AI In Industries

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Transforming Industries with MongoDB and AI: Healthcare

This is the sixth in a six-part series focusing on critical AI use cases across several industries . The series covers the manufacturing and motion, financial services, retail, telecommunications and media, insurance, and healthcare industries. In healthcare, transforming data into actionable insights is vital for enhancing clinical outcomes and advancing patient care. From medical professionals improving care delivery to administrators optimizing workflows and researchers advancing knowledge, data is the lifeblood of the healthcare ecosystem. Today, AI emerges as a pivotal technology, with the potential to enhance decision-making, improve patient experiences, and streamline operations — and to do so more efficiently than traditional systems. Patient experience and engagement While they may not expect it based on past experiences, patients crave a seamless experience with healthcare providers. Ideally, patient data from healthcare services, including telehealth platforms, patient portals, wearable devices, and EHR, can be shared – securely – across interoperable channels. Unfortunately, disparate data sources, burdensome and time-consuming administrative work for providers, and overly complex and bloated solution stacks at the health system level all stand in the way of that friction-free experience. AI can synthesize vast amounts of data and provide actionable insights, leading to personalized and proactive patient care, automated administrative processes, and real-time health insights. AI technologies, such as machine learning algorithms, natural language processing, and chatbots, are being used to enhance and quantify interactions. Additionally, AI-powered systems can automatically schedule appointments, send notifications, and optimize clinic schedules, all reducing wait times for patients. AI-enabled chatbots and virtual health assistants provide 24/7 support, offering instant responses, medication reminders, and personalized health education. AI can even identify trends and predict health events, allowing for early intervention and reduction in adverse outcomes. MongoDB’s flexible data model can unify disparate data sources, providing a single view of the patient that integrates EHRs, wearable data, and patient-generated health data for personalized care and better patient outcomes. For wearables and medical devices, MongoDB is the ideal underlying data platform to house time series data, significantly cutting down on storage costs while enhancing performance. With Atlas for the Edge, synchronization with edge applications, including hospital-at-home setups, becomes seamless. On the patient care front, MongoDB can support AI-driven recommendations for personalized patient education and engagement based on the analysis of individual health records and engagement patterns, and Vector Search can power search functionalities within patient portals, allowing patients to easily find relevant information and resources, thereby improving the self-service experience. Enhanced clinical decision making Healthcare decision-making is critically dependent on the ability to aggregate, analyze, and act on an exponentially growing volume of data. From EHRs and imaging studies to genomic data and wearable device data, the challenge is not just the sheer volume but the diversity and complexity of data. Healthcare professionals need to synthesize information across various dimensions to make informed, real-time, accurate decisions. Interoperability issues, data silos, lack of data quality, and the manual effort required to integrate and interpret this data all stand in the way of better decision-making processes. The advent of AI technologies, particularly NLP and LLMs, offers transformative potential for healthcare decision-making by automating the extraction and analysis of data from disparate sources, including structured data in EHRs and unstructured text in medical literature or patient notes. By enabling the querying of databases using natural language, clinicians can access and integrate patient information more rapidly and accurately, enhancing diagnostic precision and personalizing treatment approaches. Moreover, AI can support real-time decision-making by analyzing streaming data from wearable devices, alerting healthcare providers to changes in patient conditions that require immediate attention. MongoDB, with its flexible data model and powerful data development platform, is uniquely positioned to support the complex data needs of healthcare decision-making applications. It can seamlessly integrate diverse data types, from FHIR-formatted clinical data to unstructured text and real-time sensor data, in a single platform. By integrating MongoDB with Large Language Models (LLMs), healthcare organizations can create intuitive, AI-enhanced interfaces for data retrieval and analysis. This integration not only reduces the cognitive load on clinicians but also enables them to access and interpret patient data more efficiently, focusing their efforts on patient care rather than navigating complex data systems. MongoDB's scalability ensures that healthcare organizations can manage growing data volumes efficiently, supporting the implementation of AI-driven decision support systems. These systems analyze patient data in real-time against extensive medical knowledge bases, providing clinicians with actionable insights and recommendations, thereby enhancing the quality and timeliness of care provided. MongoDB's Vector Search further enriches decision-making processes by enabling semantic search across vast datasets directly within the database. This integrated approach enables the application of pre-filters based on extensive metadata, enhancing the efficiency and relevance of search results without the need to synchronize with dedicated search engines or vector stores, meaning healthcare professionals can utilize previously undiscoverable insights, streamlining the identification of relevant information and patterns. Clinical trials and precision medicine The need for innovation and transformation isn’t just limited to the patient-provider-healthcare system experience. The challenges of conducting clinical trials and advancing precision medicine are significant, from identifying and enrolling suitable participants to data management practices are fraught with the potential for errors, compromising the accuracy and reliability of trial outcomes. Moreover, the traditional one-size-fits-all approach to treatment development fails to address the unique genetic makeup of individual patients, limiting the effectiveness of therapeutic interventions. AI can make clinical trials faster and treatments more personalized. It's like having a super-smart assistant that can quickly find the right people for studies, keep track of all the data without making mistakes, and even predict which medicines will work best for different people. This means doctors can create safe, efficient treatments that fit you perfectly, just like a tailor-made suit. Plus, with AI's help, these custom treatments can be developed quicker and be more affordable, bringing us closer to a future where everyone gets the care they need, designed just for them. It's a big step towards making medicine not just about treating sickness but about creating health plans that are as unique as patients are. MongoDB plays a pivotal role in modernizing clinical trials and advancing precision medicine by addressing complex data challenges. Its flexible data model excels in integrating diverse data types, from EHRs and genomic data to real-time patient monitoring streams. This capability is crucial for clinical trials and precision medicine, where combining various data sources is necessary, sometimes through a project purpose ODL, to develop a comprehensive understanding of patient health and treatment responses. For clinical trials, MongoDB can streamline participant selection by efficiently managing and querying vast datasets to identify candidates who meet specific criteria, significantly reducing the recruitment time. Its ability to handle large-scale, complex datasets in real-time also facilitates the dynamic monitoring of trial participants, enhancing the safety and accuracy of trials. Other notable use cases Patient Flow Optimization and Emergency Department Efficiency: AI algorithms can process historical and real-time data to forecast patient volumes, predict bed availability, and identify optimal staffing levels, enabling proactive resource allocation and patient routing. Virtual Health Assistants for Chronic Disease Management: Utilizing AI-powered virtual assistants to monitor patients' health status, provide personalized advice, and support medication adherence for chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension. AI-Enhanced Digital Pathology and Medical Imaging: Build modern VNA (Vendor Neutral Archive and Digital pathology solutions with innovative approaches, dealing with interoperable data, and manage extensive metadata associated with all your resources enabling fast findings and automated annotations. Operational Efficiency in Hospital Resource Management: Implementing AI to optimize hospital operations, from staff scheduling to inventory management, ensuring resources are used efficiently and patient care is prioritized. Learn more about AI use cases for top industries in our new ebook, How Leading Industries are Transforming with AI and MongoDB Atlas .

