Five Ways to Have Artificial Intelligent Tools Do the Heavy Lifting This Year

Success in the next era of retail won’t come from adding the latest widget to your site, and it’s certainly not in low prices and free shipping. Success will come down to the ability to move and innovate faster. While moving to a fully SaaS-based commerce platform and ecosystem will guarantee greater agility, the reality is that may be a multi-year process for some retailers.

So what can online retailers do to make a difference right now? It is time to let artificial intelligent (AI) tools do some heavy lifting this year.

There are a ton of options for when, where, and how to leverage AI, but for retailers looking for quick impact, here are five ways AI tools can help online retailers drive results across the shopping experience without the heavy lift:

1.      Innovate with Voice Command and Visual Search: By 2021, Gartner predicts that early adopter brands that redesign their websites to support visual and voice search will increase digital commerce revenue by 30%. With mobile devices, short attention spans and endless online options, getting on-site search right is more critical than ever. The good news is that new AI technologies, such as Visual Search and Voice Command, make search more engaging and effective at converting sales.

•       Visual search is about to take off in a big way thanks to strides in image recognition technologies and the growing number of mobile shoppers who prefer visuals. Retailers can essentially deliver faceted search results in a new, visual way by labeling product features, attributes, and names in images and videos. Pinterest now enables users to select an item in an image to surface similar items on Pinterest. Retailers Target and West Elm are experimenting here as well.

•       Voice command has become ubiquitous at home and on the go with Siri, Alexa, and Google. With advancements made in natural language processing (NLP), semantics and intent recognition, there’s a lot of exciting ways to experiment with voice-based assistance and order placement on retail mobile sites and apps. Start simple. Look at the most common shopper inquiries like order status, return policy, local store inventory and the ability to re-order items and check out via voice. Graduate to deliver on more complex use cases like searching and comparing products, asking for personalized recommendations based on preferences and history, and placing products on hold at local stores.

2.      Leverage Big Data: Retailers spend a lot of money to acquire customers via SEM, SEO, content marketing and social with murky ROI results. AI tools that crunch customer data present new options though. Instead of waiting for shoppers to discover you, retail marketers can now discover consumers. Third-party data audiences leverage billions of global IDs, trillions of dollars in transactional data and tens of thousands of pre-built audiences that span demographic, online and offline behaviors. Insight from these mega data sets means you can reach exactly who you want to.

One business that is reaping the benefits of big data and AI is Carousell, one of the world's largest mobile classifieds marketplaces. By integrating Oracle's Responsys with its AI tools, Carousell was able to roll out dynamic landing pages with personalized content based on users' past behavior or project behavior. Additionally, Carousell was also able to leverage Responsys' Link Tracking feature, which tracks where clicks on links come from, to achieve in-depth insights into the effectiveness of its social media marketing efforts. These valuable insights enable Carousell to create more relevant and personalized editorials for their users.

3.      Integrate AI in your mobile strategy: It’s getting harder than ever to engage consumers, deliver on what they want in the moment and turn them into a loyalist. Context is critical and AI tools provide that in a way humans can’t. As

63 percent of smartphone owners used their mobile devices to make holiday decisions this past season, mobile shopping is becoming a way of life. Mobile is a goldmine of contextual user information and the perfect place for retailers to seize micro-moments along the shopper’s journey. Recent data from Oracle Responsys from this past holiday season told us mobile SMS traffic went up 70% and mobile push rates increased 110% year-over-year. Shoppers want to hear from retailers and brands if it’s relevant and provides value. In mobile communications, use AI for personalized recommendations on products, local store events, offers and order updates to scale a personal relationship with your most valuable customers.

4.      Have chatbots initiate proactive chats: Chatbots are expected to be the top application of AI over the next five years, according to TechEmergence. AI-powered chatbots are not just a great way to scale service post-sale, but also during browsing and buying. Proactive service drives sales and chatbots are a great technology to initiate proactive conversations with customers that can alleviate concerns and offer solutions to common queries.

5.      Virtual Assistants can be your personal concierge: Leverage AI tools to make your most lucrative customer segments feel known and valued. Virtual Assistants (that use AI, speech recognition and loads of data) can serve as a personal concierge, helping loyal customers with purchase recommendations, education and customer service. Loyalty programs can also use AI to supercharge personalization. They can recommend products based on local weather conditions, hyper-personalized subscription services and tailored promotions based on what resonates with each customer specifically.

