When discussing gender equality, the wage gap between men and women nearly always becomes a part of the conversation. While most people know this gap exists, not as many realize the far-reaching and detrimental impacts of that inequality.

Why Does This Gap Exist?

Before diving into the consequences of wage inequality, it’s important to look at some of the reasons the gap exists. It’s a complicated issue involving many interconnected factors, but some of the most prominent reasons include:

• Occupational segregation, wherein more men work in higher-paid industries
• Vertical segregation, with more men in senior (and, therefore, higher-paid) positions
• Nonexistent, poorly enforced, or ineffective legislation related to equal pay
• Barriers to entering the labor market, including outright discrimination, access to education, and work-hindering issues related to child-rearing

Real-World Consequences of the Gender Wage Gap

Closing the wage gap would, of course, be positive because it would be a step toward overall gender equality. However, there would be myriad other positive effects that should motivate people and businesses to make this issue a priority.

For example, gender wage inequality reduces overall economic output. While it’s certainly not the case for every woman, the wage disparity does make it more likely for females to be dependent on welfare or other social aid programs—a problem that becomes even more pronounced in old age. With less savings and fewer pensions, women are generally at a disadvantage in regard to retirement and more likely to face poverty after the age of 65. One study by the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services, and Indigenous Affairs in Australia found that eliminating the 17 percent wage gap there would translate to approximately $93 billion in increased gross domestic product (GDP), or 8.5 percent of overall GDP.

Aptitude Research Partners also found that organizations that specifically prioritize gender equity perform better. They are 54 percent more likely to exceed industry average turnover numbers and 46 percent more likely to have higher year-over-year ratings on Glassdoor. With better retention rates and more engaged and motivated employees, companies are more likely to attract top talent, which then generally leads to improved customer satisfaction and higher-than-average financial returns.

In short, closing the wage gap would improve individual employee satisfaction and quality of life, improve a company’s bottom line, and positively impact an entire nation’s GDP and economic standing.

The March Toward Equality

According to the World Economic Forum, if progress continues at its current pace, it will take 108 years to close the global pay gap in the 106 countries covered in that report. This pace is a result of the slowness of global action on the topic and the sheer vastness of the gap itself.

While these numbers can seem disheartening, many individuals and companies are using them as motivation. Lauren Hasson founded DevelopHer, which is based in Dallas, Texas, United States. DevelopHer is an award-winning platform that bridges the gender wage gap, inspires, and empowers women to advocate for themselves to break glass ceilings.

The scalability and affordability offered through DevelopHer programs has allowed and empowered thousands of women to earn 26%, 43%, and 67% salary increases in just a single negotiation. Through DevelopHer, Lauren has created real change at a grassroots level. Women have also gained the confidence to secure better positions and move beyond glass ceilings, bridging the challenging opportunity gap.

Hasson just won the Gold Stevie Award for Entrepreneur of the Year - Consumer Services in The 2020 American Business Awards® as well as a Silver Stevie® Award in the category of Female Solo Entrepreneur of the Year, and Startup of the Year - Consumer Services Industries in the 2019 Stevie® Awards for Women in Business.

Interested in entering the Stevie Award for Women in Business?

Hasson acknowledges not only the complexity of this global issue but the need to focus on local solutions.

“Pay disparity is an intractable issue that will not be solved overnight,” says Hasson, “but the DevelopHer mission is to foster engagement by businesses and individuals at a grassroots level to affect true change.”

The Stevie® Awards, organizers of the world’s premier business awards programs, today announced the Gold, Silver and Bronze Stevie winners in The 18th Annual American Business Awards®.

All organizations operating in the U.S.A. – large and small, public and private, for-profit and non-profit - are eligible to submit nominations to the ABAs in a wide range of categories, honoring achievement in every aspect of work life, from customer service and management to public relations and product development. More than 3,600 nominations were reviewed in the judging process this year by 230 professionals worldwide, whose average scores determined the winners.

