Companies around the world are struggling to balance their digital strategies with implementation on the ground.
“We think co-creation helps to bridge the gap,” says Duncan Tait, head of EMEIA region at Fujitsu. “We talk about co-creation for success, and have invested heavily in people and centres of excellence to accelerate customer results.
“Not only are we training brilliant technical people, we are developing collaborators who can help to accelerate value.”
Fujitsu has opened a number of new digital co-creation centres in locations around the world. “And our customers love them,” Tait says.
“Customers know they have to change; they need new ideas to create new value and are using our digital co-creation centres accordingly.”
Customers are also benefitting from the new digital business solutions business unit in Fujitsu, described as a “start-up with the company” by Yves de Beauregard, head of digital business solutions: EMEIA.
“New technologies don’t work in isolation – the best advantage comes from combining them in innovative ways,” he explains. “Our goal is to make robotic process automation, advanced analytics, artificial intelligence and blockchain accessible to customers.”
Helping businesses to accelerate their digital transformation processes by connecting artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics and business decision-making, Fujitsu has launched a powerful new Sholark framework that accelerates the deployment of complex AI projects.
A powerful assistive tool, Fujitsu Sholark bridges the gap between data and the end user. Users can easily query the system via its user-friendly web-based interface, enabling the mainstream use of AI, and allowing non-technical employees to answer complex questions related to their businesses. It also simplifies the automation of information management tasks that are repetitive, lengthy and add little value, for example the time consuming and tedious elements of data entry.
The Sholark framework processes large volumes of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data in real time – including multiple different sources from social networks, to databases, voice, video or images. It can also be used to easily deploy machine learning to intelligently automate processes, and utilizes semantic intelligence capabilities to find connections and to deliver meaningful insights to support decision making.
The legal profession is an example of a use case where Sholark could be used to improve the efficiency of the discovery process traditionally undertaken by lawyers. Automating tasks results in a 60% decrease in time required to manually classify and search results.
The technology can also be deployed to speed up crime and threat investigation, by the automatic collection of unstructured information such as internal and external data sources including police records or important public events – both accelerating investigations and improving their accuracy.
By using Sholark, police forces can increase the number of simultaneous investigations by more than 40% without increasing manpower.
Healthcare is another potential application, as Sholark incorporates HIKARI technologies developed by Fujitsu Laboratories of Europe to process patient records, assisting doctors to answer relevant clinical questions about their patients.
Businesses want to retain control over data analytics processes and to have full visibility over them – consequently Fujitsu Sholark is based on open source technologies. It is also designed to be modular, enabling customers to include additional open source capabilities, depending on their requirements. Furthermore, the solution can be easily integrated with existing software or connected with legacy data warehouse systems.
Albert Mercadal, head of advanced analytics and big data at Fujitsu in EMEIA, comments: “The true power of Sholark is that – unlike most types of artificial intelligence – it does not require expert users. Any employee can learn to operate it and discover links between unrelated sources of information.
“It can recognise context and make intelligent connections from content far faster and more effectively than any manual process. This eliminates time consuming and tedious elements of data entry – and accelerates discovery of the most relevant information. As a result, businesses can focus more time on value adding tasks, or can undertake many more daily operations tasks in the same amount of time.”