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- [00:01]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
If there is anything contemporary society has demonstrated, it's that innovation is in the hands of the layman. Anyone can create, anyone can inspire. Anyone has the power to make a mark in the world through creative endeavors, especially through businesses. In 2024, the United States recorded over 30 million new businesses, with 99% of them being small or startup enterprises. It's a noticeable achievement. It means you've taken a risk, are willing to make an impact in the world, and want to provide society with some kind of unique service or product. But that being said, it's not an easy feat. And the process can sometimes feel overwhelming, especially when small business teams are made up of one or two people. At the very least. How do you manage your finances? How do you understand the best, most optimal development strategy? What about advertising? What's the pricing strategy there? Many of the technological innovations we've explored in previous episodes, like AI and automation, are resourceful solutions to serious struggles for new entrepreneurs. Others, like complex data analytics and machine learning, help businesses, both large and small, scale up and reduce efficiency problems. But if you really want to understand how emerging technology can help transform businesses, you'd probably have to look closer at the rising trend of business intelligence.
- [01:28]
Philip Martin
Ever wondered how businesses make those smart decisions you see every day? Like predicting trends, personalizing your shopping experience.
- [01:35]
Kieran Burke
Or even recommending the perfect playlist. That's where business intelligence and analytics, or BI and A comes in. In data visualization, the roll up of data is commonly conducted algorithmically and stored in memory. This makes the experience of BI far more plug and play in nature. And it also allows the business to answer one off questions in a much simpler way.
- [01:58]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
What is it? And how can it help savvy entrepreneurs keep an edge? I'm senior tech correspondent Samantha Murphy. Kelly. This is the next innovation in the world of business. It's not all just about profit margins and revenue. It's not just about marketing and the sales tactics. There's an intellect required to properly run a business. If a team is short staffed, how do you make sure you're efficiently organized? Naturally, in the old days, everything was conducted by hand, on paper, with pen or pencil. But over the course of history, we've witnessed the expansion and growth of technology, specifically capabilities that can help shape business related matters. Take for instance the calculator or Microsoft's Excel program. Their presence and impact on businesses has developed beyond their simple role as a tool. They are now a reliable asset for any business owner. But if these technologies span decades, what are the best emerging tools now?
- [02:57]
Kieran Burke
So what we're doing is working with some of the best, the breed off the shelf products that you'll know out there. And what we're doing is applying our own data to these models. So we're locking down the technology and then we're combining the technology with the data that we have so that we can then give really great insights back to our customers.
- [03:20]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
Kieran Burke is an Irish entrepreneur. He's the co founder and COO of Swoop, a platform that provides new and established businesses with tailored and personalized financial products. They help companies gauge their accessibility for loans. They study a company's data and help them determine the best options for investments, grants and more.
- [03:41]
Kieran Burke
Business owners come to Swoop every day. They connect their banking and their accounting information and from that we showcase them their credit position and then crucially what funding options they have. We look across lending, we across investments and we look across grants. So often businesses aren't aware of just how many funding options they have. So even within lending, there are so many different types of products that a business can access when running their business.
- [04:08]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
Swoop is like having a friend in finance, a resource that provides customizable information on business expertise. But this is the key. If the trends of the past were optimization, then we're now at the stage of personalization. This means technology can identify the best strategy for efficiency. It's like when algorithms predict your taste in music or determine your preferred social media content. It's a mix of tools and frameworks that help businesses flourish. AI and machine learning have been very buzzy terms in the last few years, but they've been around in some capacity for decades. The business intelligence market is predicted to hit $190 billion in 2028. Sunil Gupta is a professor at the Harvard Business School. For the last 15 years, he's been studying how technology and new innovations are shaping the way businesses develop and grow. I asked him about the biggest trends in business technology and he pointed his finger to data analytics. It's now one of the leading ways companies gauge what's at stake and, and what's important.
- [05:11]
Sunil Gupta
So if you buy, I know what you bought and I could customize an offer. I can do cross selling, I can recommend another product. That's what we call first moment of truth. That you actually bought something, that's you actually put money down. We also now know your intention to buy. That's what Google calls zero moment of truth even before you buy something. And then as we start putting chips into products, for example, in a B2B setting, we put chips into a machine the so called iot. Now I also know your actual usage behavior. So I can do predictive maintenance in the software industry as companies move to the cloud.
- [05:49]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
When Dr. Gupta talks about the so called IoT, he's talking about the Internet of things. Despite its name, it's not really about the Internet as we know it. It's more about the interconnectedness of devices and softwares. It's a much more complex network of both physical and virtual applications. This network allows smart devices to communicate with each other, kind of like Bluetooth headphones or smart thermostats. But in another version of IoT, these devices can filter through complex data.