April 22, 2024

Transforming Industries with MongoDB and AI: Insurance

This is the fifth in a six-part series focusing on critical AI use cases across several industries . The series covers the manufacturing and motion, financial services, retail, telecommunications and media, insurance, and healthcare industries. With its ability to streamline processes, enhance decision-making, and improve customer experiences in far less time, resources, and staff than traditional IT systems, artificial intelligence offers insurers great promise. In an inherently information-driven industry, insurance companies ingest, analyze, and process massive amounts of data. Whether it’s agents and brokers selling more policies, underwriters adequately pricing, renewing and steering product portfolios, claim handlers adjudicating claims, or service representatives providing assurance and support, data is at the heart of it all. Given the volumes of data, and the amount of decision-making that needs to occur based on it, insurance companies have a myriad of technologies and IT support staff within their technology investment portfolios. It’s no surprise that AI is at the top of the list when it comes to current or prospective IT investments. With its ability to streamline processes, enhance decision-making, and improve customer experiences with far less time, resources, and staff than traditional IT systems, AI offers insurers great promise. Underwriting & risk management Few roles within insurance are as important as that of the underwriters who strike the right balance between profit and risk, bring real-world variables to the actuarial models at the heart of the insurer, and help steer product portfolios, markets, pricing, and coverages. Achieving equilibrium between exposures and premiums means constantly gathering and analyzing information from a myriad of sources to build a risk profile sufficient and detailed enough to make effective policy decisions. While many well-established insurers have access to a wealth of their own underwriting and claims experience data, integrating newer and real-time sources of information, keeping up with regulatory changes, and modeling out what-if risk scenarios still involve significant manual effort. Perhaps the single greatest advantage of AI will be its ability to quickly analyze more information with fewer people and resources. The long-term impact will likely be profound, and there is tremendous promise within underwriting. Advanced analytics: Traditional IT systems are slow to respond to changing formats and requirements surrounding data retrieval. The burden falls on the underwriter to summarize data and turn that into information and insight. Large Language Models are now being leveraged to help speed up the process of wrangling data sources and summarizing the results, helping underwriting teams make quicker decisions from that data. Workload and triage assistance: AI models are mitigating seasonal demands, market shifts, and even staff availability that impact the workload and productivity of underwriting teams, saving underwriting time for high-value accounts and customers where their expertise is truly needed. Amid high volumes for new and renewal underwriting, traditional AI models can help classify and triage risk, sending very low-risk policies to ‘touchless’ automated workflows, low to moderate risk to trained service center staff, and high-risk and high-value accounts to dedicated underwriters. Decision-making support: Determining if a quoted rate needs adjustment before binding and issuing can take significant time and manual effort. So can preparing and issuing renewals of existing policies, another large portion of the underwriters’ day-to-day responsibilities. Automated underwriting workflows leveraging AI are being employed to analyze and classify risk with far less manual effort. This frees up significant time and intellectual capital for the underwriter. Check out our machine learning solutions page to learn more about automated digital underwriting. Vast amounts of data analyzed by underwriters are kept on the underwriter's desktop rather than IT-managed databases. MongoDB offers an unparalleled ability to store data from a vast amount of sources and formats and deliver the ability to respond quickly to requests to ingest new data. As data and requirements change, the Document Model allows insurers to simply add more data and fields without the costly change cycle associated with databases that rely on single, fixed structures. For every major business entity found within the underwriting process, such as a broker, policy, account, and claim, there is a wealth of unstructured data sources, waiting to be leveraged by generative AI. MongoDB offers insurers a platform that consolidates complex data from legacy systems, builds new applications, and extends those same data assets to AI-augmented workflows. By eliminating the need for niche databases for these AI-specific workloads, MongoDB reduces technology evaluation and onboarding time, development time, and developer friction. Claim processing Efficient claim processing is critical for an insurer. Timely resolution of a claim and good communication and information transparency throughout the process is key to maintaining positive relationships and customer satisfaction. In addition, insurers are on the hook to pay and process claims according to jurisdictional regulations and requirements, which may include penalties for failing to comply with specific timelines and stipulations. To process a claim accurately, a wealth of information is needed. A typical automobile accident may include not only verbal and written descriptions from claimants and damage appraisers but