This post on free resources was originally produced by Oracle and first appeared on the Oracle for Startups Blog: https://blogs.oracle.com/startup/startups-step-up-with-free-resources-and-virtual-technology

 

Startups are known to be adaptive, innovative, and agile. When there’s a crisis or disruption, these up-and-coming business are quick with a solution, and this situation is no different.

 

Despite being hit hard themselves, startups are stepping up to help by offering their virtual technologies and resources for free. Among them, we are proud to share, are several cloud startups from the Oracle for Startups community.

 

Here is a running list of some of the startups who are putting their ingenuity and inspiration into action.

 

Extending Help to Farmers and Growers

 

AgroScout

 

AgroScout’s software solution enables growers and farmers to turn a low-cost commercial drone into a digital agronomist, providing pinpoint detection of disease and pests, thereby protecting crops and increasing yield. During this economic crisis, AgroScout is offering its solution at discounted rates and including free use of a drone for 2 weeks in the case of growers who do not already own one, so the grower can try out the system without any cost.

 

“In these challenging times, we don’t want to ask farmers to put their hand into their pockets unless they are 100% positive it’s going to help them out,” said Simcha Shore, CEO of AgroScout.  “In addition to our discounted offerings, we are also providing online demonstrations so growers can be acquainted with the system and understand the benefits.”

 

The solution accurately and autonomously detects, identifies, and monitors diseases, pests, and other agronomic problems in the field. Data is uploaded to the cloud and analyzed by AgroScout’s deep learning algorithms with the goal of sending growers accurate crop stress statuses, disease, and pinpointed pest locations, accompanied by treatment recommendation, directly to their computer or mobile device.

 

You can take advantage of AgroScout’s current offers here or by emailing sales@agro-scout.com

 

Patient Triage Via Mobile App

 

w3.care

 

Brazilian startup w3.care is focused on mobile emergency care through telemedicine and artificial intelligence solutions for ambulances, rescues, and healthcare units. The startup has developed a new and free service, TeleCOVID, which helps identify potential patients and calculates their severity into low- and high-risk profiles. Low risk profiles receive care instructions and best-practice procedures, as well as connections with medical professionals. In the case of high risk, the TeleCOVID will start the medical tele-orientation using the w3.care platform, which is HIPAA and HL7 compliant, to help better connect high-risk patients to immediate care. (No personally identifiable information is used during the process.)

 

“Telemedicine is critical right now and the ability to help triage via TeleCOVID is helping the general population and the many medical doctors and organizations we are working with,” said Jamil Cade, MD and CEO of w3.care.  “We are helping medical professionals to tele-triage, tele-orientate, tele-monitor and use real-time data visualization to battle this pandemic.”

 

To access information on this free service, visit their website.

 

Real-time, Active Analytics Helping on the Front Lines

 

Kinetica

 

Kinetica is providing free access to its Active Analytics Platform for researchers, data scientists, and academics trying to analyze the impact of COVID-19. Kinetica helps organizations build real-time active analytical applications that react instantly to changing conditions. The platform leverages powerful GPUs to process and visualize complex streaming, historical, and location data at scale—layering on machine learning—to deliver real-time information for insight-driven actions and results.

 

“Our hearts go out to all those affected by the outbreak of COVID-19. I believe it is our duty to do all we can for the safety of our community,” said Kinetica CEO Paul Appleby. “Kinetica was founded on the idea that data can change the world. By providing our analytics platform for free we will help provide critical, real-time information to protect the most vulnerable, assist emergency responders, better care for the sick, and find a solution against this terrible virus.”

 

Use this form to provide a basic overview of your project, and access the platform free.