Winners of three or more Gold Stevie Awards include:

Cisco Systems (San Jose, CA), CitizenNet & Magnitude Digital (New York, NY), Comcast Business (Philadelphia, PA), Crocs (Niwot, CO), Fazoli's Italian Restaurants (Lexington, KY), George P Johnson Experiential Marketing (Auburn Hills, MI), Harman International (Stamford, CT), Hearts & Science (New York, NY), Hilton Grand Vacations (Orlando, FL), Humana (Louisville, KY), Jeunesse Global (Orlando, FL), John Hancock (Boston, MA), London Computer System (Cincinnati, OH), Mastercard (Purchase, NY), National Association of REALTORS® (Chicago, IL), Newberry Tanks and Equipment (West Memphis, AR), Nexxt Gen Corporation (Irving, TX), POWERHOME (Mooresville, NC), Red Hat (Raleigh, NC),  State Farm (Bloomington, IL), Toft Group (San Francisco, CA), and United Imaging (Houston, TX).

Among other winners, organizations with five or more Gold, Silver, or Bronze Stevie wins include:

Bank of America (Charlotte, NC), BMO Financial Group (Chicago, IL), Curion (Deerfield, IL), Fannie Mae (Washington, DC), LifeVantage (Sandy UT), Medical Marijuana, Inc. (San Diego, CA), Merkle (Columbia, MD), Metro Development Group (Tampa, FL), MONAT Global (Miami, FL), Pareto Intelligence (Chicago, IL), Passageways (Lafayette, IN), SoftPro (Raleigh, NC), TBI (Chicago, IL), Tek Leaders Inc (Plano, TX), Tinuiti (New York, NY), United Imaging (Houston, TX), and Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S. (New York, NY).

For a complete list of the Stevie Award winners announced today, visit www.StevieAwards.com/ABA.

2020 Stevie winners will be celebrated and presented their awards during a virtual awards ceremony on Wednesday, August 5 at 2pm ET. Details of the event are available on the website.

The categories that recognize outstanding new products and services introduced in the USA are among the most heavily subscribed in the ABAs, and every new product or service nominated in The 2020 American Business Awards is included in voting for the People's Choice Stevie Awards for Favorite New Products, a worldwide public vote. Voting opened today at http://peopleschoice.stevieawards.com and will conclude on July 15. People’s Choice Stevie winners will be announced the week of July 20 and will be honored during the August 5 virtual presentations.

“Despite the toughest business conditions in memory, American organizations continue to demonstrate their commitment to innovation, creativity, and bottom-line results,” said Stevie Awards President Maggie Gallagher.  “This year’s Stevie-winning nominations are full of inspiring stories of persistence, ingenuity, resourcefulness, and compassion.  We celebrate all of their stories and look forward to showcasing them during our virtual awards ceremony on August 5.”

Top HR Awards Program Adds Several Free COVID-19 Response Categories

The Stevie® Awards, organizer of the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, is accepting entries in the fifth annual competition through the entry deadline of Wednesday, June 3.

The Stevie Awards for Great Employers honors the world’s best companies to work for and the HR teams and professionals, HR achievements, new products and services and suppliers that help to create and drive great workplaces.

For those who miss the June 3 entry deadline, late entries will be accepted through July 22 with payment of a late fee.

All individuals and organizations worldwide—public and private, for-profit and non-profit, large and small—may submit nominations to the Stevie Awards for Great Employers. The 2020 awards will honor achievements since the beginning of 2019. Entry details are available at www.StevieAwards.com/HR.

The Stevie Awards for Great Employers recognize achievement in many facets of the workplace. Category groups include:

• Employer of the Year
• HR Achievement
• HR Individual
• Solution Provider
• HR Team
• Solutions, Implementations, and Training Programs or Media
• COVID-19 Response

Stevie Award winners in the 31 Employer of the Year categories will be determined by a unique blending of the ratings of professionals and the votes of the general public. Public voting will be open July 23 through August 31.

