair – concluded that the massive growth in RPA services was a result not only of organisations adopting RPA as a cost mitigation strategy, but because automation was regarded as critical to the implementation of broader digital transformation efforts. However, while RPA adoption in terms of spend appears to be rising around the world, Forrester was unable to provide information about RPA adoption in Africa, or South Africa, as it was unable to source sufficient data.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has worked its way into a variety of industries, from the obvious (autonomous vehicles) to the hidden (anti-money laundering due diligence). But while organizations are clearly recognizing the value associated with incorporating AI into their business processes, they also are encountering a number of challenges with integrating this new intelligence into their operational processes. The value of using algorithms to unmask hidden patterns and then correlate findings with other seemingly unrelated variables to create real "intelligence" is becoming increasingly clear with each completed proof-of-concept (POC) project. But it is the larger, organization-wide deployment of AI that will generate the return on investment (ROI) that companies large and small have been seeking. To fully access the operational and economic benefits of AI, however, organizations are realizing that, in most cases, enabling AI is not a plug-and-play proposition.

Should you work for a company that produces such items as heating, ventilation and air conditioners, 3D cardiac imaging machines, seed drills or submersible pumps, chances are that you're already aware of the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT). All of us in the tech community are constantly excited about any opportunity to tell the rest of you about our cool technology that can run on your machine, vehicle or product. We see the IoT's potential to not only improve services but also to connect each product to the internet, to collect data from it and, using advanced machine learning technology, to derive predictions from the ongoing analysis of that data. But if you're the CEO of an already successful manufacturing company, maybe the questions you're asking right now are "Why should I care? Don't my products sell just fine without IoT connectivity? How can it possibly be meaningful to my business?"