- [06:18]
Sunil Gupta
So data analytics have been used for a long time. I can look at the purchase information of consumers and predict demand and that could help in better inventory management, that could help in predicting customer behavior for new product introduction, that could help me in better pricing and therefore optimizing it could help me in better optimizing my ad spend. So for example, I can monitor the click through rate on Facebook or Google. I can see which customers are clicking more, how the conversion rate is going on. I can also even track your lifetime value based on the historical data project, whether you are more profitable to me in the long run versus somebody else. And therefore I can provide different offers to different people.
- [06:59]
Kieran Burke
It can gather data, it can insight on data and it can remove some of the heavy handed barriers that banks and institutions have set up to make it very difficult to access finance. The other side for business owners that I think is really exciting when it comes to finance is it really helps them and a bit like what Sweep is trying to do, be a bit of a virtual CFO because you have millions of people going and starting businesses now, not because they're accountants, not because they're economists, because they absolutely love what they do and they're really passionate about it. But at the end of the day, there is a lot of money and finances going through the business and if you're not comfortable with it, then that is always going to be a weak spot.
- [07:48]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
Before swoop, Karen was looking to finance a different startup. He got in touch with Andrea Reynolds, a close friend who helped business owners with sponsors, specialized and practical loans. She'd worked extensively with big companies like the Formula one team, but these larger brands often needed smarter financing that didn't rely on banks. So instead she leaned toward alternative solutions like grants or equity. Kiran and Andrea soon realized that with the help of data analytics, they could simplify the process not just for big companies, but for inexperienced entrepreneurs. Together they Launched Swoop funding, I could.
- [08:24]
Kieran Burke
See how there was now a shift in the small business data world where it has become a lot easier to access information on small businesses. So the combination of being able to access this data quickly so businesses were burdened. Filling in the same information over and over again meant myself and Andrea sensed that was a really big opportunity to help as many business owners as we could access finance, but to do it in a tech driven way.
- [08:54]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
Okay, let's say I'd like to start a business and I go to Swoop for help. How exactly can data analytics create a tailored portfolio of business opportunities for me and my team? Would AI help?
- [09:06]
Kieran Burke
So as they come through the platform, we are training the AI AI model based on past behaviors or insights from our own customers to be able to drive better decisions and better probability scores. And that's kind of how predominantly we're using it.
- [09:21]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
When I spoke to Kieran, he explained that when clients approach him, it's almost like Swoop is their economic therapist. They're expected to divulge as much information as possible. Things like expenses, rentals, profit margins and so much more. All of this is then pulled together and digitally analyzed. Each source of information serving as a data point. What comes out of it is a fully fleshed company portrait.
- [09:47]
Kieran Burke
We're also using it from not just a document, insights or collection. So some people might be familiar with the the technology ocr which is used to read documentations. Often companies will use it to pick out key pieces of data from PDFs. But again, where AI has really helped there is it does that baseline of exporting data from PDFs and getting key data points. But what it also brings is that ability to give insights back and also helps the user not just get those insights, but take action on those insights and start to plan. So those elements are what we're looking to bring in From a product perspective.
- [10:25]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
Like Kiran mentioned earlier, a tech company like Swoop acts like a virtual cfo, which can significantly lessen the burden for small business owners. All this is part of the larger picture of business intelligence. The personalization that Swoop does is similar to the algorithms at many major companies.
- [10:43]
Sunil Gupta
And some of the other industries are already doing personalization. I mean, Netflix does personalization based on your viewing history. Amazon does personalization based on what you buy. L'Oreal does personalization for the skin care products based on the scanning of your face and understanding your skin type. So private industries are actually ahead of the curve and some of the other industries have still time to catch up and that information is pulled together by a particular company to get a profile of who you are. And based on that, they target a particular ad, for example, at you, and you might or might not respond. And that behavior of your responding or not responding gives another data point to the company. So I think over time, companies are beginning to collect everything that you, you leave a footprint.
- [11:31]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
So we've covered AI and data analytics for businesses, but can other technologies help in different ways? Because the eternal struggle for business owners, especially new ones, is how to manage the never ending heap of responsibilities, meetings, deadlines and so much more. You could always hire out more to beef up your team, but could you afford it? Would they know how to handle the different priorities? Different forms of data analytics and machine learning could do that. Suzanne Cairns is the CMO of Quora Systems, a management software company.
- [12:03]
Philip Martin
Basically, we deliver software to large organizations that allows them to better plan and execute their projects, leading to more profitable outcomes. At the end of the day, if you boil all down, what we're delivering is a single source of truth. So it's a centralized point of data. So what our software does is it takes all of the different data points across an enterprise and the projects they're running, pulls that together and analyzes that data and rolls that up to give them a real picture of health, of where they're at. So they've got this control, governance and insight in real time to be able to understand where is their business at, Are they meeting their goals? Is there risk there, is there deviation that they can mitigate? What Quora does for our clients is it streamlines and centralizes all of the data required to deliver projects on time and on budget in a seamless way. So that's integrating schedules, forecasting resources, financial controls, and ultimately by pulling all that data together and reporting on that in real time, we're protecting margins, bottom line, et cetera for these companies.