 

Throwing Studios and Artists a Lifeline

 

GridMarkets

 

GridMarkets, a cloud rendering and simulation company for studios, animation/visual effects, and other industries, is providing its service at a significant discount (and in some cases, at no cost) to studios and freelance artists in need. GridMarkets’ “COVID-19 Relief Program” (powered by Oracle’s VMs) can help studios and freelance graphic artists in many ways, including:

 

•    Enabling studios to continue work so they can preserve their cash and business
•    Providing a lifeline to the artistic community
•    Bootstrapping a freelance business (if they have been laid off by their studios)
•    Helping professionals refresh their artistic “reels”
•    Creating helpful community VFX 3D tutorials

 

“Visual effects studios and freelance 3D artists, who produce the world’s visual content, are being crushed by COVID-19.  Demand is down and anyone fortunate enough to have a project is now, understandably, ultra-budget sensitive,” said cofounder Mark Ross.  “Our visual effects cloud-based rendering and simulation service, powered and secured by Oracle, can be up and running for a studio or freelancer in minutes with no special skills required.  We have cut our prices and made grants available as a way of giving back to the artistic community in their hour of need.”

 

Learn more about GridMarkets’ COVID-19 Relief Program on their webpage.

 

Helping Navigate Volatility in Markets and Supply Chains

 

Complete Intelligence

 

With economies around the would essentially being put on pause, there is a new level of uncertainty in markets and supply chains. As a result, manufacturers are quickly trying to pivot and make adjustments on the fly. Complete Intelligence is offering a free report and consultation call to help businesses adjust to volatility in markets and supply chains.

 

“We’ve seen a big shift in how category managers and planning managers are looking at their supply chains,” said Tony Nash, CEO and founder.  “With entire economies being shut down with coronavirus, companies are taking a closer look at the concentration of supply chains by region. Our AI/ML software helps companies easily visualize their supply chains, and helps them pivot quickly.”

 

With Complete Intelligence, businesses can easily visualize their cost data, make predictions and plans, all in the context of a global economy. The company uses more than 15 billion data points in their AI/ML tool, so planning teams can see their cost projections in the context of market influences.

 

Contact Tony Nash at tnash@completeintel.com for more information.

 

Keep your storytelling fresh – even while working from home

 

Sauce

 

Video is paramount to brand storytelling, but creating great, engaging content when you can’t send out video crews or get face-to-face is a problem.

 

Sauce’s platform allows businesses to keep engaging with their audience, by transforming every organization’s community into a video creation team. The London-based startup enables video creation leveraging smartphone cameras, so anyone can become part of the film crew. The result is authentic user-generated content.

 

With features for editing, subtitling, and music – the platform is collaborative, fast, and robust.

 

“We’ve received an uptick in organizations needing advice and direction around video creation,” said Sauce cofounder Priya Shah. “We want to meet their needs with advice and technology resources so they can keep their video content and storytelling fresh and constant—even while we are all working from home.”

 

Contact Priya at priya@sauce.video for advice on capturing great video, even when your whole team is at home.

 

Chatbots triage customer service calls

 

BotSupply

 

BotSupply is a conversational AI company that helps organizations create engaging and relevant customer experiences using their bot platform. Today, the cutting-edge startup is providing its AI platform for free to public and non-profit healthcare organizations so they can do what they do best: save lives.

 

Triage and response teams across industries are being overloaded with customer calls. As call volume increases, so do wait times. Chatbots help these organizations provide information in a timely manner, automating the most repetitive queries and routing only the most critical ones to human agents.

 

“The beauty of chatbots is that they are so flexible and easy to implement that you can respond to any crisis in a matter of hours, not weeks. This is something other communication tools simply can’t do,” said BotSupply cofounder Francesco Stasi. “We are happy to offer these resources free while many are in need.”

 

To get started, contact Francesco at francesco@botsupply.ai

 

Mapping services for governments, healthcare, startups

 

TravelTime

 

TravelTime’s platform processes maps and data from across the globe and delivers optimized travel time mapping, so you know what’s reachable in minutes, not miles.

 

Today, TravelTime is offering its data and mapping services to governments, charities, health services, and NGOs for free. The startup is also covering mapping and data costs for other startups and small businesses.