also unstructured content from police reports, traffic and vehicle dashboard cameras, photos, and even vehicle telemetry data. Aligning the right technology and the right amount of your workforce in either single or multi-claimant scenarios is crucial to meeting the high demands of claim processing. Taming the flood of data: AI is helping insurers accelerate the process of making sense of a trove of data and allowing insurers to do so in real-time. From Natural Language Processing to image classification and vector embedding, all the pieces of the puzzle are now on the board for insurers to make a generation leap forward when it comes to transforming their IT systems and business workflows for faster information processing. Claims experience: Generating accurate impact assessments for catastrophic events in a timely fashion to inform the market of your exposure can now be done with far less time, and with far more accuracy, by cross-referencing real-time and historical claims experience data, thanks to the power of Generative AI and vector-embedding of unstructured data. Claim expediter: Using vector embeddings from photo, text, and voice sources, insurers are now able to decorate inbound claims with richer and more insightful metadata so that they can more quickly classify, triage, and route work. In addition, real-time insight into workload and staff skills and availability is allowing insurers to be even more prescriptive when it comes to work assignments, driving towards higher output and higher customer satisfaction. Litigation assistance: Claims details are not always black and white, parties do not always act in good faith, and insurers expend significant resources in the pursuit of resolving matters. AI is helping insurers drive to resolution faster and even avoid litigation and subrogation altogether, thanks to its ability to help us analyze more data more effectively and more quickly. Risk prevention: Many insurers provide risk-assessment services to customers using drones, sensors, or cameras, to capture and analyze data. This data offers the promise of preventing losses altogether for customers and lowering exposures, liability, and expenses for the insurer. This is possible thanks to a combination of vector-embedding, traditional, and generative AI models. Learn more about AI-enhanced claim adjustment for automotive insurance on our solutions page. Customer experience Accessing information consistently during a customer service interaction, and expecting the representative to quickly interpret it, are perennial challenges with any customer service desk. Add in the volume, variety, and complexity of information within insurance, and it’s easy to understand why many insurers are investing heavily in the transformation of their customer experience call center systems and processes. 24/7 virtual assistance: As with many AI-based chat agents, the advantage is that it can free up your call center staff to work on more complex and high-touch cases. Handling routine inquiries can now include far more complex scenarios than before, thanks to the power of vector-embedded content and Large Language Models. Claims assistance: Generative AI can deliver specific claim-handling guidelines to claim-handling staff in real time, while traditional ML models can interrogate real-time streams of collected information to alert either the customer or the claim-handler to issues with quality, content, or compliance. AI capabilities allow insurers to process more claims more quickly and significantly reduce errors or incomplete information. Customer profiles: Every interaction is an opportunity to learn more about your customers. Technologies such as voice-to-text streaming, vector embedding, and generative AI help insurers build out a more robust ‘social profile’ of their customers in near real-time. Real-time fraud detection: According to estimates from the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud , the U.S. insurance industry lost over $308 billion to fraud in 2022. With vector-embedding of unstructured data sources, semantic and similarity searches across both vector and structured metadata, and traditional machine learning models, insurers can detect and prevent fraud in ways that were simply not ever before possible. Other notable use cases Predictive Analytics: AI-powered predictive analytics can anticipate customer needs, preferences, and behaviors based on historical data and trends. By leveraging predictive models, insurers can identify at-risk customers, anticipate churn, and proactively engage with customers to prevent issues and enhance satisfaction. Crop Insurance and Precision Farming: AI is being used in agricultural insurance to assess crop health, predict yields, and mitigate risks associated with weather events and crop diseases, which helps insurers offer more accurate and tailored crop insurance products to farmers. Predictive Maintenance for Property Insurance: AI-powered predictive maintenance solutions, leveraging IoT sensors installed in buildings and infrastructure, are used in property insurance to prevent losses and minimize damage to insured properties. Usage-Based Insurance (UBI) for Commercial Fleets: AI-enabled telematics devices installed in commercial vehicles collect data on driving behavior, including speed, acceleration, braking, and location. Machine learning algorithms analyze this data to assess risk and determine insurance premiums for commercial fleets to help promote safer driving practices, reduce accidents, and lower insurance costs for businesses. Learn more about AI use cases for top industries in our new ebook, How Leading Industries are Transforming with AI and MongoDB Atlas. Read the full ebook here .