Several COVID-19 Response categories were recently added to the competition to recognize the positive ways that employers and HR professionals have responded to the pandemic. These categories have no entry fee.

An international judging panel of more than 70 executives will determine the Stevie Award winners. Finalists will be announced on August 13. Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Award winners will be revealed and presented their awards at a gala event in Las Vegas on September 17, or in a virtual ceremony if the awards dinner cannot be staged.

Interested in entering The 2020 Stevie Awards for Great Employers? 

Using AI in a variety of ways, Stevie-winner ThatWare LLP is optimizing digital marketing and improving customer experience.

Digital marketing is part of today’s landscape, and it's getting smarter by the minute. Smart devices abound. Consumers can ask chatbots all their questions, and artificial intelligence (AI) seems to permeate every corner of people’s lives. AI allows machines to learn from input over time and adjust their output accordingly, and that’s why it’s so valuable to businesses. By understanding consumers’ preferences and delivering personalized content, AI provides an improved customer experience, which is invaluable in digital marketing efforts.

With its ever-advancing tactics to cut out the human middleman when identifying marketing trends, AI is changing the digital landscape. Brands can leverage AI to automate their digital marketing and to save both time and money. The substantial advantages of AI technology are providing brands with the edge that gets them noticed in a competitive space.

Understanding Your Audience

AI can work to analyze data and to build a comprehensive picture of your target customers’ preferences. Once you have defined your customer personas, you can use AI to map their buying behaviors and to track their eventual purchasing decisions. As a marketer, you can use this intelligence to put products in front of your audience that they need, which makes purchasing decisions easy for them. A marketing strategy can evolve quickly and effectively with AI-driven analytics. 

Tuhin Banik, the founder of digital marketing company ThatWare LLP, aims to “positively disrupt the system” and to improve customer experience by using AI in a range of ways, including semantic engineering, natural language processing (NLP), and predictive analysis.

Productivity

The use of smart technology can help increase your productivity by allowing you to automate processes. You can outsource repetitive, time-consuming tasks and instead concentrate on strategizing and creating effective content. AI enables you to optimize the way you interact with your audience, and as AI continues to improve, the way your brand attracts new customers and keeps existing customers engaged to increase sales will continuously transform. 

Optimized Advertising

Your product or service has to reach the right audience to be successful, and with the increasing intelligence of AI, it’s simpler than ever to pinpoint your ideal customer. You can use AI to collect user information, to analyze that data, and then to predict what the customer will do or need in the future. This means digital marketers can target ads to match user data. 

You can be creative with AI too. For example, Topshop, a British high-street clothing brand, created an immersive AI experience in Moscow, Russia. Customers could download a catalog app and then use the in-store smart screens to virtually try on outfits. This innovation not only created buzz around a product, but it also allowed the brand to gather data that fed back into their AI marketing systems. Using that data, they could create even more focused campaigns in the future.

Customer Experience

AI technology allows brands to deliver an enhanced customer experience and to make their digital marketing strategies even more successful. You can use AI to track customer preferences and buying behaviors and then leverage these insights to make further suggestions. 

Digital marketing specialists are focusing on using developing technologies to advance their field in the future. In recognition of this commitment to driving faster results in digital marketing using AI, THATWARE LLP, of West Bengal, India, was presented with a Bronze Stevie® Award in the Startup of the Year - Business Services Industries category at The 2019 International Business Awards®.

Interested in entering The International Business Awards?

Summary: As technology races forward, there’s greater and greater uncertainty about what the future job market is going to look like, which is precisely why educational technology company MAD-learn seeks to turn students from consumers of tech into creators of it. In this piece, we explore how they go about this mission and why the Stevie® Awards honored their efforts with a Gold distinction.