 

“Although the current situation is disrupting our personal lives, our technology remains as solid and stable as always and so it is business as (un)usual for us,” said TravelTime cofounder Charlie Davies. “There is no time limit on this, there is no contract, there is no assumption for future use. We want to repurpose our data and services to help. Lots of people have helped us along our way, now it’s our turn to try and do the same for others.”

 

Any government, charity, health service, or NGO that is actively helping to address the crisis can get unlimited free access to data to help them plan their responses, including:

 

•          Arranging visits to vulnerable patients

•          Mapping the right locations for testing centers

•          Communicating to the public which test centers are right for them

 

Small businesses and startups can also take advantage of these services. Access the request form here.

 

With virtual-AI platform, HR recruiting keeps pace

 

Jobecam

 

Brazilian-based Jobecam is offering free access to its virtual recruitment platform so human resource teams can continue recruiting. Jobecam is a 100% digital recruiting experience that brings agility, accessibility, and diversity through AI-driven video technology. A pioneer in video blind interviews, Jobecam’s solution improves the recruiting experience and makes it virtual in a time when face-to-face meetings aren’t possible.

 

“In this moment of uncertainty and social isolation, we all need to come together and help,” said Jobecam COO Thereza Bukow.  “By making our solution free, we enable businesses to be more agile in their recruitment process and deliver a better experience that is secure and modern.”

 

Jobecam’s solution offers:

•          Registration of unlimited job posts

•          Automatic screening of candidates

•          Recorded video interviews

•          AI-based intelligent rankings

•          Live interview room, cultural matching, and video curriculum

 

Contact Jobecam by emailing cammila@jobecam.com or thereza.bukow@jobecam.com.

 

Real-time employee feedback that’s simple and meaningful

 

Holler Live

 

Dutch startup Holler Live is offering their real-time feedback solution free to human resource managers, so employees can provide their opinions and feedback on various topics, including how they are adapting during this time.

 

“Employees across the world are working from home—many for the first time. Holler provides an easy way for employees to voice their opinions and feedback—allowing human resource managers to better understand how staff are handling the changes and challenges of remote working during this difficult time,” said CEO Rado Raykov.

 

With one swipe, Holler Live allows people to express their opinion in an easy and universally understandable way. Holler Live partners get specific and user-permissioned alerts, permitting them to promptly respond in real-time to the opinions of their target audience, whether it’s employees, customers, or other stakeholders.

 

To access Holler Live’s free solution, please email rado@holler.live or sign up here.  Watch a video of the mobile employee engagement solution.

 

Keeping media rolling with AI-powered content tools

 

aiconix

 

German startup aiconix is offering its multilingual transcription and subtitling solutions for free and discounted rates. An AI-powered media and content creation platform, the technology enables media and entertainment professionals to produce better content more efficiently by automating routine workflows and creating new content from large amounts of unstructured audio-visual data.

 

“In these days, where everybody communicates online, it should be essential to reach also those who need barrier-free access, and provide searchability in audio and video files,” said CEO and cofounder Eugen L. Gross.  “We want to provide our live transcription and live subtitling feature for free for the next three months to those who need it like hospitals, authorities and NGOs.”

 

From press conferences to media content, aiconix’s transcription and subtitle services can plug into any data stream in multiple languages allowing organizations to quickly repurpose and disseminate valuable content. The platform enables automated subtitling of videos, semantic text analysis, transcription of audio, automated recognition of faces and local celebrities, label detection, and much more.

 

Contact aiconix to access your discount and get started:  Live@aiconix.ai or contact form.

 

Startups are also reducing operating costs by taking advantage of free and discounted cloud with Oracle for Startups. Learn more and join them at oracle.com/startup

Top 12 AI Use Cases: Artificial Intelligence in FinTech

We’ve scoped out these real-world AI use cases so we could detail how artificial intelligence has been a game-changer for FinTech. Few verticals are such a perfect match for the improved capabilities brought by the AI revolution like the financial sector.

