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Krita Coelho talks to Ali Hyder, CEO of Focus Softnet, on how the AI platform is making day-to-day tasks for various business segments easier
What made Focus Softnet jump onto the AI bandwagon?
Focus Softnet has been providing business applications for more than 25 years. With the advent of Artificial IntelIigence (AI) we are offering our customers AI-enabled applications. Not only for our applications, but for other business applications as well. When we look at AI as a platform, we take into consideration different elements such as speech recognition, face recognition, and optical recognition or OCR technology, which allows Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
Can you give us some used cases for this?
The whole platform and the different elements of AI are used in various business segments. AI was first implemented in the banking sector to respond to customer calls automatically. Now most of the banking calls are answered by automated voice systems. Similarly in the retail industry, face recognition will let you know how often you get customers returning to your store, how many turn back without buying anything, and the reason for their behaviour.
We are looking to double our revenues for AI-enabled applications in the last quarter of this year compared to previous years because everyone using some sort of business application would want to add on the AI component.
The third aspect of AI is completing routine tasks such as opening an application and entering data manually, or sending an SMS, printout or fax. Routine tasks can be automated using RPA.
We are trying to come up with a few new things for business segments such as an HR attendance system, which records attendance based on face recognition. We are also into creating voice assistants for people on the move, so even if you’re driving you can command and get a task done.
If you have to compare them to other similar platforms, what sets these apart?
Focus Softnet is known for being providers of good quality, reliable, mid-range enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This hasn’t been in this market for so long, and we are the first and foremost in providing this.
Do you have any new products and services that you have launched? And any significant achievements?
The platform of AI is our biggest launch for this year. We are looking to double our revenues for AI-enabled applications in the last quarter of this year compared to previous years because everyone using some sort of business application would want to add on the AI component.
What are your plans for the future?
We are looking at creating plug-ins for a lot of standard products, so that people can just plug in to our AI platform with whatever application they are using without having to change it. We are planning to release this in the coming months.