In today’s landscape, technological discoveries and creations are increasing exponentially. With this rapid rate of change and development, it’s nearly impossible to anticipate what the job market is going to look like in even ten to twenty years, and it’s that very uncertainty that contributed to the creation of MAD-learn.

What Is MAD-learn?

MAD-learn, which is based out of Atlanta, Georgia, United States, is an educational technology company that runs a mobile app creation program for students. (MAD stands for “mobile app development.”) The curriculum focuses on bringing the concepts and tools of app development to students ranging from kindergartners to twelfth-graders. The program enables students to build their very own mobile apps. The web-based tool empowers all teachers—not just teachers of technology—to engage students in app development.

Alefiya Master is the founder and CEO of MAD-learn. Her educational background and professional experience motivated her to start the company.

“Alefiya has a degree in education and psychology from Emory University, and she’s gone through training and had experience as a Montessori teacher,” says Doreen Frempong-Baah, the project manager at MAD-learn. “She’s a teacher-turned-entrepreneur, and her background truly powers her passion for wide-scale educational improvement.”

What started as a small company has since grown into a program that serves over twenty thousand students across thirty states and five countries. Using just one metric of success, the company doubled its revenue in 2019 and is on track to do the same in 2020.

Technology Creation, Not Just Consumption

One of the driving principles of MAD-learn is the desire to empower today’s children to gain the skill sets necessary to solve tomorrow’s unknown problems.

“By employing our design-thinking program, we can engender twenty-first-century technology literacy, as well as teach students vital and transferable skills that will enable them to gain experience with problem identification and solution,” says Frempong-Baah. “By using the design-thinking process, we’re preparing today’s students for tomorrow’s careers. Ultimately, we aim to inspire students to become creators of technology and not just consumers of it.”

Because of the rapid rate of technological change, and the uncertainty it brings, the curriculum of MAD-learn leans heavily on the process of learning how to solve problems.

“When we don't know what jobs are going to be available ten years from now, we have to teach kids how to create,” says Frempong-Baah. “It’s important to have all kids learn to think and to create for themselves.”

Teaching children how to tackle future problems isn’t just about ensuring a spot in the workforce. It’s about learning how to harness available technology to solve global-scale problems. It is this sentiment that spurred the launch of MAD About Mattering, another initiative of MAD-learn.

“We believe strongly in global collaboration, and that’s why we created MAD About Mattering. It enables students around the world to connect and collaborate virtually to create apps that solve social problems,” says Frempong-Baah. “We’re extremely excited about the opportunity for more kids around the planet to create world-changing apps that will solve social problems and improve lives.”

Impact of Winning a Stevie® Award

MAD-learn was honored with a Gold Stevie® Award in the category of Best New Product or Service of the Year - Consumer Products at the 2019 Stevie® Awards for Women in Business. For MAD-learn, this honor has had both internal company-wide effects, as well as a sweeping positive external impact.

“Winning this award has been such an exciting time for the organization as a whole. It’s truly motivation to keep working harder,” says Frempong-Baah. “Through the exposure of the award, we have also gained more global recognition, which has increased our social media following and our overall brand recognition. Both help us keep doing our important work.”

Interested in nominating your business in the 2020 Stevie Awards for Women in Business? 

Deadlines Extended to Provide More Time to Submit Nominations Amid COVID-19 Slowdown

The Stevie® Awards, organizers of The International Business Awards®, announced today that the remaining schedule for the 2020 (17^th annual) edition of the awards has been revised because of the  COVID-19 pandemic.

The International Business Awards are widely considered to be the world's premier business awards competition.  In 2019 the competition attracted more than 4,000 nominations from organizations in more than 70 nations.

“We assessed that it’s necessary to push the entry deadlines out a bit to provide more time to prepare and submit nominations to organizations that are effected by the pandemic,” said Stevie Awards president Maggie Gallagher.