For more information on Oracle’s privacy policies with reference to our cloud solutions, please refer to the following link: https://www.oracle.com/legal/privacy/marketing-cloud-data-cloud-privacy-policy.html

The above article was made by Katrina Gosek, senior director, digital customer product strategy, Oracle.

World’s Largest Commercial PC Manufacturers Introduce AMD Ryzen™ PRO Mobile and Desktop APU Powered Systems

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today announced unprecedented adoption of its AMD Ryzen™ PRO processors – including new notebooks and desktops powered by Ryzen PRO processors with built-in Radeon™ Vega graphics now available from the world’s three largest enterprise PC OEMs. AMD Ryzen PRO APUs for premium commercial desktop and notebooks provide commercial PC buyers with new levels of choice and innovation and enable Dell, HP, and Lenovo to create a range of business systems, from sleek enterprise notebooks to powerful commercial desktops. Combined, these systems make up the broadest portfolio of AMD processor-based enterprise PCs in the company’s history

“Our mission with AMD Ryzen processors is to deliver more performance, features, and choice to users. We’ve fulfilled this promise over the last year across the premium consumer desktop and notebook markets. Now, we bring those same principles to a full range of commercial notebooks and desktops,” said Jim Anderson, senior vice president and general manager, Computing and Graphics Business Group, AMD. “The new enterprise platforms introduced by Dell, HP and Lenovo mark an important milestone for AMD, demonstrating that we are addressing the needs of the premium commercial market from top-to-bottom. Ryzen PRO mobile processors can enable all-day battery life[1] up to 16 hours of use, world-class productivity performance, and sensational graphics built on Radeon technology.”

Ryzen PRO processors are designed to meet the fast-changing requirements of today’s business PC users, including both commercial workloads and rich multimedia capabilities that are becoming more typical as the traditional boundaries between work and personal computing merge. Offering desktop-class performance in an ultrathin notebook[2], the AMD Ryzen™ 7 PRO 2700U offers more system performance than the competition[3] and up to 16 hours of battery life to enable all-day productivity¹. In desktop, the AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 2400G and AMD Ryzen 3 PRO 2200G delivers world-class performance on heavily graphics-intensive commercial and workstation-grade workloads ranging from graphics design to 3D CAD to medical imaging, while also excelling at general office productivity tasks[4]^,[5].

Designed specifically for the commercial market, all Ryzen PRO processors provide security, reliability, and performance with the award-winning AMD “Zen” architecture. Armed with AMD GuardMI technology, Ryzen PRO processors with Radeon Vega Graphics offer state-of-the-art security at the silicon level from power-on to power-off. Commercial-grade quality and reliability help ensure platform longevity, and open-standard manageability helps safeguard businesses from being locked into proprietary solutions.

Global OEM & Partner Support

During an event in front of the global press and industry analysts last week, several top global PC OEMs unveiled a breadth of commercial platform offerings including light but powerful enterprise notebooks, robust enterprise desktops, compact enterprise micro towers and small form factor desktops, all powered by Ryzen PRO processors with Radeon Vega Graphics.

      “We’re proud to introduce our first Ryzen PRO based Latitude 5495 laptop that delivers outstanding performance in a beautiful design,” said Andy Rhodes, vice president & general manager, Dell Commercial Mobility Solutions. “The Latitude 5495 complements the OptiPlex 5055 desktop PC and provides our customers with another compelling AMD Ryzen PRO option within the world’s most secure, manageable and reliable commercial portfolio.”

      “HP is redefining the commercial PC experience as the traditional boundaries between work and life blend. Our latest offerings with AMD Ryzen PRO processors integrate powerful processing and graphics into innovative solutions built with a focus on design, security, and collaboration to power the modern workforce.” Lorena Kubera, Global Head of Commercial Product Management, HP Inc.

“For more than 25 years, the ThinkPad brand has been defined by simplicity, function, and reliability. And as the digital transformation advances with exponential speed, Lenovo maintains a relentless quest to deliver a no-compromise customer experience,” said Jerry Paradise, vice president, Lenovo global commercial portfolio & product management. “Expanding that portfolio to include the latest Ryzen PRO processors in our ThinkPad A series notebooks and ThinkCentre M715q & M725s desktops help us to further support our enterprise customers and their ever-evolving business requirements.”

“Modern workers are changing how they work and play – always on-the-go, multitasking from basic office productivity work like emailing, word processing, editing spreadsheets and presentations, to web browsing and live streaming multimedia content all at the same time,” said Roanne Sones, general manager, strategy and ecosystem for Windows at Microsoft. “The new multi-core design of Ryzen PRO processors delivers amazing performance on Windows 10 PCs, while the ‘Vega’ graphics architecture enables a smoother and richer visual experience, ideally suited for today’s modern commercial environments.”