Traditional financial services have always struggled with massive volumes of records that need to be handled with maximum accuracy.

However, before the advent of AI and the rise of Fintech companies, very few giants of this industry had the bandwidth to deal with the inherently quantitative nature of this world. (Read Fintech’s Future: AI and Digital Assets in Financial Institutions.)

Banks alone are expected to spend $5.6 billion USD on AI and Machine Learning (ML) solutions in 2019 — just a fraction of what they’re expecting to earn since the profits generated may reach up to $250 billion USD in value.

From automating the most menial and repetitive tasks to free up the time to focus on higher-level objectives, to assisting with customer service management and reducing the risk of frauds, AI is employed from back-office tasks to the frontend with nimbleness and agility.

1. Fraud Detection and Compliance

According to the Alan Turing Institute, with $70 billion USD spent by banks on compliance each year just in the U.S., the amount of money spent on fraud is staggering. And when the number of reported cases of payments-related fraud has increased by 66% between 2015 and 2016 in the United Kingdom, it’s clear how this problem is much more than a momentary phenomenon.

AI is a groundbreaking technology in the battle against financial fraud. ML algorithms are able to analyze millions of data points in a matter of seconds to identify anomalous transactional patterns. Once these suspicious activities are isolated, it’s easy to determine whether they were just mistakes that somehow made it through the approval workflow or traces of a fraudulent activity.

Mastercard launched its newest Decision Intelligence (DI) technology to analyze historical payments data from each customer to detect and prevent credit card fraud in real time. Companies such as Data Advisor are employing AI to detect a new form of cybercrime based on exploiting the sign-up bonuses associated with new credit card accounts.

Even the Chinese giant Alibaba employed its own AI-based fraud detection system in the form of a customer chatbot — Alipay.

2. Improving Customer Support

Other than health, no other area is more sensitive than people’s financial well-being. A critical, but often overlooked, application of AI in the finance industry is customer service. Chatbots are already a dominating force in nearly all other verticals, and are already starting to gain some ground in the world of banking services, as well. (Read We Asked IT Pros How Enterprises Will Use Chatbots in the Future. Here’s What They Said.)

Companies like Kasisto, for example, built a new conversational AI that is specialized in answering customer questions about their current balance, past expenses, and personal savings. In 2017, Alibaba’s Ant Financial’s chatbot system reported to exceed human performance in customer satisfaction.

Alipay’s AI-based customer service handles 2 million to 3 million user queries per day. As of 2018, the system completed five rounds of queries in one second.

Other companies, such as Tryg, used conversational AI techs such as boost.ai to provide the right resolutive answer to 97% of all internal chat queries. Tryg’s own conversational AI, Rosa, works as an incredibly efficient virtual agent that substitutes inexperienced employees with her expert advice.

Virtual agents are able to streamline internal operations by amplifying the capacity and quality of traditional outbound customer support. For example LogMeIn’s Bold360 was instrumental in reducing the burden of the Royal Bank of Scotland’s over 30,000 customer service agents customer service who had to ask between 650,000 and 700,000 questions every month.

The same company also developed the AI-powered tool AskPoli to answer all the challenging and complex questions asked by Fannie Mae’s customers.

3. Preventing Account Takeovers

As a huge portion of our private identity has now become somewhat public, in the last two decades cybercriminals have learned many new ways to use counterfeit or steal private data to access other people’s accounts.

Account Takeovers (ATOs) account for at least $4 billion USD in losses every year, with nearly 40% of all frauds occurred in 2018 in the e-commerce sector being due to identity thefts and false digital identities.

Smartphones appear to be the weakest link in the chain in terms of security, so the number of mobile phone ATO incidents rose by 180% from 2017 to 2018.

New AI-powered platforms have been created such as the DataVisor Global Intelligence Network (GIN) to prevent these cyber threats, ranging from social engineering, password spraying, and credential stuffing, to plain phone hijacking.