REVIEW THE ENTRY KIT HERE

Changes to the 2020 IBA calendar are as follows:

• The entry deadline, originally scheduled for 13 May, is rescheduled to 24 June
• The late entry deadline, through which nominations are accepted with payment of a late fee, is pushed to 28 July from 17 June
• Judging by the juries of more than 250 professionals around the world now will begin in late June and continue through 31 August
• The announcement of the Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Award winners, originally slated for 11 August, will now be made on 9 September.

The 17^th IBA awards gala, at which the Stevie winners will be celebrated, is still scheduled to be held in Paris, France on 24 October.

The 2020 IBAs will recognize achievements since the beginning of 2019 of organizations, teams, and individuals in a wide variety of categories.  Entry details are available at www.StevieAwards.com/IBA.

Gallagher emphasized that the IBAs feature more than 40 categories that don’t require the payment of entry fees, including all 35 of the Company/Organization of the Year categories, and that there are many new and revised features of the IBAs for 2020, including:

• Nine new categories to recognize singular business achievements in areas such as business turnaround, finance, revenue generation, and science and technology, among others.
• The simplification of submission requirements in the Company/Organization, Corporate Communications & Public Relations, Marketing, and New Product & Product Management category groups.

Stevie-winner KÖNIGSKLASSE#1 is a video production team that travels to their clients' locations to produce corporate videos in order to make business leaders more comfortable and confident in front of the camera.

Video marketing is a vital tool in your brand promotion toolbox, and it’s becoming more essential to ROI every day. In 2019, it is no longer sustainable to avoid video content because you’re scared of the medium or you don’t think you have the resources to create something watchable. Success means hopping on board and understanding why video is one of the most profitable and versatile digital marketing tools around.

Videos Increase Conversions

According to Forrester’s research into digital marketing, if you add a product video to your landing page, it is possible to double your conversion rate. Similarly, if you embed an informational video about your service, you are more likely to see sales of that service. 

Hiring a great video production team is an investment worth making, as they can help you create an engaging video that showcases your company. Although it is possible to create a corporate video with online tools, poorly produced content can turn off customers. To ensure your video is giving you the best possible return on investment, focus on top-quality content presented in a slick way.

Know, Like, and Trust

Many businesspeople use the “know, like, and trust” mantra, but building trust truly helps your audience engage with your company. If you’re using video to provide potential customers with useful, interesting information, you are creating a valuable relationship. Whether you’re using your video content on your company website or getting it in front of your audience via your social media channels, you need to concentrate on trust, not just traffic. 

As Martin Grosse of KÖNIGSKLASSE#1 notes, “the corporate video market will shift within the process of digital transformation … to revolutionize the thinking of how a corporate video should look and how it should be consumed.”

Stevie-winner KÖNIGSKLASSE#1, which is located in Munich, Germany, makes a point of traveling to a company’s location in order to make business-to-business (B2B) corporate videos. This allows the C-suite of the business to be comfortable in front of the camera, which lets them shine.

Engagement with Content

LinkedIn is the social media channel of choice for engaging CEOs and decision-makers. Video is an integral part of getting in front of your audience and capturing their attention, and video plays automatically in your LinkedIn feed, which also helps to increase engagement. Additionally, LinkedIn is the perfect platform to showcase your company’s authenticity, allowing your C-suite to demonstrate the human side of the business. 

One pitfall of video content marketing is that B2B corporate videos can look very similar. That’s why you need to present your content in a way that keeps people watching. In addition to showing your brand’s accessibility, keep in mind how your audience is likely to be viewing your video. According to Insivia, mobile views are on the rise as more and more people check their social media platforms on the go. Google reveals that people who use smartphones are 1.4 times more likely to feel a sense of personal connection to video content they watch on a mobile device.

The key to a successful video marketing campaign is creating entertaining content that people are likely to share. To do this, it’s important to demonstrate value to your audience and keep them engaged in your message. 

