What an incredible day!
Last week, a few of my colleagues from ventriloc and I spent the day at our customer ABB Canada to hold collaborative workshops. What a joy it was to be able to interact IN PERSON! What always strikes me about this type of mission is the richness of the exchanges that arise from the complementary nature of our expertise. The ABB team masters its processes and data, and knows the needs of the business, while on our side, we bring the expertise, proven methods and tools to develop technical solutions. It’s this synergy that makes our job so exciting!
The retrospective workshop was particularly rich. The exchanges were very constructive, and I was impressed by the open-mindedness of all the participants, as well as by the inspiring vision of the team leader.
Synergy : The combined effect of individuals in collaboration that exceeds the sum of their individual effects.
In the afternoon, we planned a training session on Artificial Intelligence (AI) given by my friend Alexei Nordell-Markovits. An excellent “enlightener”, Alexei’s aim is to help companies make the right digital choices, which pragmatically often means saying “you don’t need AI for that, analytics will do the job at reduced cost (and risk)”. In short, it’s all about doing your homework – in a very simplified way, that is:
- What process needs to be improved (“what’s hurting?”)
- What’s the return on investment (ROI, or “how much does it hurt?”)
Then we can look at how to fix it, for example:
- Implement a transactional tool;
- Opt for automation (Power Automate, RPA);
- Develop Power BI reports to visualize and alert;
- Integrate advanced analytics into reports (regression for forecasting, “what-if” scenarios, etc.);
- Use AI services integrated with cloud platforms, such as Azure AI Services;
- Use generative AI;
- Or develop your own algorithms!
It was great to spend the day together and experience all the dimensions of the humans we collaborate with on a daily basis!
