In a data-driven world, it is critical to manage large chunks of data in a simple way. In the words of comedian Dave Chappelle... This is where solutions like vector databases come in. They are significant because of their ability to efficiently store and process...
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Are digital wallets a catalyst for customer engagement and revenue growth?
Customers don’t care only about cost any more. Today, they want to feel connected to the brands and companies they choose to associate with. No matter what they want, they are spoilt for choice. What differentiates good and popular brands from the rest? Customer...
Natural Language Querying (NLQ): The future of search
Everything’s great. Data and AI are propelling all sectors. We get all the required info in the palm of our hand. All good, everything is peachy, except… …having to wait for data scientists to extract the information one wants. Well, not anymore. Thanks to Natural...
25 Recommender Algorithms, Packages, Tools, and Frameworks: Your Gateway to Exploring Personalized Recommendations
In today's digital age, where information overload is a constant challenge, personalized recommendations have become an essential part of our online experiences. Whether it's suggesting movies, books, products, or even potential connections, recommender systems play a...
Product recommendations for ecommerce brands
Build a merchant-product personalization-driven engagement strategy The future of consumer ecommerce belongs to brands who curate experiences that keep customers coming back. To improve the customers’ shopping experience, brands are using personalization to let them...
Leveraging LLMs: Revolutionizing ecommerce and transforming customer experience
Today, information is abundant. Customer expectations are soaring. And enterprises are seeking innovative ways to deliver an exceptional customer experience (CX). Large Language Models (LLMs) have now become part of dinner-table conversation. They're all-pervasive....
Reimagining digital commerce with Open Protocols
Namma Yatri, a transport service platform based in the state of Karnataka in India, recently touched one million trips. Backed by the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), Beckn Foundation, and Juspay, India’s first open mobility platform is an...
How digital wallets are transforming the global payment landscape
Physical wallets are now passe. In 2023, it’s all about the digital wallet. A growing majority prefer the ease of whipping out their phones and paying for purchases. Be it at the corner kirana store or at the glitziest of malls. The omnichannel dominance of digital...
Game of Phones: Device financing for a digital-forward Africa
When the iPhone 5s was launched in 2013, online sales were live only in a few countries – UK, Australia, Hong Kong, USA. Long lines formed at Apple stores across the world. The length of these lines was considered an indicator of the phone’s popularity. A few years...
Accelerating Revenue with Recommendation-as-a-Service (RaaS): The Power of Personalized Experiences
As much as we joke about Google not letting us finish our sentences, we now expect it to do so. If the drop-down list doesn’t appear when we type the first few letters, we tend to think the Internet is acting up. This expectation has crossed the lines of search...
Loyalty Programs and Personalized Marketplaces: How to get the best of both worlds
In today's world, customer retention has become a crucial part of any successful business strategy. As the competition increases, it becomes more challenging to maintain brand loyalty. This is where customer incentive approaches come into play. Loyalty programs have...
The synthetic data revolution
British mathematician Clive Humby was spot on with his prediction that “data is the new oil”. It reflects not only the value of data, but also its exhaustible nature. While the world is still starry-eyed about the power of data, let’s pause for a moment. Is ALL data...
Pivoting to the future: where the digital world is heading today
When I speak to my parents, they tell me a number of stories about how a non- digital world used to be. Some of their favorite examples: To know how their loved ones were doing, they sent handwritten letters. These would take more than a week to get delivered....
Vijaya Kumar Ivaturi on the technology renaissance
Crayon Data's co-founder and CTO, Vijaya Kumar Ivaturi, gives us a peek into the decade ahead in terms of technology. This article was carried in the first issue of STRIDE, a journal of technology, leadership, and innovation, published by the Confederation of Indian...
Integrate deeply, so customers find it difficult to pull the plug: Suresh Shankar on Churn.FM podcast
Crayon Data's founder and CEO Suresh Shankar was recently on the Churn.FM podcast. Hosted by Andrew Michael, CEO of Avrio, they talk about ways to prevent churn with enterprise customers. Suresh shares how he connects the dots looking back going from an account...
Crayon Data’s maya.ai features in Ecosystm Insights
Crayon Data’s flagship platform, maya.ai, features in the latest edition of Ecosystm Insights. In a piece titled ‘Personalization – The New Digital Imperative in Financial Services’, analyst Gerald Mackenzie puts the AI-led personalization platform in the...