April 11, 2024

Transforming Industries with MongoDB and AI: Financial Services

This is the fourth in a six-part series focusing on critical AI use cases across several industries . The series covers the manufacturing and motion, financial services, retail, telecommunications and media, insurance, and healthcare industries. In the dynamic world of financial services, the partnership between artificial intelligence (AI) and banking services is reshaping traditional practices, offering innovative solutions across critical functions. Relationship management support with chatbots One key service that relationship managers provide to their private banking customers is aggregating and condensing information. Because banks typically operate on fragmented infrastructure with information spread across different departments, solutions, and applications, this can require a lot of detailed knowledge about this infrastructure and how to source information such as: When are the next coupon dates for bonds in the portfolio? What has been the cost of transactions for a given portfolio? What would be a summary of our latest research? Please generate a summary of my conversation with the client. Until now, these activities would be highly manual and exploratory. For example, a relationship manager (RM) looking for the next coupon dates would likely have to go into each of the clients' individual positions and manually look up the coupon dates. If this is a frequent enough activity, the RM could raise a request for change with the product manager of the portfolio management software to add this as a standardized report. But even if such a standardized report existed, the RM might struggle to find the report quickly. Overall, the process is time-consuming. Generative AI systems can facilitate such tasks. Even without specifically trained models, RAG can be used to have the AI generate the correct answers, provide the inquirer with a detailed explanation of how to get to the data, and, in the same cases directly execute the query against the system and report back the results. Similar to a human, it is critical that the algorithm has access to not only the primary business data, e.g. the portfolio data of the customer, but also user manuals and static data. Detailed customer data, in machine-readable format and as text documents, is used to personalize the output for the individual customer. In an interactive process, the RM can instruct the AI to add more information about specific topics, tweak the text, or make any other necessary changes. Ultimately, the RM will be the quality control for the AI’s output to mitigate hallucinations or information gaps. As outlined above, not only will the AI need highly heterogeneous data from highly structured portfolio information to text documents and system manuals to provide a flexible natural language interface for the RMs, it will also have to have timely processing information about a customer's transactions, positions, and investment objectives. Providing transactional database capabilities as well as vector search makes it easy to build RAG-based applications using MongoDB’s developer data platform. Risk management and regulatory compliance Risk and fraud prevention Banks are tasked with safeguarding customer assets and detecting fraud , verifying customer identities, supporting sanctions regimes (Sanctions), and preventing various illegal activities (AML). The challenge is magnified by the sheer volume and complexity of regulations, making the integration of new rules into bank infrastructure costly, time-consuming, and often inadequate. For instance, when the EU's Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive was implemented, it broadened regulations to cover virtual currencies and prepaid cards . Banks had to update their onboarding processes swiftly, and software, train staff, and possibly update their customer interfaces to comply with these new requirements. AI offers a transformative approach to fraud detection and risk management by automating the interpretation of regulations, supporting data cleansing, and enhancing the efficacy of surveillance systems. Unlike static, rules-based frameworks that may miss or misidentify fraud due to narrow scope or limited data, AI can adaptively learn and analyze vast datasets to identify suspicious activities more accurately. Machine learning, in particular, has shown promise in trade surveillance, offering a more dynamic and comprehensive approach to fraud prevention. Regulatory compliance and code change assistance The regulatory landscape for banks has grown increasingly complex, demanding significant resources for the implementation of numerous regulations. Traditionally, adapting to new regulations has required the manual translation of legal text into code, provisioning of data, and thorough quality control—a process that is both costly and time-consuming, often leading to incomplete or insufficient compliance. For instance, to comply with the Basel III international banking regulations , developers must undertake extensive coding changes to accommodate the requirements laid out in thousands of pages of documentation. AI has the capacity to revolutionize compliance by automating the translation of regulatory texts into actionable data requirements and validating compliance through intelligent analysis. This approach is not without its challenges, as AI-based systems may produce non-deterministic outcomes and unexpected errors. However, the ability to rapidly adapt to new regulations and provide detailed records of compliance processes can significantly enhance regulatory adherence. Financial document search and summarization Financial institutions, encompassing both retail banks and capital market firms, handle a broad spectrum of documents critical to their operations. Retail banks focus on contracts, policies, credit memos, underwriting documents, and regulatory filings, which are pivotal for daily banking services. On the other hand, capital market firms delve into company filings, transcripts, reports, and intricate data sets to grasp global market dynamics and risk assessments. These documents often arrive in unstructured formats, presenting challenges in efficiently locating and synthesizing the necessary information. While retail banks aim