Global AI-powered Order-to-Cash platform, Sidetrade, announced an acceleration to its North America offensive strategy with plans to invest $24 million and add 110 full-time jobs in Calgary over the next three years. Just one year since the launch of its North America operations, Sidetrade has exceeded expectations with 58% of its new bookings now from the North America market. The SaaS provider has been recognized by Gartner as one of just three Leaders in the 2022 Magic Quadrant for Invoice to Cash applications. Sidetrade is now accelerating its expansion into North America by investing $24 million in the next three years and hiring in the region. Brad Parry, President and CEO of Calgary Economic Development, said: "Sidetrade's expansion in Calgary as its North American headquarters speaks to the city's leading business environment and the exciting momentum in our tech and innovation ecosystem. Alberta and Calgary are centres for AI excellence with highly skilled talent, and as a global leader in AI, Sidetrade joins a growing roster of multinational companies that call Calgary home, where bright minds with big ideas are solving global challenges."

Sidetrade, the Artificial Intelligent platform dedicated to accelerating company revenue, and Solocal, the French digital marketing leader, have signed a four-year partnership agreement in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Sidetrade's machine learning algorithms will allow Solocalto digitalize and automate financial relations with their 399,000 clients,and optimize debt collection.Using AIto boost operating efficiency Launched in 2017, Solocal's transformation project named Solocal 2020 represents a new ambition: become a champion of digital in France. "To achieve this transformation, our priority was to invest in operational projects with high added value, based on structured, optimized and automated processes, and a client-driven approach", explains Eric Boustouller, CEO of Solocal. "With this partnership, our Finance Department shows their determination to make full use of today's latest technologies, especially in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Given how essential it is to effectively manage financial relations with clients, we must boost the operational efficiency of our teams, who have immense volumes of data to manage. It is in this context that we have chosen Sidetrade to support us with this transformation."

Sidetrade, the Artificial Intelligent platform dedicated to accelerating company revenue, and Solocal, the French digital marketing leader, have signed a four-year partnership agreement in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Sidetrade's machine learning algorithms will allow Solocalto digitalize and automate financial relations with their 399,000 clients,and optimize debt collection.Using AIto boost operating efficiency Launched in 2017, Solocal's transformation project named Solocal 2020 represents a new ambition: become a champion of digital in France. "To achieve this transformation, our priority was to invest in operational projects with high added value, based on structured, optimized and automated processes, and a client-driven approach", explains Eric Boustouller, CEO of Solocal. "With this partnership, our Finance Department shows their determination to make full use of today's latest technologies, especially in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Given how essential it is to effectively manage financial relations with clients, we must boost the operational efficiency of our teams, who have immense volumes of data to manage. It is in this context that we have chosen Sidetrade to support us with this transformation."

The French division of Manpower, one of the largest recruitment and staffing companies in the world, has deployed an AI agent developed by Sidetrade to help optimize credit management in its financial department. The software, called Aimie, has passed the probation with flying colors – after nine months of testing, effectiveness of recovery actions grew 12 percent – and is now handling thousands of accounts. "We started Aimie off with two customer portfolios for a period of two months," said Laurent Bueno, credit director of Manpower France. "Encouraged by the results, we ramped up our use of Aimie. Within four months, Aimie was managing nearly 60 percent of single-site customers, which represents over 5,000 accounts, and nearly 10,000 follow-up actions per month."

With an annual income of €4 bn per year, Manpower France collects 1.3 million receivables from 80,000 companies. To handle this volume, and increasingly complex payment procedures, Manpower's Finance department started using Sidetrade technology in 2013. Sidetrade accelerates automation of the order-to-cash process, and models collection strategies for different segments of clientele. As a result, Manpower France improved their efficiency with a significant reduction in days sales outstanding. Despite this excellent performance, considering the complexity of the purchasing process, and exponential growth in data, Sidetrade decided to enrich their platform with Artificial Intelligence technology.

Manpower France anticipates and drives change in the world of work by breaking new ground with Aimie, Sidetrade's cutting edge Artificial Intelligence system. To optimize Credit Management, Manpower equipped their Finance team with Sidetrade's ground breaking technology, now available to all of Sidetrade's customers. With an annual income of €4 bn per year, Manpower France collects 1.3 million receivables from 80,000 companies. To handle this volume, and increasingly complex payment procedures, Manpower's Finance department started using Sidetrade technology in 2013. Sidetrade accelerates automation of the order-to-cash process, and models collection strategies for different segments of clientele.

Early adopters are already creating competitive advantages, and the gap with the laggards looks set to grow," is how McKinsey Global Institute puts it in their report Artificial Intelligence, The Next Digital Frontier?. They add: "In our survey of 3,000 AI-aware C-level executives, across 10 countries and 14 sectors, only 20% said they currently use any AI-related technology at scale or in a core part of their businesses. Many firms say they are uncertain of the business case or return on investment." However, investments in AI for the enterprise are ever-increasing and industry case studies are demonstrating the disruptive potential of AI. What is certain is that, whatever the industry, there's no longer any guarantee it will remain unaffected by the next Uber-like app. The IoT is real and ever-expanding.

Artificial intelligence now fits in our daily lives and is deployed in more and more business sectors, hustling human expertise. Artificial intelligence should transform one job over two, but does not necessarily represent a threat. In fact, these jobs should be redirected to less repetitive tasks, with more added value, discusses According to a PwC study from March 2017, 70% of the jobs in the energy sector and 65% of the jobs in the consumer sector could be automated through artificial intelligence. This new technology involves a necessary change in the value chain and, if it opens the way to new skills like cybersecurity, it also represents a major challenge and opportunity for these businesses. Managers and Top-Levels are directly involved in the facing of this challenge, by accompanying the teams through this mutation: vanquish fears, embracing innovation, transforming businesses, training teams.

The task of the Data Scientist is to come up with innovative algorithms that deliver actionable business outcomes from volumes of unstructured data. Companies are now grasping just how crucial large-scale data analysis is for anticipation and decision-making. But what does the hazy title'Data Scientist' mean exactly? What are the core skills the role requires? And why is this kind of talent in such phenomenal demand?

The whole question of our ability to understand and control the algorithms we're producing has come about precisely because we need to develop models capable of adapting to the correct processing of the data they receive. The validity of the suggestions they come up with has to be checked, and if needs be, invalidated by the human user to avoid any risk of uncontrolled automation. The whole conversation though has now been started as a way of accessing, sharing and developing knowledge. So it seems logical that the first means of interaction with an Artificial Intelligence form and hastening its learning has to be language, whether it's spoken or written. The embedding of specialized software in the form of speech robots for instant messaging looks set to be a promising area.