- [13:15]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
Core launched in Ireland back in 1999. Its CEO Philip Martin noticed how different manufacturing companies struggle to manage multiple projects at the same time.
- [13:26]
Philip Martin
So how do we ensure that our clients can utilize the data within our system to the best of their ability and get that data out or combine that data with other data sources across their enterprise to do that analysis and, and leverage their AI models in house. So that's definitely one key element for us.
- [13:47]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
Core enables up and coming companies to scale by condensing the workload of a robust team. This means that all the fine details that often get overlooked or the inevitable project delays are virtually eliminated.
- [14:00]
Philip Martin
For large organizations, there's A lot of similar trends out there, no matter what industry you're in, whether that's supply chain issues, whether that's inflation, whether that's labor shortages, and really there's that air of how do we do more with less at the moment. So I suppose Quora can help our. That's what we do with our clients, right? So we help them digitize, modernize, speed up time to market and deliver those efficiencies across their business to essentially allow them to do things quicker, better in a more profitable way. We do have smaller mid market customers who maybe aren't as mature as those large enterprises, but still want to start implementing a project management office or just general better processes within their businesses, particularly around projects and programs. So we do have, I suppose, the ability to scale down the capability or scale up as needed, the capability of the software.
- [15:01]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
Like Swope Funding, Quora is part of the emerging frontier in business intelligence. But will the outcome always be so positive?
- [15:08]
Sunil Gupta
So clearly, I think both for the adoption purposes as well as for the accuracy of the task that you're doing, there is more and more collaboration between humans and technology. I don't think you can have either, or in some unique cases you can have one or the other. If it's a mundane, repetitive task, perhaps AI can do that over and over again. But in many cases it's a combination.
- [15:34]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
I asked Dr. Gupta about the concern that more artificial intelligence and machine learning could weaken a founder's ability to run a company. But he assured me that if applied properly, you could have a very healthy, successful collaboration between humans and technology.
- [15:50]
Sunil Gupta
None of these models are 100% accurate. The so called hallucination, in the sense they give you all kinds of made up information. So depending on the task you're doing, if you're doing creative work, the hallucination may not be a problem because you can come up with some different funky creative. But if you're a doctor and doing an operation on a patient, you need 100% accuracy. You can't go with 80% accuracy. The second thing is you also need to understand why the model is telling you to do A versus B. So you need to understand the logic behind the outcome of that model. And many of these models are black boxes. They just give you some information, but you don't know why they're telling you to do one versus another. And that's okay if you are simply predicting something, but if you are actually trying to understand should I operate in a patient or should I not operate on the patient? For example, you would want to know as to what is the reasoning behind it. So in that case, AI is simply an enabler to give you an initial idea, but ultimately human will then be necessary to make the final decision.
- [16:55]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
And he even likened it to a new oil reserve.
- [16:58]
Sunil Gupta
I think data is becoming more and more important for almost every business and many people now say data is the new oil that is the real resource and asset of a company because you can understand the marketplace, you can understand the customer, that can provide you a lot more insights not only in customer behavior, but also on the ways you might want to innovate, on your product, the way the future might look like, etc. So data become that much important. That's why companies are trying to different ways to both collect the data, analyze the data and run their business.
- [17:33]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
This could indicate that the future of smart business operations isn't too far off from your own computer.
- [17:39]
Kieran Burke
One, it's going to help reduce bureaucracy and drive efficiency and then secondly it can help business owners that aren't financially savvy have an extra kind of wingman there to help them along the way.
- [17:54]
Philip Martin
I suppose the future from our industry clients and from our own businesses perspective is we're all seeing the critical role that software solutions are playing in helping organizations to navigate complexity, to enhance operational efficiency, to drive innovation or competitiveness. And there's mounting pressure to adapt and cora's software is uniquely positioned to provide that visibility, the control, the agility that's necessary to meet these evolving demands and future proof their operations through what we call is the power of predictability.
- [18:40]
Samantha Murphy Kelly
Thanks for listening to the Next Innovation. This this series was produced by Situation Room Studios and powered by Enterprise Ireland. Investing in the next wave of innovation. Our Executive Producer is Christine Barata and our Senior Producer is Sharon Barreiro. Emily Beeman is our Associate Producer. Additional production assistance by Global Situation Room A special thanks to Kiran Burke, Suzanne Karens and Dr. Sunil Gupta. My name is Samantha Murphy Kelly. Until next time.