Vidhyashankar Sriram joins Crayon Data as Vice President – Client Solutions
Vidhyashankar Sriram has joined Crayon Data as Vice President - Client Solutions. In his new role, he will lead value delivery for our clients. An alumnus of NITIE Mumbai and Madras Institute of Technology, Vidhyashankar is a true-blue banker. He comes with over 15...
The changing OTT landscape in a COVID-19 impacted world
The indefinite lockdown due to the continuing spread of COVID-19 has been frustrating. With negative news all around and limited access to entertainment avenues, consumers are slowly turning to over-the-top (OTT) platforms. 80% of Indian consumers have stated that...
Rediscover life at your workplace: thrive in the post-crisis world
In this week’s episode of the Crayon Lighthouse Fireside Chat series, Shagufta Anurag, or Shagu, as we know her, spoke to us about rediscovering our lives at the workplace. Shagu is the founder and CEO of Saltmine, a B2B SaaS company in the workspace design-build...
360° customer experience with personalization
Right now, banks face more competition from non-banking FinTech players than ever before. They have ushered in a new era of relevance and personalized online experiences, that has elevated customer expectations. Due to the competition, banks find it difficult to...
Accelerating digital transformation: how AI can help banks in Oceania
In the past several years, enterprises around the world have adopted digital transformation projects on various scales. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), worldwide budgets on technology and services that facilitate digital transformation is...
How to push the envelope on client delight
Customers are delighted when you exceed their expectations. . To do so, you need to always be one step ahead of them, understand and anticipate their needs. But the current COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t exactly made it easy for us to have all the answers to wow our...
How to go-to-market in 9 days – Lessons from lockdown
We’ve shared the story of how we identified a new business opportunity and developed a product for it in 2 weeks. And we promised we’d share the second part of that story – going-to-market (GTM) in 9 days. So here it goes! A typical GTM plan takes a while to put...
How to identify new business opportunities in 2 weeks – Lessons from lockdown
Crayon’s core value proposition for maya.ai is to create personalized lifestyle experiences. Be it in dining, retail or travel, we had it all covered. Until Covid-19 changed the world. Worldwide dining and travel came to a standstill. Brick-and-mortar shopping now...
Unlock your OMS potential. Here's how
By the year 2022, the total number of credit card holders across the globe is projected to grow to 1.2Bn (from the 1.06 Bn in 2017). And these card holders will look for relevant experiences that match their interests. Be it fine dining, globe-trotting or shopping. ...
The mathematics behind the lock-down of a country
Disclaimer: The following piece of writing is not meant to cause panic, or hurt sentiments. There is no political judgement being handed out in this article. This is purely an opinion piece. I possess expertise in neither mathematical modeling nor epidemiology. The...
How to launch a product remotely – Lessons from Lockdown
A story of successful product launch – Our vision here at Crayon Data is to simplify the world’s choices. We believe there is always a simpler way to do things. But the algorithms we work with aren’t always visible to the naked eye. For months we tried over and over...
What banks should be doing during lockdown and beyond
The lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, while necessary, has impacted industries across the board. Travel, restaurants, luxury and fashion, amongst others, have taken a huge hit. And banks are no exception. How banks respond to the current situation...
Keep your distance please: a case for social distancing in troubling times
Disclaimer: This piece of writing is meant to drive the case for social distancing and self-quarantines. It isn’t meant to cause panic. I’m in no way an expert, in neither epidemiology nor mathematical modeling. The approach undertaken below is laden with assumptions,...
The state of FinTech in Europe: Key trends from Finovate Europe 2020 in Berlin
We’re three months into the new decade and Crayon Data has already unlocked something very special. For awhile now, we’ve wanted to showcase the powerful AI-led personalization capabilities of our product, maya.ai in Europe. And this year, we were selected to demo...
Consumers want to be recognised for their individuality; can enterprises keep up?
At the start of the last decade, smartphones and social media were still in their infancy. But by the time we hopped over to 2020, with their omnipresence, they increased access to information dramatically; Choice exploded and consumer expectations ramped up,...
Artificial intelligence in the battle against the coronavirus: How can it help?