to streamline customer and internal operations, capital market firms prioritize the rapid and effective analysis of diverse data to inform their investment strategies. Both retail banks and capital market firms allocate considerable time to searching for and condensing information from documents internally, resulting in reduced direct engagement with their clients. Generative AI can streamline the process of finding and integrating information from documents by using NLP and machine learning to understand and summarize content. This reduces the need for manual searches, allowing bank staff to access relevant information more quickly. MongoDB can store vast amounts of both live and historical data, regardless of its format, which is typically needed for AI applications. It offers Vector Search capabilities essential for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). MongoDB supports transactions, ensuring data accuracy and consistency for AI model retraining with live data. It facilitates data access for both deterministic algorithms and AI-driven rules through a single interface. MongoDB boasts a strong partnership ecosystem , including companies like Radiant AI and Mistral AI, to speed solution development. ESG analysis Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations can have a profound impact on organizations. For example, regulatory changes—especially in Europe—have compelled financial institutions to integrate ESG into investment and lending decisions. Regulations such as the EU Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) and the EU Taxonomy Regulation are examples of such directives that require financial institutions to consider environmental sustainability in their operations and investment products. Investors' demand for sustainable options has surged, leading to increased ESG-focused funds. The regulatory and commercial requirements, in turn, drive banks to also improve their green lending practices . This shift is strategic for financial institutions, attracting clients, managing risks, and creating long-term value. However, financial institutions face many challenges in managing different aspects of improving their ESG analysis. The key challenges include defining and aligning standards and processes and managing the flood of rapidly changing and varied data to be included for ESG analysis purposes. AI can help to address these key challenges in not only an automatic but also adaptive manner via techniques like machine learning. Financial institutions and ESG solution providers have already leveraged AI to extract insights from corporate reports, social media, and environmental data, improving the accuracy and depth of ESG analysis. As the market demands a more sustainable and equitable society, predictive AI combined with generative AI can also help to reduce bias in lending to create fairer and more inclusive financing while improving the predictive powers. The power of AI can help facilitate the development of sophisticated sustainability models and strategies, marking a leap forward in integrating ESG into broader financial and corporate practices. Credit scoring The convergence of alternative data, artificial intelligence, and generative AI is reshaping the foundations of credit scoring, marking a pivotal moment in the financial industry. The challenges of traditional models are being overcome by adopting alternative credit scoring methods, offering a more inclusive and nuanced assessment. Generative AI, while introducing the potential challenge of hallucination, represents the forefront of innovation, not only revolutionizing technological capabilities but fundamentally redefining how credit is evaluated, fostering a new era of financial inclusivity, efficiency, and fairness. The use of artificial intelligence, in particular generative artificial intelligence, as an alternative method to credit scoring has emerged as a transformative force to address the challenges of traditional credit scoring methods for several reasons: Alternative data analysis: AI models can process a myriad of information, including alternative data such as utility payments and rental history, to create a more comprehensive assessment of an individual's creditworthiness. AI offers unparalleled adaptability : As economic conditions change and consumer behaviors evolve, AI-powered models can quickly adjust. Fraud detection: AI algorithms can detect fraudulent behavior by identifying anomalies and suspicious patterns in credit applications and transaction data. Predictive analysts: AI algorithms, particularly ML techniques, can be used to build predictive models that identify patterns and correlations in historical credit data. Behavioral analysis: AI algorithms can analyze behavioral data sets to understand financial habits and risk propensity. By harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, lenders can make more informed lending decisions, expand access to credit, and better serve consumers (especially those with limited credit history). However, to mitigate potential biases and ensure consumer trust, it's crucial to ensure transparency, fairness, and regulatory compliance when deploying artificial intelligence in credit scoring. AI in payments A lack of developer capacity is one of the biggest challenges for banks when delivering payment product innovation. Banks believe the product enhancements they could not deliver in the past two years due to resource constraints would have supported a 5.3% growth in payments revenues . With this in mind and the revolutionary transformation with the integration of AI, it is imperative to consider how to free up developer resources to make the most of these opportunities. There are several areas in which banks can apply AI to unlock new revenue streams and efficiency gains. The image below provides a high-level view of eight of the principal themes and areas. This is not an exhaustive view but does demonstrate the depth and breadth of current opportunities. In each example, there are already banks that have begun to bring services or enhancements to the market using AI technologies or are otherwise experimenting with the technology. Learn more about AI use cases for top industries in our new ebook, How Leading Industries are Transforming with AI and MongoDB Atlas .