This platform is able to collect and aggregate enormous amounts of data including IP addresses, geographic locations, email domains, mobile device types, operating systems, browser agents, phone prefixes, and more collected from a global database of over 4 billion users.

Once digested, this massive dataset is analyzed to detect any suspicious activity, and then prevent or remediate account takeovers.

4. Next-gen Due Diligence Process

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) due diligence is a cumbersome and intensive process, requiring a huge workload, enormous volumes of paper documents, and large physical rooms to store the data. Today the scope of due diligence is now even broader, encompassing IT, HR, intellectual property, tax information, regulatory issues, and much more.

AI and ML are revolutionizing it to overcome all these difficulties.

Merrill has recently implemented these smart technologies in its due diligence platform DatasiteOne to redact documents and halve the time required for this task. Data rooms have been virtualized, paper documents have been substituted with digital content libraries, and advanced analytics is saving dealmakers’ precious time by streamlining the whole process.

5. Fighting Against Money Laundering

Detecting previously unknown money laundering and terrorist financing schemes is one of the biggest challenges faced by banks across the world. The most sophisticated financial crime patterns are stealthy enough to get over the rigid conventional rules-based systems employed by many financial institutions.

The lack of public datasets that are large enough to make reliable predictions makes fighting against money laundering even more complicated, and the number of false positive results is unacceptably high.

Artificial neural networks (ANN) and ML algorithms consistently outperform any traditional statistic method in detecting suspicious events. The company ThetaRay used advanced unsupervised ML algorithms in tandem with big data analytics to analyze multiple data sources, such as current customer behavior vs. historical behavior.

Eventually, their technology was able to detect the most sophisticated money laundering and terrorist financing pattern, which included transfers from tax-havens countries, abnormal cash deposits in high risk countries, and multiple accounts controlled by common beneficiaries used to hide cash transfers.

6. Data-Driven Client Acquisition

Just like in any other sector where several players fight to sell their services to the same customer base, competition exists even among banks. Efficient marketing campaigns are vital to acquire new clients, and AI-powered tools may assist through behavioral intelligence to acquire new clients.

Continuously learning AI can digest new scientific research, news, and global information to ascertain public sentiment and understand drivers of churn and customer acquisition.

Companies such as SparkBeyond can classify customer wallets into micro-segments to establish finely-tuned marketing campaigns and provide AI-driven insights on the next best offers.

Others such as LelexPrime make full use of behavioral science technology to decode the fundamental laws that govern human behaviors. Then, the AI provide the advice required to make sure that a bank’s products, marketing and communications align best with their consumer base’s needs.

7. Computer Vision and Bank Surveillance

According to the FBI, in the United States Federal Reserve system banks alone are targeted by nearly 3,000 robberies every year. Computer vision-based applications can be used to enhance the security and surveillance systems implemented in all those places and vehicles where a lot of money is stashed (banks, credit unions, armored carriers, etc.).

One example is Chooch AI, which used to monitor sites, entries, exists, actions of people, and vehicles. Visual AI is better than human eye to capture small details such as license plates and is able to recognize human faces, intruders and animal entering the site.

It can even raise a red flag whenever unidentified people or vehicles are present for a suspicious time within a certain space.

8. Easing the Account Reconciliation Process

Account reconciliation is a major pain point in the financial close process. Virtually every business must face some level of account reconciliation challenge since it’s an overly tedious and complex process that must be handled via manual or Excel based processes.

Because of this, errors are way too common even when this problem is dealt with rule-based approaches. In fact, other than being extremely expensive to set up due to complicated system integration and coding, they tend to break when the data changes or new use cases are introduced and need on-going maintenance.

SigmaIQ developed its own reconciliation engine built on machine learning. The system is able to understand data at a much higher level, allowing for a greater degree of confidence in matching, and is able to learn from feedback.

As humans “teach” the system what is a match and what is not, the AI will learn and improve its performance over time, eliminating the need to pre-process data, add classifications, or update the system when data changes.

