If you want your company to reap the benefits of AI but are worried about penalties due to regulation, BlastPoint’s customizable and auditable approach to customer intelligence may be the right solution for you.
Highly regulated industries, especially those with large security vulnerabilities like utilities, telecoms, credit unions, and insurance, are often still relatively new to customer intelligence. Strict regulations require these initiatives to have discipline and caution – not traditional strongpoints of software vendors – because the stakes are so high. Companies in these sectors can’t be early adopters of any new technology, especially a technology like AI that is still such a young science. There are big penalties for companies that implement AI wrong.
These companies have started to recognize that they need customer intelligence, however. Utilities need to meet benchmarks, telecoms need to differentiate, cable companies need to explore new models, credit unions need to grow their membership, and insurance companies need to monetize their vast array of unstructured, non-actuarial data. This is where BlastPoint can help.
Highly auditable decision-making
One problem that regulated industries have with a lot of AI, is that it relies on neural networks that make it difficult for companies to retrace their steps showing how individual decisions are made. Decisions are mostly just presented for a company to follow. This doesn’t work for firms in industries like financial services, however, that are often accountable for every decision they make. If someone is denied a loan, for example, a credit union needs to explain exactly why that happened. It’s critical, therefore, that AI resources are built without bias. And that is hard. To address this issue, our models are built around data as a whole, so that we are able to audit for equitability automatically.
Changing regulations
Companies also know that they have to respond to changing regulations that are often enforced at a human level. When an industry gets a new regulator, that person might have very different opinions about how compliant a company is. While this can be very stressful for companies, its effect can be mitigated by using a customizable and auditable platform that can adapt to changing regulations. Helping companies adapt their customer intelligence processes quickly is one way that BlastPoint can add value to industries that are subject to high regulation.
“We are the ‘come as you are’ software vendor, and there is almost certainly something in every company that we can work with RIGHT NOW, no matter what level of investment a firm currently has.”
Alison Alvarez
Overcoming hurdles
One big hurdle that these companies believe they face in undertaking a customer intelligence initiative, is that they feel they have to make a big upfront investment in infrastructure before they can even get started. They are then concerned that any return on investment could be years away. These organizations also face the very real challenge of utilizing the skillsets of their current staff as they continue to hire for AI expertise. In short, these companies know that efficiencies exist but don’t know how to start achieving them.
BlastPoint is like an on-ramp to these efficiencies. “We are the ‘come as you are’ software vendor,” says Alison Alverez, BlastPoint’s CEO, “and there is almost certainly something in every company that we can work with RIGHT NOW, no matter what level of investment a firm currently has.” Infrastructure investment, after all, is never done and a company’s infrastructure will never be perfect. Time is a precious commodity, however, and BlastPoint can immediately put organizations on the path to finding results in weeks instead of years.
Our software is also specifically designed to help unlock the value of your existing employees and make them more powerful. In some ways, “we are like the McDonalds of AI,” explains Alverez with a smile, “in that our customers can use the same base of ingredients – like McDonalds’ patties, lettuce, and buns – over and over again” for different data business objectives. Like McDonalds, this enables customer intelligence to be “affordable, efficient, and accessible to everyone,” she says,” even those with limited or no technical training.” If this intelligence had to be built from scratch every time, it would cost a lot more and be much less accessible.
Even if your company is in a highly regulated industry, BlastPoint’s customer intelligence platform can help you target specific customers with the most effective message in the most effective way.
Learn more about BlastPoint’s industry-specific solutions: visit our enterprise and energy pages. Don’t forget to sign up for our weekly e-newsletter, and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.