April 4, 2024

Transforming Industries with MongoDB and AI: Retail

This is the third in a six-part series focusing on critical AI use cases across several industries . The series covers the manufacturing and motion, financial services, retail, telecommunications and media, insurance, and healthcare industries. With generative AI, retailers can create new products and offerings, define and implement upsell strategies, generate marketing materials based on market conditions, and enhance customer experiences. One of the most creative uses of gen AI help retailers understand customer needs and choices that change continually with seasons, trends, and socio-economic shifts. By analyzing customer data and behavior, gen AI can also create personalized product recommendations, customized marketing materials, and unique shopping experiences that are tailored to individual preferences. AI plays a critical role in decision-making at retail enterprises; product decisions such as design, pricing, demand forecasting, and distribution strategies require a complex understanding of a vast array of information from across the organization. To ensure that the right products in the right quantities are in the right place at the right time, back-office teams leverage machine learning arithmetic algorithms. As technology has advanced and the barrier to adopting AI has lowered, retailers are moving towards data-driven decision-making where AI is leveraged in real-time. generative AI is used to consolidate information and provide dramatic insights that could be immediately utilized across the enterprise. AI-augmented search and vector search Modern retail is a customer-centric business, and customers have more choice than ever in where they purchase a product. To retain and grow their customer base, retailers are working to offer compelling, personalized experiences to customers. To do this, it is necessary to capture a large amount of data on the customers themselves—like their buying patterns, interests, and interactions—and to quickly use that data to make complex decisions. One of the key interactions in an ecommerce experience is search. With full-text search engines, customers can easily find items that match their search, and retailers can rank those results in a way that will give the customer the best option. In previous iterations of personalization, decisions on how to rank search results in a personalized way were made by segmentation of customers through data acquisition from various operational systems, moving it all into a data warehouse, and then running machine learning algorithms on the data. Typically, this would run every 24 hours or a few days, in batches, so that the next time a customer logged in, they’d have a personalized experience. This did not, however, capture the customer intent in real-time, as intent evolves as the customer gathers more information. These days, modern retailers augment search ranking with data from real-time responses and analytics from AI algorithms. It's also now possible to incorporate factors like the current shopping cart/basket and customer clickstream or trending purchases across shoppers. The first step in truly understanding the customer is to build a customer data platform that combines data from disparate systems and silos across an organization: support, ecommerce transactions, in-store interactions, wish lists, reviews, and more. MongoDB’s flexible document model allows for the easy combination of data of different types and formats with the ability to embed sub-documents to get a clear view of the customer in one place. As the retailer captures more data points about the customer, they can easily add fields without the need for downtime in schema change. Next, the capability to run analytics in real-time rather than retroactively in another separate system is built. MongoDB’s architecture allows for workload isolation, meaning the operational workload (the customer's actions on the ecommerce site) and the analytical or AI workload (calculating what the next best offer should be) can be run simultaneously without interrupting the other. Then using MognoDB’s aggregation framework for advanced analytical queries or triggering an AI model in real time to give an answer that can be embedded into the search ranking in real time. Then comes the ability to easily update the search indexing to incorporate your AI augmentation. As MongoDB has Search built in, this whole flow can be completed in one data platform- as your data is being augmented with AI results, the search indexing will sync to match. MongoDB Atlas Vector Search brings the next generation of search capability. By using LLMs to create vector embeddings for each product and then turning on a vector index, retailers can offer semantic search to their customers. AI will calculate the complex similarities between items in vector space and give the customer a unique set of results matched to their true desire. Figure 1: The architecture of an AI-enhanced search engine explaining the different MongoDB Atlas components and Databricks notebooks and workflows used for data cleaning and preparation, product scoring, dynamic pricing, and vector search Figure 2: The architecture of a vector search solution showcasing how the data flows through the different integrated components of MongoDB Atlas and Databricks Demand forecasting and predictive analytics Retailers either develop homegrown applications for demand prediction using traditional machine learning models or buy specialized products designed to provide these insights across the segments for demand prediction and forecasting. The homegrown systems require significant infrastructure for data and machine learning implementation and dedicated technical expertise to develop, manage, and maintain them. More often than not, these systems require constant care to ensure optimal performance and provide value to the businesses. Generative AI already delivers several solutions for demand prediction for retailers by enhancing the accuracy and granularity of forecasts. The application of retrieval augmented generation utilizing large language models (LLMs) enables retailers to generate specific product demand and dig deeper to go to product categories and individual store levels. This not only streamlines distribution but also contributes to a more tailored fulfillment at a store level. The integration of gen AI in demand forecasting not only optimizes inventory management but also fosters a more dynamic and customer-centric approach in the retail industry. Generative AI can be used to enhance supply chain efficiency by accurately predicting demand for products, optimizing/coordinating with production schedules, and ensuring adequate inventory levels in warehouses or distribution centers. Data requirements for such endeavors include historical sales data, customer orders, and current multichannel sales data and trends. This information can be integrated with external datasets, such as weather patterns and events that could impact demand. This data must be consolidated in an operational data layer that is cleansed for obvious reasons of avoiding wrong predictions. Subsequently, feature engineering to extract seasonality, promotions impact, and general economic indicators. A retrieval augmented generation model can be incorporated to improve demand forecasting predictions and avoid hallucinations. The same datasets could be utilized from historical data to train and fine-tune the model for improved accuracy. Such efforts lead to the following business benefits: Precision in demand forecasting Optimized product and supply planning Efficiency improvement Enhanced customer satisfaction Across the retail industry, AI has captured the imaginations of executives and consumers alike. Whether you’re a customer of a grocer, ecommerce site, or retail conglomerate, AI has and will continue to transform and enhance how you do business with corporations. For the retailers that matter most globally, AI has created opportunities to minimize risk and fraud, perfect user experiences, and save companies from wasting labor and resources. From creation to launch, MongoDB Atlas guarantees that AI applications are cemented in accurate operational data and that they deliver the scalability, security, and performance demanded by developers and consumers alike. Learn more about AI use cases for top industries in our new ebook, Enhancing Retail Operations with AI and Vector Search: The Business Case for Adoption .