9. Automated Bookkeeping Systems

Small business owners are often distracted by the drudgery of the back-office — an endless series of chores which take away a lot of valuable business time. AI-powered automated bookkeeping solutions such as the ones created by ScaleFactor or Botkeeper are able to assist SMB owners in back-office tasks, from accounting to managing payrolls.

Using a combination of ML and custom rules, processes, and calculations, the system can combine various data sources to identify transaction patterns and categorize expenses automatically. JP Morgan Chase is also employing its own Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automate all kind of repetitive tasks such as extracting data, capturing documents, comply with regulations, and speed up the cash management process.

10. Algorithmic Trading

Although the first “Automated Trading Systems” (ATSs) trace their history back to the 1970’s, algorithmic trading has now reached new heights thanks to the evolution of the newer AI systems.

In fact, other than just implementing a set of fixed rules to trade on the global markets, modern ATSs can learn data structure via machine learning and deep learning, and calibrate their future decisions accordingly.

Their predicting power is becoming more accurate each day, with most hedge funds and financial institutions such as Numerai and JP Morgan keeping their proprietary systems undisclosed for obvious reasons.

ATSs are used in high-frequency trading (HFT), a subset of algorithmic trading that generates millions of trades in a day. Sentient Technologies’ ATS, for example, is able to reduce 1,800 days of trading to just a few minutes. Other than for their speed, they are appreciated for their ability to perform trades at the best prices possible, and near-zero risk of committing the errors made by humans under psychological pressure.

Their presence on the global markets is pervasive to say the least. It has been estimated that nowadays, computers generate 50-70% of equity market trades, 60% of futures trades and 50% of Treasuries. Automated trading is also starting to move beyond HFT arbitrage and into more complex strategic investment methodologies.

For example, adaptive trading is used for rapid financial market analysis and reaction since machines can quickly elaborate financial data, establish a trading strategy and act upon the analysis in real-time.

11. Predictive Intelligence Analytics and the Future of Forecasting

Accurate cash forecasting are particularly important for treasury professionals to properly fund their distribution accounts, make timely decisions for borrowing or investing, maintain target balances, and satisfy all regulatory requirements. However, a 100% accurate forecasting is a mirage when data from internal ERPs is so complicate to standardize, centralize, and digitize — let alone extract some meaningful insight from it. It’s clearly a financial forecasting challenge.

Even the most skilled human professional can’t forecast outside factors and can hardly take into consideration the myriad of variables required for a perfect correlation and regression analysis.

Predictive intelligence analytics applies ML, data mining and modeling to historical and real-time quantitative techniques to predict future events and enhance cash forecast. AI is able to pick hidden patterns that humans can’t recognize, such as repetitions in the attributes of the payments that consist of just random sequences of numbers and letters.

The most advanced programs such as the ones employed by Actualize Consulting will use business trends to pull valuable insights, optimize business models, and forecast a company’s activity.

Others such as the one deployed by Complete Intelligence reduce error rate to less than 5-10% from 20–30%.

12. Detecting Signs of Discrimination and Harassment

Strongman and sexist power dynamics still exist in financial services, especially since it’s an industry dominated prevalently by males. While awareness has increased, 40% of people who filed discrimination complaints with the EEOC reported that they were retaliated against, meaning that the vast majority of those who are victimized are simply too scared to blow the whistle.

AI can provide a solution by understanding subtle patterns of condescending language, or other signals that suggest harassment, victimization, and intimidation within the communication flows of an organization.

Receptiviti is a new platform that can be integrated with a company’s email and messaging systems to analyze language that may contain traces of toxic behaviors. Algorithms have been instructed with decades of research into language and psychology that analyze how humans subconsciously leak information about their cognitive states, levels of stress, fatigue, and burnout.

A fully automated system, no human will ever read the data to preserve full anonymity and privacy.

