Technology is designed for natural use

I am known for being late for dinner.  I almost never leave work on time – just ask my wife.

So, to save my marriage, next year I’ll buy a new BMW!

Amazon and BMW just announced a partnership.  Amazon’s Alexa will be embedded in all 2018 BMWs.  Now when I’m running late, I could have Alexa send a message to my wife.  One step further – I could have Alexa drone-deliver flowers as an apology for yet another missed family meal.  We live in amazing (and scary) times!  I could do all of this by using my voice – no keyboard, no tap, no swipe.  All powered with the advent of Artificial Intelligence.

How we interact with technology as consumers is rapidly evolving, moving in a direction where technology is designed for natural use.  What is natural use?  It is the idea that we can interact with technology in more human ways.

This shift towards natural use is widely noticeable in the world of consumer apps.  Software companies have begun to focus on the entire customer experience with an eye towards intelligent user experience.   It’s essential in today’s B2C world that companies get this concept right.

Consider this, if you download an app and it’s complicated, poorly designed, or visually unappealing, you just delete the app and look for another one.  It doesn’t matter how functional the app is.  You’ll just move on to something else.

Consumers are demanding software developers provide intelligent and visually-stunning apps that meet all their needs.  Why should this be any different in the B2B application world?  Why do we settle for less than stellar business software?

As we anticipate this change, it reflects how we envision B2B software.

Think about how you work now.  Are you sitting at a desk, hunched over a keyboard, mouse by your side?  Most of us are – Prophix is going to change that.  We need to be standing, speaking and having the software do the hard work!

Imagine this; you are in a boardroom:

You: “Prophix – show me trailing twelve months sales.”

Prophix: Charts show up. 

You: “By Product.”

Prophix:  Charts adjust.

You: “Explain variance in Q2.”

Prophix: “A pricing promotion in Q2 led to higher unit sales, however negative impact on margins by -4%.  This should be corrected in Q3 as the pricing promotion ended.”

You: “Project forward 12 months.”

Prophix: Prophix Machine Learning crunches millions of data points to perform time scale predictive analytics and projects data forward by 12 months.

You: Not perfectly happy with the results, you modify the projections by touching the visuals and manually adjusting the bars.

Leveraging the power of the cloud, transformation of the office of Finance is possible because of advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the related technologies such as Natural Language Interaction (NLI), Natural Language Generation (NLG) and Machine Learning.

Advances in Artificial Intelligence rapidly enables unknown anomalies and patterns to be automatically detected and surfaced to users, upon which further interactive analysis can be performed via voice commands.   While Machine Learning allows us to take all this data, and apply time scale predictive analytics to improve forecasting capabilities.

This is the future of CPM software.  I believe that CPM software should be Intelligent, Easy to Use and Visually Stunning.

Over the coming months, we look forward to breaking this conversation and explore components of each topic more in-depth.