How Enalytix delivers AI-powered video analytics and business intelligence solutions reveals by Neerja Kumar, Chief Operating Officer and Cofounder
CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Ms. Neerja Kumar, Chief Operating Officer, and Cofounder, Enalytix
- Please provide us a brief overview of the business, its area of expertise, and the services it provides.
Neerja Kumar: Enalytix is an AI-based analytics company that offers tools and apps leveraging AI, computer vision and machine learning to help companies build productive workforces and create better employee and customer experiences.
Enalytix product line includes –
(1) AI-based EX Mobile App for Productivity & Time Tracking
(2) AI-based Video analytics software for Retail and Market Research
Enalytix’s mission is to build AI-powered businesses and workplaces.
2. What goals and objectives guided the establishment of the company? Briefly describe your experiences since the company’s founding?
Neerja Kumar: At Enalytix, we started with a belief that to build a business, you need to build a workforce. Over 60% organisations believe that smart technology solutions are critical to manage staff scheduling, tasks, and correct pay-outs. Enalytix offers companies a great opportunity to build both EX and RX in a simple, cost-effective, and quick manner.
As they say, one learns more from failures than successes; we had our share of failure during the pandemic. We were focusing on AI based video analytics for brick-and-mortar retail stores using CCTV cameras and computer vision, which helped organisations provide better customer experiences and bring efficiencies in their operations.
However, as the pandemic hit, retail businesses shut down. At the same time, we moved to 100% remote working, and needed higher visibility into how effectively our employees were working. Being a small set-up, we did not have an elaborate ERP and were looking for ways to effectively assign tasks and monitor quality of work, especially for our field team. We decided to leverage our existing technology platform and implement a mobile based AI system, which could be easily used by all employees and helped us streamline operations. And this sparked an idea to turn it into a product for all organisations in the market.
3. Please offer your thoughts on the AI industry’s present and future.
Neerja Kumar: Artificial Intelligence has entered our lives in a big way, and it’s for the good! We experience some form of AI every day in every aspect of our lives – right from our morning journey to office using google map navigation, listening to auto-curated playlists on Spotify, unlocking our phones with Face ID, voice based searches, and much more!
In the business context, AI is a key enabling technology that is disrupting every process across every industry. Whether you are looking to build an efficient workforce, improve your products, enhance customer service or optimize your operational costs, technologies like ML and deep learning permeate every realm of a successful business. One of the key reasons that AI has taken the world by storm is that it makes it easier to deal with complex data that a human being cannot handle, leading to numerous value creation possibilities and impactful solutions to varied business problems. Imagine tons of data generated by CCTV cameras at retail outlets or public places that can be harnessed to generate insights and enable smart decision making around operations, safety, compliances or customer engagement opportunities. Further, AI is contributing in a big way to create an augmented and engaging workforce focusing on value-added tasks, while machines do the routine, repetitive tasks.
The pandemic has been a key accelerator in digital transformation journeys of organisations. Today, with the proliferation of AI companies, aggregators and AIaaS players, AI is no longer limited to large enterprises but has become more democratised. It has become relatively easy to deploy and adopt AI-based systems and tools. Easy access to prebuilt algorithms and open-source machine-learning libraries has made it easier to automate repetitive tasks, gain newer insights, prevent leakages, predict behaviours and enhance productivity.
In the next few years, AI is poised to have a significant impact on sustainability, climate change and environmental issues. We have already started seeing work towards smart cities, cars, smart devices, advanced healthcare systems, and there is no doubt that AI will continue to take the spotlight for the foreseeable future.
4. What are some of the current issues facing the sector?
Neerja Kumar:AI is transformative but comes with its own set of challenges.
The foremost challenge is accuracy, and the biggest question is if your systems are accurate enough to remove manual interventions. It’s very easy to reach 80% accuracy but progressing to human-level accuracy of 99% is quite a task. This is the reason that a scalable AI strategy is not to replace humans with machines completely but augment human capabilities.
Another key challenge is data privacy and security. AI algorithms and models rely on tons of data used to train them. This could be data generated by millions of users around the globe, which puts data privacy and security at stake. Companies are working towards addressing these concerns by deploying AI methodologies that send only trained models to the servers.
5. What future market-related plans do you have?
Neerja Kumar: Our Enalytix App is currently being used by companies across retail, manufacturing, real-estate, and consulting verticals. Every entity which has a workforce, be it 5 or 1000+ employees, needs to have an effective Employee Experience and Productivity platform, which is user-friendly, smart, transparent and holistic.
Our plan is to target organisations of all sizes across all verticals to scale our App. Our services can be subscribed online, which works extremely well for small companies with less than 100 employees. For mid-size and large companies, we plan to build channel partnerships and direct sales capabilities.
6. What expansion ambitions do you have for the upcoming year?
Neerja Kumar: Being a product, we need to constantly stay in touch with the market and keep evolving our product. Product market fitment is a continuous journey of maturing the product with an intent to solve a real business problem. We intend to add modules like employee recognition, AI based productivity scorecard, and AI based self-paced training to make Enalytix App a smart AI tool for every employee. These new modules will be part of our quarterly release plans.