Final Thoughts

In the financial sector, AI can serve a multitude of different purposes, including all those use cases we already mentioned in our paper about the insurance industry. AI and ML are incredibly helpful to ease many cumbersome operations, improve customer experience, and even help employees understand what a customer will most-likely be calling about prior to ever picking up the phone.

These technologies can either substitute many human professionals by automating the most menial and repetitive tasks, or assist them with forecasts and market predictions.

In any case, they are already spearheading innovation in this vertical with the trailblazing changes they keep bringing every day.

Written by Claudio Buttice

Dr. Claudio Butticè, Pharm.D., is a former clinical and hospital pharmacist who worked for several public hospitals in Italy, as well as for the humanitarian NGO Emergency. He is now an accomplished book author who has written on topics such as medicine, technology, world poverty, and science. His latest book is “Universal Health Care” (Greenwood Publishing, 2019).

A data analyst and freelance journalist as well, many of his articles have been published in magazines such as Cracked, The Elephant, Digital Journal, The Ring of Fire, and Business Insider. Dr. Butticè also published pharmacology and psychology papers on several clinical journals, and works as a medical consultant and advisor for many companies across the globe.

Full Bio

This article first appeared on Techopedia at https://www.techopedia.com/top-12-ai-use-cases-artificial-intelligence-in-fintech/2/34048

This article is originally published at https://houston.innovationmap.com/houston-based-complete-intelligence-changing-the-business-forecasting-game-2643180609.html

The business applications of artificial intelligence are boundless. Tony Nash realized AI’s potential in an underserved niche.

His startup, Complete Intelligence, uses AI to help on how to make better business decisions, which looks at the data and behavior of costs and prices within a global ecosystem in a global environment to help top-tier companies make better business decisions.

“The problem that were solving is companies don’t predict their costs and revenues very well,” says Nash, the CEO and founder of Complete Intelligence. “There are really high error rates in company costs and revenue forecasts and so what we’ve done is built a globally integrated artificial intelligence platform that can help people predict their costs and their revenues with a very low error rate.”

Founded in 2015, Complete Intelligence is an AI platform that forecasts assets and allows evaluation of currencies, commodities, equity indices and economics. The Woodlands-based company also does advanced procurement and revenue for corporate clients.

“We’ve spent a couple years building this,” says Nash. “We have a platform that is helping clients with planning, finance, procurement and sales and a host of other things. We are forecasting equity markets; we are forecasting commodity prices, currencies, economics and trades. We built a model of the global economy and transactions across the global economy, so it’s a very large, very detailed artificial intelligence platform.”

That platform, CI Futures, has streamlined comprehensive price forecasting and data analysis, allowing for sound, data-based decisions.

“Our products are pretty simple,” says Nash. “We have our basic off the shelf forecasting application which is called CI Markets, which is currencies, commodities, equities and economics and trade. Its basic raw data forecasts. We distribute that raw data on our website and other data distribution websites. We also have a product called Cost Flow, which is our procurement forecasting engine, where we build a material level forecasting for clients.

“Then we have a product that we’ll launch next year called Revenue Flow, which is a sales forecasting tool that will use balance of both client data and publicly available data to forecast client sales by product, by geography and so on and so forth. So we really only do three things: revenues, costs and raw data forecasts.”

Forecasting across industries

Complete Intelligence’s Cost Flow and Revenue Flow products are specific to direct clients. They are working with clients in the food and beverage sector, the energy sector, the chemical sector, and the technology sector.

“Anybody that manufactures a tangible good, should use our product,” says Nash. “Because we can take their historical data we can configure their bills of material and they can see the exact cost and exact revenue of those products by month over time.”

CI is not a consulting firm, so they offer their clients an annual license, which allows them to receive updated forecasts every month to understand how markets will iterate over time.

“We’re integrating with the client’s enterprise data,” says Nash. “Whether it’s their ERP system or their procurement system or their CRM, we’re integrating with client’s enterprise data, and we’re creating forecast outlooks that are perfectly contextually relevant for client buying decisions.”