In recognition of its innovative approach to video marketing commitment, KÖNIGSKLASSE#1 earned a Silver Stevie® Award in the Company of the Year - Advertising, Marketing, & Public Relations - Small category at The 2019 International Business Awards®.

Interested in entering The International Business Awards?

The Stevie® Awards, organizer of The American Business Awards®, announced today that the final entry deadline for the 18^th annual ABA competition has been further extended to May 5. The organizers said it is apparent that the original final deadline extension to April 14 will not be enough time for American organizations impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic to submit their nominations of achievement.

No additional late fees will be charged, and nominations submitted through May 5 will not be penalized in any way in the judging process. Organizers still hope to be able to stage the 18^th ABA awards banquet at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City on Friday, June 12.

The American Business Awards are widely considered to be the premier business awards program in the U.S.A. All organizations operating in the U.S.A. are eligible to submit nominations— public and private, for-profit and non-profit, large, and small. The 2020 awards will honor achievements since the beginning of 2019. Entry details are available at http://www.StevieAwards.com/ABA.

With the announcement of the deadline extension organizers said they have waived all fees for nominations to the Startup of the Year and Tech Startup of the Year categories, for organizations that began operations since the beginning of 2018.

The further extension of the final entry deadline has prompted the organizers to change several other dates in the 2020 ABA calendar:

• May 10: Revised end of judging
• May 15: Revised winners notification and announcement
• May 15 - June 5: Revised window for public voting in the People's Choice Stevie Awards for Favorite New Products

The American Business Awards recognize achievement in every facet of the workplace. Categories include:

• Entrepreneur Awards
• Management Awards
• Company of the Year Awards
• Customer Service Awards
• Human Resources Awards
• Information Technology Awards
• Marketing Awards
• New Product Awards
• Public Relations Awards
• Website Awards, Smartphone and Tablet Apps, and other Media Awards
• …and more

More than 200 executives on 13 juries will rate nominations to determine the Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Award winners.

The list of past Stevie Award winners in The American Business Awards reads like a who’s who of innovation and business success in the U.S.A. Explore the list of last year’s winners.

Winners in the 14th annual Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service, recognized as the world's top customer service awards and sales awards, were unveiled on Friday night at a gala ceremony in Las Vegas, Nevada USA, attended by more than 570 executives from around the world.

The complete list of Stevie Winners by category is available at http://www.StevieAwards.com/Sales.

IBM, with 52 Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Award wins, was the most honored organization this year, earning the top Grand Stevie Award trophy. Other Grand Stevie Award winners, in descending order, include DP DHL, HomeServe USA, Sales Partnerships, Inc, Delta Vacations, Cinch Home Services, Dell Technologies, DenizBank Financial Service Group, WNS (Holdings) Limited, and Allianz Global Assistance.

IBM won 17 Gold Stevie Awards, the most in the 2020 competition. Other winners of three or more Stevie Awards include: American Airlines, Autosoft, Inc., BlueCat Networks, Inc., BNY Mellon’s Albridge, Buildium, Bounteous, Carbonite, Inc., Chorus.ai, Clarabridge, Concentrix, ConnectiCare, Constant Contact, CoverMyMeds, Covestic, Cvent, Inc., Druva, Enterprise Fleet Management, GoDaddy, Guidebook, Inc., HCL America, Inc., Industrial Security Integrators, Intuit, John Hancock Financial Services, Korea Representative, Lexmark, Loopio, Inc., Mailchimp, Merrill Corporation, Michael Kors, Mobile Labs, MRO Corp, NCR, Nextiva, Nuance Communications, Inc., OneWest Bank, Optima Tax Relief, LLC, Pushpay, QNB Finansbank, RAIN Group, Rimini Street, SAP, SoftPro, SolarWinds, Spinnaker Support, StarHub Ltd, Sun Basket, Tani, The Audacious Agency, The Brooks Group, Tivity Health, Travelzoo, TTEC, Türkiye Vakıflar Bankası T.A.O., UPMC Health Plan, ValueSelling Associates, Veeam, Verimatrix, VIZIO, Inc., VODAFONE TURKEY, VXI Global Solutions, Wells Fargo Treasury Management, Wheels, Inc., Willis Towers Watson, and xneelo.

