Capgemini launches ‘Perform AI’

A recent publication from the Capgemini Research Institute highlighted that a mix of anxiety and ill-informed opinion is obscuring the risks and opportunities of implementing AI. Organizations therefore need a pragmatic approach to move forward. In terms of anticipated demand, IDC forecasts cognitive and AI spend will grow to $52.2 billion in 2021 and achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 46.2% over the 2016-2021 forecast period.

Perform AI has been designed to address the real opportunities and the critical challenges which companies confront today, whatever their maturity on data management and AI:

·        Applying AI at scale: Moving beyond proofs-of-concept and isolated deployments to industrialize AI across the enterprise, scaling the business benefits throughout the organization.

·        Empowering people: Proactively managing the impact of AI initiatives on augmented workforces and seeking the best interactions between people and AI. 

·        Transforming operations and beyond: Applying AI-based technologies to assist, augment or automate operations, right through to reimagining business processes.

·        Embedding ethics: Applying AI with an ethical and responsible approach; one that is transparent to users and customers, embeds privacy, ensures fairness, and builds trust.

·        Spurring innovation for competitive advantage: Leveraging AI to introduce entirely new business models, ways of working, products, services, and experiences, offering legacy enterprises the opportunity to leapfrog their current market positions to ones previously reserved for digitally native enterprises only.

“Most companies have already started to experiment with AI to help them transform certain functions within their business, but those that adopt it effectively and throughout the enterprise will gain true competitive advantage,” comments Lanny Cohen, Group Chief Innovation Officer at Capgemini. “To realize true real-world impact and ensure sustained success, companies need to move beyond isolated initiatives to infusing AI into everything they do – from simply changing technologies to shifting the entire game. With Perform AI, we are laser-focused on applying AI to achieve mission-critical, high business impact, resulting in tangible performance outcomes for today and in the future.”

Capgemini’s Perform AI portfolio comprises four core components, affording vital flexibility needed for bespoke roadmaps through to rollout of AI at scale across a business:

1.    AI ACTIVATE: Creates the strategic direction and the organization and technology platforms for where and how AI should be applied and adopted in the enterprise for maximum impact.

2.    AI TRANSFORM: Delivers AI-infused performance improvements to optimize existing business processes and to create the springboard for long term growth by introducing the right AI technologies and solutions among the vast and rapidly expanding volume of tools and solutions.

3.    AI REIMAGINE: Draws upon the strategy and innovation capabilities within Capgemini Invent and Capgemini’s network of Applied Innovation Exchanges to help organizations envision new products and services, customer experiences, operating and business models, and revenue streams.

4.    AI ENGINEERING: Provides foundation services to ensure the enterprise’s data estate and governance deliver trusted AI solutions in production and at scale. AI Engineering addresses the operating core of AI – data underpins every stage of the transformation.

To concentrate asset and solution creation as well as expert capability development, Capgemini has created a network of cross-practice AI Centers of Excellence (CoEs). These Perform AI CoEs are now operational in France, Germany and North America, all supported by a hub CoE in India. Geographical coverage of the Perform AI CoEs will be extended throughout 2019.

Markets of primary focus for Perform AI are the Manufacturing and Financial Services sectors, as well as the Customer Experience domain. Capgemini has worked closely with its extensive ecosystem of technology partners, start-ups and academia to build AI solutions that help address these specific industry needs, including a Manufacturing intelligence platform leveraging computer vision for quality defects prevention and machine learning for failure detection; cognitive analytics to address multi-dimensional underwriting risk in the Financial Services sector; or natural language processing, conversational interfaces and computer-vision based emotions recognition to predict and understand consumers needs with unmatched certainty.

With data privacy and security emerging as some of the most important priorities for businesses, it is vital that companies balance their AI innovation with efforts to secure and maintain the trust of their customers, partners, and employees. Capgemini’s Perform AI portfolio focuses on the ability to secure data and AI platforms.

Building on its existing recognition as one of the world’s most ethical companies, Capgemini has integrated ethics into the foundations of its Perform AI portfolio.

“We have launched Perform AI to enable organizations to augment operations and potentially reinvent their business at a time when they are expected to regularly meet and exceed customers’ expectations that are higher and more diverse than ever before,” concludes Anne-Laure Thieullent, AI and Analytics Group Offer Leader, Capgemini. “Through the application of AI technologies, our Perform AI solutions will increase the speed of execution and certainty of success for our clients’ AI initiatives, which are sometimes still fragmented and not exploited to their full potential. With Perform AI and the follow up releases of this new portfolio, we are dedicated to becoming the premier AI-infused consulting and technology services company and are excited to take our clients to the next stage of their journey to the Intelligent Enterprise.”