Called out by Capital Factory

As a business solution, CI has garnered widespread industry confidence and accolades, such as Capital Factory’s coveted “Newcomer of the Year” award, which recognizes innovative companies from a pool of 110 startups in Texas.

“Honestly, I couldn’t believe it because with a startup like ours, there’s so much hard work that goes into it, there’s so much time, there’s so much persistence,” says Nash.

“And the types of startups that Capital Factory attracts are very competitive startups, so for us to receive this award, it’s given us a huge amount of credibility in the market and it’s really encouraged the team inside the company to understand that what we’re doing is being recognized, it’s meaningful and we’re really going places.”

From consulting to billions of monthly calculations

Nash is no stranger to going places. Before setting up shop in his native Texas, he lived in Singapore for 15 years where he started his career in sourcing and procurement for American retail firms.

“I became very sensitive to costs, cost inflections and I got very involved in global sourcing and international trade and then I did a couple of corporate turnarounds and start ups and so with that you see costs as an issue with those types of firms,” Nash says.

He then worked with The Economist running their global research business. There, he grew familiar with how clients and customers use data. At IHS Markit, a global information provider.

“When I was working with those firms, those firms helped companies with planning,” says Nash. “The problem is that those firms have very large errors in their forecasts. It is not just the internal forecasts that have a 30 percent or higher error rate in their forecasts, even the industry forecasters typically have around a 20 percent error rates in their forecasts.

“Even the people who should actually know where prices are going are not very good forecasters. With Complete Intelligence, we wanted to use data and use artificial intelligence to machine learning to create a better way to identify where costs and revenues will go for companies.”

Every month, CI runs billions of calculations. They test their error rates and record them for clients that request them. With 700 assets that they show publicly, CI their average error rate is 3.7 percent, which is dramatically lower than both corporate procurement professionals and industry experts.

“With us doing billions of calculations, it allows us to run simulations and scenarios that your average analyst just can’t do and most companies haven’t even thought of. We’re able to run a comprehensive view of activities in the world to understand how things directly and indirectly affect a cost. In Houston, for example, that could be crude oil or natural gas or something like that.”

Proving its value

Last year, the company tested its platform with a natural gas trader. After reviewing the data, CI revealed to the client that natural gas would fall by 40 percent over the next year.

“They looked at our forecast and said they couldn’t work with us because it didn’t make sense,” says Nash. “A 40 percent fall didn’t make sense, so they didn’t subscribe to us. That was 2018. What has happened over the past 12 months? Natural gas prices had fallen by 49 percent. You would look at our forecasts and say, ‘Wow, that’s a dramatic drop over 12 months.’ But reality was even more dramatic than that and there weren’t analysts out there saying what our model was telling us.”

That natural gas trading company never admitted its faux pas, but if they had listened to CI, they could have positioned themselves to negotiate their vendors down for their cost base, which helps the margin of their business.

“Nobody ever admits mistakes,” says Nash. “But when you think about the numerous materials that require natural gas, especially things that are manufactured in Houston, it affects a lot of costs.”

Houston roots — by way of Asia

The missed opportunity with the natural gas trader notwithstanding, Nash is happy that he brought Complete Intelligence to Houston.

“I went to Texas A&M and grew up in Texas, so I moved back to Texas knowing how good Americans are with planning, with math and with data. I like Houston because people make stuff in Houston,” Nash says. “We just found Houston to be perfect after spending 15 years in Asia given the global centrality of Houston. The industry’s here and there’s a lot of diversity in Houston.”

Nash’s expectation was that he would be able to work with Western multinationals to improve their analytics and their artificial intelligence processes because he has learned that there is a lot of pressure in American financial markets and analysts communities to really know what is happening within companies.

“We want companies to be able to really tightly plan their costs so they can better improve their profitability,” says Nash. “That’s what I wanted to do when we moved to the U.S. and we’re finding that there’s a lot of interest from companies.”