Mumbai-based Tata Consultancy Services, a global leader in IT services, consulting, technology, and digital solutions, is in the process of developing a new intelligent solution for the investment management and market infrastructure industry leveraging SAP Business Technology Platform. SAP’s platform offers a portfolio of solutions that gives enterprises the ability to adapt rapidly to change irrespective of their landscape and provides a faster way to turn data into business value.

TCS’ Investment Insights solution, which utilises the SAP Business Technology Platform, aims to help asset managers and market infrastructure firms leverage insights from harmonised data for superior portfolio design.

Prab Pitchandi, Global Head, BFSI CDO Strategic Initiatives, TCS, shared that the consulting firm has been delving into research and innovation in the capital markets domain. Aside from achieving a world-leading intellectual property, TCS’ continuous investment in that sector also empowered the consultancy firm to offer new differentiated services and solutions that would accelerate its customers’ digital transformation.

“TCS’ Investment Insights solution leverages our strong domain capabilities, contextual knowledge, and deep expertise in advanced analytics and insights to help customers transform their data into strategic investment insights for superior business outcomes,” he added.

Building an Intelligent Solution with SAP

Expressing the excitement on the development of the solution for the investment management and market infrastructure industry with TCS, Falk Rieker, Global Head of Banking & Capital Markets at SAP, said:

“SAP has a long history providing innovative technology to the world’s leading capital markets firms and will continue to support it with our industry cloud strategy. By leveraging the industry expertise, commitment to quality delivery, and customer focus, the teams at TCS and SAP are helping businesses make the transformational move to the Intelligent Enterprise.”

“Automation and innovation technologies such as machine learning facilitate faster time to production with less implementation risk. The current environment is driving organisations to innovate faster than ever. This partnership leverages the SAP Business Technology Platform to allow firms to adapt quickly to enhance their internal processes or create new data services to fill ever-changing market needs. This will enable industry participants to become market leaders in financial markets data and analytics,” Rieker further explained.

SAP Business Technology Platform has been enabling businesses to focus on providing solutions to specific business needs by combining technologies from four market categories (database and data management, application development and integration, analytics, and intelligent technologies) along with value creation scenarios. The platform can turn data into business value, compose end-to-end business processes, and build and extend SAP applications quickly.

“TCS’ Investment Insights solution is an outcome of our deep understanding of the capital markets industry and our co-innovation partnership with SAP. It will help our investment management and market infrastructure customers accelerate their product innovation, accelerate their Business 4.0 transformation journeys and gain a competitive advantage,” stressed Prashant Shirgur, Global Head, SAP Practice, TCS.

Leveraging AI techniques and TCS’ intellectual property such as Automated Data Discovery and Machine Learning-based Data Quality Management tools, the Investment Insights solution is anticipated to enhance investment management firms’ portfolio decisioning. 

Furthermore, the solution is designed to provide market infrastructure firms with a strong digital platform to streamline end-to-end data management, enhance their data offerings, and offer value-added services. Available on-premise or on the cloud, the TCS solutions will enable a 360° view of investments, ESG integration, black swan financial impact modelling, and yield optimisation strategies.

More About SAP Business Technology Platform

As businesses ease into the new world of work, SAP has also designed unique packages combining SAP Business Technology Platform solutions to help customers thrive in fast-changing environments, be able to react rapidly to new realities, and make bold decisions with insight-based confidence. The offerings focus on the following:

• Emergency response communications
• Intelligent process management
• Insight-driven decisions-making

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have been more and more omnipresent in the fields of logistics, production, operations, and HR today for its capabilities to mimic human decision-making processes and efficiently perform tasks like humans. For talent acquisition, in particular, many organisations are moving towards integrating AI and ML to manage the recruitment process at a scale.

Having been at the receiving end of the cumbersome corporate talent acquisition process, Bipul Vaibhav together with his co-founders Anan Kumar and Kumar Sambhav, developed Skillate, an AI-powered platform that would make recruitment easy, fast, and transparent. Now available on SAP App Center, SAP customers can leverage the power of AI and ML in their hiring process with Skillate.

Skillate integrates with the SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting and Onboarding, cloud-based software that provides a comprehensive, guided solution to help recruiters and hiring managers source, engage, nurture, and hire the best talent.

Bipul Vaibhav, CEO and Co-Founder of Skillate, stated:

‘‘We are happy for our recruitment platform to integrate with SAP SuccessFactors solutions to save time and recruitment costs while offering a more transparent process for enterprises across sectors.” 

Skillate is a smart recruitment product to optimise the talent acquisition process by leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. It integrates seamlessly with any homegrown system and Application Tracking Softwares (ATS) such as SAP SuccessFactors and Taleo. The platform provides out of box integrations with a host of third-party applications to source candidates directly from Job Board – Monster, Indeed, IIMjobs and the likes. The integration with SAP SuccessFactors brings Skillate’s solutions to a global scale, reaching more industries and enterprises to improve hiring performance. 

As a partner in the SAP PartnerEdge program, Skillate is empowered to build, market, and sell software applications on top of SAP Cloud Platform.