March 29, 2024

Transforming Industries with MongoDB and AI: Telecommunications and Media

This is the second in a six-part series focusing on critical AI use cases across the manufacturing and motion, financial services, retail, telecommunications and media, insurance, and healthcare industries. Read part one here. The telecommunications industry operates in a landscape characterized by tight profit margins, particularly in commoditized communication and connectivity services where differentiation is minimal. With offerings such as voice, data, and internet access being largely homogeneous, telecom companies need to differentiate and diversify revenue streams to create value and stand out in the market. As digital natives disrupt traditional business models with agile and innovative approaches, established companies are not only competing among themselves but also with newcomers to deliver enhanced customer experiences and adapt to evolving consumer demands. To thrive in an environment where advanced connectivity is increasingly expected, telecom operators must prioritize cost efficiency in their Operations Support Systems (OSS) and Business Support Systems (BSS), elevate customer service standards, and enhance overall customer experiences to secure market share and gain a competitive edge. They’re not alone — media publishers, too, must streamline operations through automation while strengthening reader relationships to foster a willingness to pay for personalized and relevant content. Service assurance Telecommunications providers need to deliver network services at optimal quality and performance levels to meet customer expectations and service level agreements. Key aspects of service assurance include performance monitoring, quality of service (QoS) management, and predictive analytics to anticipate potential service degradation or network failures before they occur. With the increasing complexity of telecommunications networks and the growing expectations of customers for high-quality, always-on services, a new bar has been set for service assurance, requiring companies to invest heavily in solutions that can automate and optimize these processes and maintain a competitive edge. Service assurance is revolutionized by artificial intelligence (AI) through several key capabilities: Machine learning (ML) can be a powerful foundation for predictive maintenance, analyzing patterns, and predicting network failures before they occur, allowing for preemptive maintenance and significantly reducing downtime; AI techniques can also sift through complex network systems to accurately identify the root causes of issues, improving the effectiveness of troubleshooting efforts; and, with network optimization, analyzing log data to identify opportunities for improvement, raising efficiency and thus reducing operational costs and optimizing network performance in real-time. MongoDB Atlas ’s JSON-based document model is the ideal data foundation to underpin intelligent applications. It enables developers to store log data from various systems without the need for time-intensive upfront data normalization efforts and with the flexibility to deal with a wide variety of different data structures, even as they change over time. By vectorizing the data with an appropriate ML model, it's possible to reflect the healthy system state and identify log information that shows abnormal system behavior. Atlas Vector Search allows for conducting the required K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) search in an effective way and as a fully included service of the MongoDB Atlas developer data platform . Finally, using LLM, information about the error, including the analysis of the root cause, can be expressed in natural language, making the job of understanding and fixing the problem much easier for the staff who are in charge of maintenance. Fraud detection and prevention Telecom providers today are utilizing an advanced array of techniques for detecting and preventing fraud, constantly adjusting to the dynamic nature of threat actors. Routine activities for detecting fraud consist of tracking unusual call trends and data usage, along with safeguarding against SIM swap incidents, a method frequently used for identity theft. To prevent fraud, strategies are applied at various levels, starting with stringent verification for new customers during SIM swaps or for transactions with elevated risk, taking into account the unique risk profile of each customer. Machine learning offers telecommunications companies a powerful tool to enhance their fraud detection and prevention capabilities by training ML models on historical data like call detail records (CDR). Moreover, these algorithms can assess the individual risk profile of each customer, tailoring detection and prevention strategies to their specific patterns of use. The models can adapt over time, learning from new data and emerging fraud tactics, thus enabling real-time detection and the automation of fraud prevention measures, reducing manual checks, and speeding up response times. To succeed in fraud detection, many data dimensions need to be considered, making the reaction time a critical factor in preventing the worst things from happening. So, the solution must also support fast, sub-second decisions. By vectorizing the data with an appropriate ML model, normal (healthy) business can be defined, and in turn, deviations from the norm identified, such as suspicious user activities. In addition to Atlas Vector Search, the MongoDB Query API supports stream processing , simplifying data ingestion from various sources and detecting fraud in real-time. Content discovery Today’s media organizations are expected to offer a high degree of content personalization, from streaming services to online publications and more. Viewers want intelligently selected and suggested content tailored to their interests. Using AI can significantly enhance the process of suggesting the next best article to read or show to stream. The most powerful implementations of content personalization track the behavior of the user, such as what content was searched for, how long was content displayed before the next click happened, and the categories the search falls under. Based on these parameters, similar content can be presented, or, as an alternative strategy, content from unseen areas of the portal so the user may discover new types of media and decide if they like it. To bring the right content to the right people at the right time, an automated system needs to maintain a multitude of information facets, which will lay the foundation for proper suggestions. With MongoDB and its document model, all required data points can be easily and flexibly stored in a user’s profile, in content, and in media. Ultimately, by vectorizing the content, an even more powerful system of content suggestions can be built with Atlas Vector Search, which allows for a similarity search that goes well beyond comparing just keywords or a list of attributes. Other notable use cases Differential Pricing: Gather insights into what customers are willing to spend on content or a service by conducting A/B tests and analyzing the data with an ML algorithm. This method facilitates the adoption of dynamic pricing models instead of sticking to a standard price list, thereby enhancing revenue and increasing the paying customer base. Content Summarization and Reformatting: Design a smart assistant tailored for writers, capable of providing automatic suggestions for content summaries, identifying suitable SEO keywords, and adapting articles for various specific audiences. Search Generative Experiences (SGE): Provide more dynamic, personalized, and contextually relevant search results, thus making information retrieval not only more efficient but also more engaging and useful. This can include personalization and summarization elements, as well. In conclusion, the telecommunications industry faces challenges of differentiation and revenue diversification amidst commoditized services and disruptive market forces. To thrive, telecom operators must prioritize cost efficiency, elevate customer service, and enhance experiences. Leveraging AI, MongoDB Atlas offers solutions like service assurance, fraud detection, and content discovery, empowering companies to navigate the complexities of the digital landscape, innovate, and deliver value-added services. From predictive maintenance to personalized content recommendations, MongoDB Atlas stands as a foundational tool for telecom and media companies, driving efficiency, agility, and competitiveness in a rapidly evolving market. Learn more about AI use cases for top industries in our new white paper, “ How Leading Industries are Transforming with AI and MongoDB Atlas .”