Ryzen™ PRO mobile processors with Radeon™ Vega Graphics:

Model	CPU Cores	Threads	Max Clock (GHz)	Graphics Compute Units	Max GPU Clock (MHz)	L2/L3 Cache (MB)	cTDP (Watts)
Ryzen™ 7 PRO 2700U with Radeon™ Vega 10 Graphics	4	8	3.8	10	1300	6	15W Nominal
Ryzen™ 5 PRO 2500U with Radeon™ Vega 8 Graphics	4	8	3.6	8	1100	6	15W Nominal
Ryzen™ 3 PRO 2300U with Radeon™ Vega 6 Graphics	4	4	3.4	6	1100	6	15W Nominal

Ryzen™ PRO desktop processors with Radeon™ Vega Graphics:

Model	CPU Cores	Threads	Max Clock (GHz)	Graphics Compute Units	Max GPU Clock (MHz)	L2/L3 Cache (MB)	TDP (Watts)
Ryzen™ 5 PRO 2400G with Radeon™ Vega 11 Graphics	4	8	3.9	11	1250	6	65W
Ryzen™ 3 PRO 2200G with Radeon™ Vega 8 Graphics

Five Ways to Make your IT Cloud-Ready

Cloud Computing is increasingly the deployment model of choice for enterprise workloads, causing public cloud spend to grow at a double-digit rate with no sign of slowing down. The issue is that most companies realize they can't transition everything at once - even if they wanted to - leaving IDC to predict that 58.7 percent infrastructure spend in 2017 will stay in the data center.

Regardless, the pressure is on and companies can’t afford to sit back and wait. The rising incidence of cyberattacks is making many companies re-evaluate their position on cloud; a recent Oracle survey showed that companies with a higher level of cloud maturity and exposure have higher levels of confidence in their cyber security capabilities and ability to detect cyber threats, than those early in their cloud journey. 

In addition, organizations are striving to deliver innovation in unprecedented ways and, to support this, are looking for new ways of handling the increasing amount of data they are having to deal with every day.[1] It is therefore very important that organizations take into consideration ways to handle the increasing amount of data being transferred into their systems every day. Having said this, finding the right application on platforms suitable to your company’s needs is essential.[2] With business leaders pushing hard for cloud migration, how should IT leaders respond?

Plan for Tomorrow

There are a myriad of reasons for keeping applications in-house, such as regulatory compliance issues, security, data sovereignty requirements, the need for low latency, and use of custom legacy applications that won't run on public cloud platforms.

In many cases, what is needed is a cloud-ready architecture - including hardware operating systems, databases, and applications - that is consistent across on-premises and cloud environments. This will make it easier to transition when the time is right.

Mapping your cloud-ready journey: While the route will vary, depending on where an individual IT organization is starting, there are five typical use cases that describe the different requirements of each leg - and thus, the likely best path forward.

1. Streamline and modernize IT infrastructure

For a business without immediate plans to move to the cloud, but wants to streamline its infrastructure, pre-built converged infrastructure.

These modern systems that are architecturally compatible with those powering private cloud and public cloud services can deliver dramatic improvements in performance, availability, security, and efficiency while lowering operating costs, by replacing older, multi-vendor server, storage, and backup.

2. Accelerate time to value with appliances

Many IT organizations have to do more with less, and faster, to respond to competitive threats. In such situations, an appliance strategy can provide great benefit. Purpose built 'appliances' that are preconfigured to serve different purposes, such as to support databases, a private cloud environments, or big data workloads. They are easy to deploy and operate, requiring less time and fewer specialized IT skills.

3. Optimize and extend private cloud

For generic, noncritical workloads, many organizations first implement private cloud environments with the aim of lowering costs and achieving greater agility.

But most self-assembled, generic private clouds take months to build - decreasing agility - and require expensive personnel to build, tune, and manage.

Private cloud environments also often use virtualization software that may require expensive licenses and support contracts to run. Another challenge is that generic private clouds often treat all applications equally, they are not always appropriate for demanding and/or business-critical databases and applications.

One way to address these issues is to adopt purpose-built, cloud appliances that are consistent across environments, enabling organizations to implement a private cloud that is cost-optimized for generic applications and performance optimized for more critical applications. This provides an easy path to public or hybrid cloud, with unified management across environments.