AI Transforms Talent Acquisition

Leveraging AI, Skillate is able to perform HR recruitment tasks such as identifying, interviewing, and hiring the best candidates at scale. In a click of a button, Skillate‘s AI algorithm is trained with over 20 million diverse profiles to screen and shortlist resumes. 

Skillate features AI-based matching, state-of-the-art resume parser, intelligent chatbot, in-depth reports, and analytics. It has self-learning capability that customises the algorithm for each enterprise, giving it a unique capability to ‘Think like an experienced recruiter’.

The B2B solution utilises chatbot in combination with AI-powered matching in efficiently finding the best candidates, significantly reducing screening time and allowing the recruitment team to engage more with applicants. The chatbot also has the capability to schedule follow up interviews after the initial screening.

Optimising Value-Chain of Recruitment

The AI-based talent acquisition platform advances and transforms the hiring process, optimising the entire value chain of recruitment- from creating job requisition to candidate engagement. Skillate boasts to deliver the following: 

• 30{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} lower cost per hire
• 50{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} reduction in time to hire
• 85{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} matching accuracy
• 100 {aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} industry agnostic
• 2.2 x candidate conversion 

Founded in 2016 as a start-up and a member of SAP Labs incubator progamme, Skillate’s customers now include big brands such as Sopra Steria, Saint-Gobain, OYO Rooms, L&T Construction, L&T Financial Services, and SoftwareAG.

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New Service Management Platform

Soabox.ai, the Australian artificial intelligence (AI) service automation platform provider, has launched a new version of its smart service management platform that provides out-the-box support for both IT Service Desk and HR request management enabling organisations to scale service capacity, maintain service quality and deliver service consistency.

The new platform combines predictive search, natural language understanding and machine learning and is targeted at any organisation wanting to improve business productivity by breaking down divisional silos. It provides organisational leaders and managers with the ability to automate repetitive tasks and requests, dramatically improving customer satisfaction and business productivity whilst lowering operational costs and increasing revenue potential.

Up until now, users have been working with highly complex, operationally expensive forms-based service management systems that are largely reliant on human attention to manage work.   Rules-based logic has traditionally been used to facilitate automation.  However, this requires expensive, external services to implement and maintain. In addition, these complex customisations have resulted in ‘upgrade nightmares’, often taken months, and expensive projects to implement. 

Paul Heath, VP of Product Marketing, Soapbox.ai, said, “We’ve developed Soapbox targeting any employee that provides a support function to the business.  They typically still use email to manage internal work requests like HR and Facilities or have implemented products from Zendesk, Freshservice, Ivanti, ServiceNow and BMC.  Other organisations may also have business processes they wish to digitise as part of their digital transformation program but are unable to leverage existing tools and platforms due to cost.

Transformation for Form-Based Requirements

While Soapbox provides out-the-box support for both IT Service Desk and HR request management, the extensible platform allows users to extend Soapbox to support any forms-based work requirements. Any custom applications built on the platform immediately realise the benefit of the Soapbox AI engine to make work, smart and simple by observing, learning, augmenting and automating.

Natural language understanding capabilities enable Soapbox to understand the intent of the user, provide guided assistance to suggested knowledge or where required, assign the request to the correct group to resolve the request.  Using advanced virtual agent capabilities, Soapbox captures the request detail via a conversational dialog on the portal or directly through collaboration tools like Slack or Microsoft teams.  Users can also leverage the power of the Soapbox Platform to improve their ITIL or IT4IT process across Incident, Request, Problem, Change, Release, Configuration Management Database, and service level agreement.

“Essentially, we’re providing a more mature platform that provides a single system of record across the business with smart workflows and intelligent knowledge to help improve productivity and better support the business.  We believe that this will be attractive to any manager or executive who is focused on better supporting the business through improved service delivery, while managing budget challenges of lowering the cost of operation,” said Heath.

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The panel will ensure the adoption of the new AI guiding principles also announced by the vendor in collaboration with the AI steering committee at SAP, a group of SAP executives from development, strategy and human resources.

“SAP considers the ethical use of data a core value,” said Luka Mucic, chief financial officer and member of the Executive Board of SAP SE. “We want to create software that enables the intelligent enterprise and actually improves people’s lives. Such principles will serve as the basis to make AI a technology that augments human talent.”

SAP’s guiding principles highlight core values around transparency, integrity, quality and safety in the use of AI. The principles also support SAP’s stance on data protection and privacy.

Five members of the advisory panel have been confirmed, including:

• Dr theol. Peter Dabrock, chair of Systematic Theology (Ethics), University of Erlangen-Nuernberg
• Dr Henning Kagermann, chairman, acatechBoard of Trustees; acatech senator
• Susan Liautaud, Lecturer in Public Policy and Law, Stanford; and founder and managing director, Susan Liautaud & Associates Limited (SLAL)
• Dr Helen Nissenbaum, professor, Cornell Tech Information Science
• Nicholas Wright, consultant, Intelligent Biology; affiliated scholar, Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics Georgetown University Medical Center; Honorary Research Associate, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London.