March 22, 2024

Transforming Industries with MongoDB and AI: Manufacturing and Motion

This is the first in a six-part series focusing on critical AI use cases across several industries . The series covers the manufacturing and motion, financial services, retail, telecommunications and media, insurance, and healthcare industries. The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) within the manufacturing and automotive industries has transformed the conventional value chain, presenting a spectrum of opportunities. Leveraging Industrial IoT, companies now collect extensive data from assets, paving the way for analytical insights and unlocking novel AI use cases, including enhanced inventory management and predictive maintenance. Inventory management Efficient supply chains can control operational costs and ensure on-time delivery to their customers. Inventory optimization and management is a key component in achieving these goals. Managing and optimizing inventory levels, planning for fluctuations in demand, and of course, cutting costs are all imperative goals. However, efficient inventory management for manufacturers presents complex data challenges too, primarily in forecasting demand accurately and optimizing stock levels. This is where AI can help. Figure 1: Gen AI-enabled demand forecasting with MongoDB Atlas AI algorithms can be used to analyze complex datasets to predict future demand for products or parts. Improvement in demand forecasting accuracy is crucial for maintaining optimal inventory levels. AI-based time series forecasting can assist in adapting to rapid changes in customer demand. Once the demand is known, AI can play a pivotal role in stock optimization. By analyzing historical sales data and market trends, manufacturers can determine the most efficient stock levels and even reduce human error. On top of all this existing potential, generative AI can help with generating synthetic inventory data and seasonally adjusted demand patterns. It can also help with creating scenarios to simulate supply chain disruptions. MongoDB Atlas makes this process simple. At the warehouse, the inventory can be scanned using a mobile device. This data is persisted in Atlas Device SDK and synced with Atlas using Device Sync, which is used by MongoDB customers like Grainger . Atlas Device Sync provides an offline-first seamless mobile experience for inventory tracking, making sure that inventory data is always accurate in Atlas. Once data is in Atlas, it can serve as the central repository for all inventory-related data. This repository becomes the source of data for inventory management AI applications, eliminating data silos and improving visibility into overall inventory levels and movements. Using Atlas Vector Search and generative AI, manufacturers can easily categorize products based on their seasonal attributes, cluster products with similar seasonal demand patterns, and provide context to the foundation model to improve the accuracy of synthetic inventory data generation. Predictive maintenance The most basic approach to maintenance today is reactive — assets are deliberately allowed to operate until failures actually occur. The assets are maintained as needed, making it challenging to anticipate repairs. Preventive maintenance, however, allows systems or components to be replaced based on a conservative schedule to prevent commonly occurring failures — although predictive maintenance is expensive to implement due to frequent replacement of parts before end-of-life. Figure 2: Audio-based anomaly detection with MongoDB Atlas. Scan the QR code to try it out yourself. AI offers a chance to efficiently implement predictive maintenance using data collected from IoT sensors on machinery trained to detect anomalies. ML/AI algorithms like regression models or decision trees are trained on the preprocessed data, deployed on-site for inference, and continuously analyzed sensor data. When anomalies are detected, alerts are generated to notify maintenance personnel, enabling proactive planning and execution of maintenance actions to minimize downtime and optimize equipment reliability and performance. A retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architecture can be deployed to generate or curate the data preprocessor removing the need for specialized data science knowledge. The domain expert can provide the right prompts for the large language model. Once the maintenance alert is generated by an AI model, generative AI can come in again to suggest a repair strategy, taking spare parts inventory data, maintenance budget, and personal availability into consideration. Finally, the repair manuals can be vectorized and used to power a chatbot application that guides the technician in performing the actual repair. MongoDB documents are inherently flexible while allowing data governance when required. Since machine health prediction models require not just sensor data but also maintenance history and inventory data, the document model is a perfect fit to model such disparate data sources. During the maintenance and support process of a physical product, information such as product information and replacement parts documentation must be available and easily accessible to support staff. Full-text search capabilities provided by Atlas Search can be integrated with the support portal and help staff retrieve information from Atlas clusters with ease. Atlas Vector Search is a foundational element for effective and efficiently powered predictive maintenance models. Manufacturers can use MongoDB Atlas to explore ways of simplifying machine diagnostics. Audio files can be recorded from machines, which can then be vectorized and searched to retrieve similar cases. Once the cause is identified, they can use RAG to implement a chatbot interface that the technician can interact with and get context-aware, step-by-step guidance on how to perform the repair. Autonomous driving With the rise of connected vehicles, automotive manufacturers have been compelled to transform their business models into software-first organizations. The data generated by connected vehicles is used to create better driver assistance systems, paving the way for autonomous driving applications. However, it is challenging to create fully autonomous vehicles that can drive safer than humans. Some experts estimate that the technology to achieve level 5 autonomy is about 80% developed — but the remaining 20% will be extremely hard to achieve and will take a lot of time to perfect. Figure 3: MongoDB Atlas’s Role in Autonomous Driving AI-based image and object recognition in automotive applications face uncertainties, but manufacturers must utilize data from radar, LiDAR, cameras, and vehicle telemetry to improve AI model training. Modern vehicles act as data powerhouses, constantly gathering and processing information from onboard sensors and cameras, generating significant Big Data. Robust storage and analysis capabilities are essential to manage this data, while real-time analysis is crucial for making instantaneous decisions to ensure safe navigation. MongoDB can play a significant role in addressing these challenges. The document model is an excellent way to accommodate diverse data types such as sensor readings, telematics, maps, and model results. New fields to the documents can be added at run time, enabling the developers to easily add context to the raw telemetry data. MongoDB’s ability to handle large volumes of unstructured data makes it suitable for the constant influx of vehicle-generated information. Atlas Search provides a performant search engine to allow data scientists to iterate their perception AI models. Finally, Atlas Device Sync can be used to send configuration updates to the vehicle's advanced driving assistance system Other notable use cases AI plays a critical role in fulfilling the promise of Industry 4.0. Numerous other use cases of AI can be enabled by MongoDB Atlas, some of which include: Logistics Optimization: AI can help optimize routes resulting in reduced delays and enhanced efficiency in day-to-day delivery operations. Quality Control and Defect Detection: Computer or machine vision can be used to identify irregularities in the products as they are manufactured. This ensures that product standards are met with precision. Production Optimization: By analyzing time series data from sensors installed on production lines, waste can be identified and reduced, thereby improving throughput and efficiency. Smart After Sales Support: Manufacturers can utilize AI-driven chatbots and predictive analytics to offer proactive maintenance, troubleshooting, and personalized assistance to customers. Personalized Product Recommendations: AI can be used to analyze user behavior and preferences to deliver personalized product recommendations via a mobile or web app, enhancing customer satisfaction and driving sales. The integration of AI in manufacturing and automotive industries has revolutionized traditional processes, offering a plethora of opportunities for efficiency and innovation. With industrial IoT and advanced analytics, companies can now harness vast amounts of data to enhance inventory management and predictive maintenance. AI-driven demand forecasting ensures optimal stock levels, while predictive maintenance techniques minimize downtime and optimize equipment performance. Moreover, as automotive manufacturers work toward autonomous driving, AI-powered image recognition and real-time data analysis become paramount. MongoDB Atlas emerges as a pivotal solution, providing flexible document modeling and robust storage capabilities to handle the complexities of Industry 4.0. Beyond the manufacturing and automotive sectors, the potential of AI-enabled by MongoDB Atlas extends to logistics optimization, quality control, production efficiency, smart after-sales support, and personalized customer experiences, shaping the future of Industry 4.0 and beyond. Learn more about AI use cases for top industries in our new white paper, “ How Leading Industries are Transforming with AI and MongoDB Atlas .”

March 19, 2024