4. Optimize and secure critical applications

For business-critical applications, in many cases, the infrastructure supporting them has been built over time, lags in modernization, and is an inconsistent mix of platforms.

The result is an overly complex environment that doesn't always deliver the required performance or security. A common solution is to employ high-end servers to optimize and ensure peak performance while improving efficiency with the highest security, whether implemented on-premises or in the cloud. Moving to a single platform will also bring cost savings and unified management.

5. Consolidate and protect data with advanced storage solutions

Finally, companies are facing data storage and protection challenges. With the explosion of data volumes, simply adding to an existing storage infrastructure is, in many cases, no longer affordable or cost-effective.

An alternative approach is to implement modern storage solutions engineered to address the risks of data loss and cut recovery times. These cloud-ready systems enable you to consolidate existing storage while ensuring the security of your data and dramatically improving performance.

Future

For each of these use cases, having cloud-ready systems that have equivalents in the public cloud can allow the public cloud to appear as a compatible extension of what already runs in your data center, making it easier to move when you're ready.

The most powerful, unified cloud solutions available that best match your licensed environment and will help you modernize, innovate, and be one step ahead in a digital world. Complete and integrated cloud services can now deliver unprecedented availability, performance, and security — potentially at a significantly lower cost.[3]

Even if you have no immediate plans to move to the cloud, it's a nice option to have. In the meantime, you're able to bring many benefits of the public cloud into your on-premises infrastructure. Wouldn't you like to be prepared for a cloud future?

ZENFONE 5 GETS SOLD OUT IN JUST 45 MINUTES!

 April 14, 2018 will forever go down in the history books of ASUS Philippines as one of its most momentous days – and not just because the company successfully went #Backto5 with their ZenFans, media partners, and dealers during the official ZenFone 5 Series launch event held in One Esplanade.

This day marked a whole new reason for ASUS Philippines to celebrate, as within just minutes after they revealed the official pricing of the ZenFone 5 Series, end-users went to the nearest ASUS and ZenFone stores in major malls in droves, eager to get their hands on the latest generation of ZenFones, now made available nationwide.

With fans racing to experience the ZenFone 5 series, the ZenFone 5 was declared sold out in just 45 minutes!This was also true for on-site sales during the launch event itself, which brought the total sell-out of 1,000 ZenFone 5’s and ZenFone 5Q’s combined in just under an hour of their first day in the country.

With the demand for both phones continuously growing each day, ASUS Philippines has made sure stores in major malls have been re-stocked as early as Monday morning.

THE ZENFONE THAT HAS GOT EVERYONE TALKING

Fans who tuned in found themselves happily surprised at the official released specs of every phone, coupled with their bang for the buck prices.

“ASUS ZenFones aim to empower luxury – this philosophy continues with the new ZenFone 5 family; especially with ZenFone 5 and ZenFone 5Q.” ASUS Philippines Country Manager, George Su, stated. “We want to share with everyone and, likewise, we also want everyone to enjoy the best  affordable technology the world has to offer.”

THE ZENFONE 5, A CHAMPION OF MOBILE PHOTOGRAPHY

“As a professional Photographer, I find Zenfone 5 as a device that speaks art, sees art, and hears art. It's my best tool to tell stories artistically anywhere and everywhere I go,” shared Emir Kahn Bautista, a known Wedding Photographer and the newest name to be included in roster of Pixel Masters.

Internationally acclaimed photographer and long-time Pixel Master, Jasper Tejano, also chimed in, “From imagining the image to seeing the final output online, the Zenfone 5 is a joy to use as my capable creative tool in photography.”

ASUS certainly has their eyes on the prize, as they continue their development of what they were best loved for – mobile photography. The newest ZenFone 5 certainly raised the bars, entering the competition strong with its newest and latest AI camera technology that allows anyone the best photo taking experience a smartphone can offer.

MARKET AVAILABILITY

The ZenFone 5 and ZenFone 5Q has officially been made available nationwide since April 14, 2018 and are also for 0% interest on Home Credit for 6 months. The ZenFone 5 is priced only at PHP19,995.00 and the ZenFone 5Q is for the affordable rate of PHP 16,995.00.

For more information on ASUS, the ZenFone 5 series, and other incredible products from ASUS, tune in to the ASUS Philippines Facebook Page and the ZenTalk Philippines Forum.

THE PHONES THAT ARE DRIVEN TO THE INCREDIBLE

From April 14 to 24, buyers of ZenFone 5 and ZenFone 5Q get the chance to win the a brand new Toyota Vios! Find out how over at http://asusphilippinespromo.ph/!