“AI offers immense opportunities, but it also raises unprecedented and often unpredictable ethics challenges for society and humanity,” said Liautaud. “The AI ethics advisory panel allows us to ensure an ethical AI, which serves humanity and benefits society.”

SAP is also playing a part in Europe’s debate on AI, with the European Commission appointing Markus Noga, senior vice president, machine learning, SAP to its high-level expert group on AI, charged with designing European AI strategy and ethical guidelines by early 2019.

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Through the strategic partnership, Wipro will offer Dallas-based Trintech’s portfolio of financial solutions to its clients worldwide. Solutions include high-volume transaction matching, balance sheet and intercompany reconciliations, journal entries, financial close task management, disclosure and fiduciary reporting, and compliance management.

Wipro will complement Trintech’s portfolio by providing its own AI and automation platform, HOLMES, to extend the footprint of Trintech’s enterprise-class Risk Intelligent Robotic Process Automation financial solution. Wipro will also plan and deliver world-class financial transformation, while providing integration services and post-implementation support.

“The demand for record to report technology solutions continues to grow as finance organisations around the world seek to increase not only the efficiency, but also the effectiveness of their overall financial close processes,” said Robert Michlewicz, chief revenue officer, Trintech.

“Wipro’s deep advisory expertise in finance and IT transformation makes them a perfect partner to deliver successful digital transformations for finance functions, using Trintech’s portfolio of solutions.”

Trintech’s Cadency solution provides financial executives with a financial governance solution that weaves all R2R activities into a single, seamless process, delivering an effective and efficient financial close cycle that minimises risk and costs, maximises resource utilisation, and gives stakeholders full visibility into the close cycle at all times.

“We are confident that organisations committed to digitally enabling their financial processes will benefit immensely from the combination of Trintech’s financial solutions portfolio and Wipro’s expertise in helping businesses simplify and automate their processes,” said Phil Dunmore, vice president and global head of consulting, Wipro Limited.

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The first solutions will focus on a subset of AI known as deep learning – typically implemented for data-hungry tasks such as image and facial recognition, image classification and voice recognition. To drive deep learning scenarios, enterprises typically a high performance compute infrastructure to build and train learning models.

According to HPE, organisations typically lack several key requirements for the implementation of deep learning, including the expertise and resources, hardware and software infrastructure, and integration capabilities to enable scaling of AI systems, and so has targeted its solution suite to address these requirements.

The new offerings include HPE’s Rapid Software Development for AI, an integrated hardware and software solution; the HPE Deep Learning Cookbook, a set of tools to guide software and hardware selection; HPE Image Classification Reference Designs, providing infrastructure configurations that are optimised to train models for various use cases such as license plate verification and biological tissue classification; the HPE AI Innovation Centres, located in Houston, Palo Alto and Grenoble; and enhanced HPE Centres of Excellence, providing customers with access to technology and expertise.

“We live in a world today where we’re generating copious amounts of data, and deep learning can help unleash intelligence from this data,” said Pankaj Goyal, vice president, artificial intelligence business, Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

“However, a ‘one size fits all’ solution doesn’t work. Each enterprise has unique needs that require a distinct approach to get started, scale and optimise its infrastructure for deep learning. At HPE, we aim to make AI real for our customers no matter where they are in their journeys with our industry-leading infrastructure portfolio, AI expertise, world-class research and ecosystem of partners.”

Deep learning is expected to help AI move beyond consumer applications such as voice interfaces and personal assistants to fields such as genomic sequencing analytics, climate research, medical science, autonomous driving and robotics.

“As deep learning-based AI advances, it will transform science, commerce and the quality of our lives by automating tasks that don’t require the most complex human thinking,” said Steve Conway, senior vice president, Hyperion Research. “HPE’s infrastructure and software solutions are designed for ease-of-use and promise to play an important role in driving AI adoption into enterprises and other organisations in the next few years.”

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Designed to deliver cognitive enhancements to user experience and productivity, Wipro’s automation services deliver end-to-end capabilities across live insights, predictive analytics and business process optimisation, and enable new business models.

The services also have a conversational computing interface, which is powered by technology from Avaamo – a company in which startup investment arm Wipro Ventures has a stake.

“Wipro HOLMES is a strategic asset in our AI and automation services portfolio,” said Rohit Adlakha, vice president and global head, Wipro HOLMES and automation ecosystem, Wipro Limited.

“The launch of our automation services is emblematic of a paradigm shift in automation services being offered to clients, which go beyond the boundaries of traditional platforms and applications. Additionally, it is reflective of our strategic commitment to Wipro’s long-term alliance with SAP to jointly build solutions and use cases on the latest SAP software.

“This also strengthens our AI and automation ecosystem to deliver efficiency, effectiveness and an improved user experience for clients in their automation journey.”

The interface for Wipro HOLMES 2.0 for SAP applications has been certified by SAP to automate and interoperate with business processes running in SAP ERP. The services are modular, so customers can prioritise a deployment across specific business processes, administration and technology.

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