The presentations were broadcast live via Livestream and are available to watch online.

The awards are presented by the Stevie Awards, which organizes eight of the world’s leading business award shows including the prestigious International Business Awards® and American Business Awards®.

More than 2,600 nominations from organizations in 48 nations were evaluated in this year’s competition. Winners were determined by the average scores of more than 180 professionals worldwide in seven specialized judging committees. Entries were considered in 106 categories for customer service and contact center achievements, including Contact Center of the Year, Award for Innovation in Customer Service, and Customer Service Department of the Year; 72 categories for sales and business development achievements, ranging from Senior Sales Executive of the Year to Sales Training or Business Development Executive of the Year to Sales Department of the Year; and categories to recognize new products and services and solution providers.

Entries for the 2021 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service will open this coming July. The entry kit may be requested at www.StevieAwards.com/Sales.

Professionals in IT operations often resolve issues by automating scripting or coding.

Why use automation?

Throughout the past two decades, technological innovations and information delivery systems have spurred unprecedented growth. The continued evolution of tech, as well as human ingenuity, present organizations across the retail, manufacturing, telecom, banking, and financial services sectors with an array of ever-expanding scenarios and challenges. As just a few examples, being connected continues to become cheaper, and device ownership is skyrocketing.

Data volumes are soaring, and billions of new connected data sources are anticipated within a few years. We are quickly approaching exabyte volumes and are surging toward zettabytes, and the growth of mobile connectivity continues to surpass fixed lines. Security is, as always, a major issue, along with regulatory complexity.

These automations, however, often only work within a monolithic and extremely predictive environment. If one thing changes in that environment, it typically results in the automation failing within the system. Once this happens, an IT professional must begin the troubleshooting process, which might take anywhere from five to thirty minutes to complete. This increases a company’s internal costs and bogs down IT resources.

Are Humans and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Destined to Work Together?

IT has revolutionized businesses across global industries. The way IT operates in most enterprises, however, is still very people-centric, which means the industry is prime for robotic or runbook automation initiatives. Having a fairly straightforward goal of achieving direct cost savings, these automations can reduce the manual effort spent on repetitive activities.

Robotic process automation (RPA) is great for a predictive environment, but it’s not necessarily designed for an ever-changing landscape. It lacks, therefore, the agility to successfully handle many scenarios. To see better results, the automation efforts need to be cognitive and intelligent.

While script-based automation yields quick, small wins, most organizations soon realize the accelerating pace of business-related changes, the increasing complexity of technology and operations, and rising technology-based operational risks far outmatch traditional automation capabilities. There is a critical need, therefore, for an intelligent system that can keep up with technology churn, understand business processes, and be customized to an industry domain and business model.

Many companies praise automation like it’s already the backbone of their business platforms, but human intervention within that automation is still largely necessary. Companies like Digitate try to be aware of this (currently) inescapable reality by working with top brands in virtually every industry. By continuing to improve their product capabilities, service delivery, and customer support, they can build a community of dedicated users who are excited about sharing their stories with them.

Digitate™ leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence to manage IT and business operations. Their product, ignio™, enables better decision-making and ultimately solves IT operations challenges.

Other companies that also leverage machine learning and AI to manage IT and business operations are still working on developing an overarching process that can understand system needs across dynamic situations from different sectors. This is a daunting task, though, and something no one has been able to achieve—yet.

Digitate recently won a Silver Stevie® Award in the Software Defined Infrastructure category at the 2019 International Business Awards®.

Interested in entering The International Business Awards this year? They open for entries on February 4, 2020.