While Online has always had a culture that promotes innovation, we were proud to officially open the doors to our Innovation Lab (Lab) in May of this year. The Innovation Lab's mission is to collaborate with Online’s customers to solve their most difficult business problems, exploring the latest in technology trends.
At the start of the year, we defined a set of technology themes we wanted to invest in; these themes are based on technologies we believe will be used to build the next generation of digital businesses. They include Artificial Intelligence, Digital Experience, IoT, and Bots.
Our team has been meeting with a number of our clients to explore business problems with the goal of identifying common goals and synergies. As we explore those commonalities we continue to look for compelling problems that overlap with the technical themes we are pursuing. As we unpack those conversations two consistent trends have emerged - we work with truly innovative customers who are asking big and hard questions; and like so many others, figuring out how these technologies can help is not straight forward.
If your organization has a business problem that could be addressed in part, or in full by the creative use of the themes outlined in the link above - we'd love to talk to you about it.
Another thing that these conversations have crystallized for us is that AI and Machine Learning will profoundly impact much of what we do today - how systems operate and the insights they are able to provide to assist their human operators. For example, the Lab is currently working on an initiative to use Machine Learning to identify anomalous behaviour. The goal is to build AI agents that can be trained in the cloud using data collected from IoT devices, and deployed to monitor behaviour in real-time on low IoT power devices at the edge of the Cloud. Although we are building this for a specific client problem, we believe the solution can be generalized to monitor the behaviour of various things like industrial or healthcare settings for example. We'll provide more insights into this solution on our blog in the months ahead.
Our second initiative is examining the use of conversational platforms to converse with employees and gather insights into organizational health, while at the same time simplifying what are perceived to be purely administrative processes such as status reporting. This initiative is in early stages but appears to be a much simpler problem to solve on a technical level, though it has a number of interesting non-technical dimensions to it.
As we continue to grow, the Innovation Lab is interested in pursuing other themes and business problems. This is another area we'd love your feedback: what additional technology themes matter most to your organization and why. In conclusion, we believe that the real value of the Innovation Lab comes when we work together. So please reach out to us if you'd like to discuss any of our current themes or if you have suggestions for future themes; we look forward to hearing from you.
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