An outbreak of flu-like symptoms that originated from a wet market in the city of Wuhan, China has brought chaos to the world. The new coronavirus or 2019-NCoV, was first reported on December 31st, 2019, as pneumonia. The number of infected people increased...
How eCommerce websites can take product pages to the next level
Personalization on an eCommerce website is not unusual in today’s consumer-driven world. Customers want brands to know them; to offer products that fit in with their own needs and preferences. They want to have the same kind of experience as shopping at a store...
All you need to know about coding standards for SQL queries
Coding standards are a set of guidelines, best practices, programming styles and conventions that developers adhere to when writing a piece of code for a project. All the big software companies have them. And advise their developers to embed these coding standards in...
Customer experience for banks: what’s hot and what’s not!
In today’s fiercely competitive world, customer experience (CX) is often the main differentiator for banks. When it comes to choosing which financial institution to bank with, customers look at the quality of customer experience. In fact, it’s the key deciding factor....
A guide to maya.ai for retail
The world is going online. Online retailers are becoming more relevant. However, they are still unable to provide the same personalized experiences as brick-n-mortar stores. (You know, like the ones which have a salesman helping customers find the perfect...
Can machines forget what they learn?
The art of forgetting. It’s been well depicted by human beings on numerous occasions. But what about machines? Are they capable of forgetting data as well? This article answers that question. As human beings, we are blessed with several cognitive skills. Including...
Chennai is quickly turning into the new hotbed for deep-tech startup
“Chennai is heaven,” says Girish Mathrubootham, cofounder of Freshworks. Sitting at his San Francisco home, his new residence since he relocated to the US last month, Mathrubootham is a tad emotional as he speaks on a Zoom video call one early morning. “What do...
Top 10 big data CEOs in India
The planet of data and analytics is spreading its empire at a fast pace leading to digital innovation which is taking the industry by boom. The widespread of technology is creating a heap of opportunities for companies and individuals as well to excel in...
Personalization in retail: an example of how it works
Personalization is a great way for enterprises, such as online retailers, to build brand loyalty. Recommending products based on a customer’s personal taste results in higher conversion rates. But is personalization all you need to increase a client's revenues? Let’s...
Enterprises Use Crayon Data to Better Understand Their Customer’s Tastes
When looking at the monstrous success of Google’s and Facebook’s ad businesses, most would point out that the core driving factor is their data and how they utilize it. These companies have built massive platforms around offering customized experiences to their...
How Agile Scrum techniques should be adapted to fit data science projects
Tech Talk: Volume 1 I’m a big fan of Agile practices. However, I think the traditional and rigid Agile Scrum rules may not be a good fit for data science projects. Tweaking the Scrum methodology could help in making it more adaptable for data science projects. Here’s...
Personalizing credit card statements: is it time?
In perspective: Volume 1 It’s the end of June 2019. It’s that time of the month again when you receive that dreaded message informing you about the arrival of your monthly credit card statement. Ugh. It breaks my heart every time I look at it. I can’t really complain...
NPS and banking: a new perspective on measuring customer satisfaction
There’s a new trend emerging among traditional enterprises who are going digital and embracing personalization. These enterprises are setting up innovation labs and digital teams as they gear up for what many are calling the ‘fourth industrial revolution’. One...
AI and the online shopper: the math behind personalized shopping experiences
A friend, Lisa, told me about a new clothing store online that she is absolutely obsessed with. She was awed by the simplicity of the site, and how it populated outfits that seemed to "know her taste". That perplexed her. She was certain the site was designed...
Banking In The Time Of Emerging Tech
There’s a new era of banking and financial services on the horizon. With the emergence of digital banking and fintech, the sector is facing a massive shift in the way people bank. There’s a new era of banking and financial services on the horizon. With the emergence...
Here’s why Chennai is the SAAS capital of India
Chennai is a city which has always been steeped in tradition. It’s a city where conventional business models have been tried and tested time and time again. And the organisations adopting these models were quite happy with the way things were. But that is not the...
5 Machine Learning and AI podcasts you should listen to
Earlier, I’d written an article on a couple of podcasts for those interested in learning about data science and analytics. And while data science is still a relevant and booming industry today, the tech world has since then moved onto other things – artificial...
5 podcasts that make learning Data Science and Analytics a lot more fun
You don’t have time to read anymore. You’re too busy to attend short courses or take online classes. But you really want to learn about the tech and corporate world’s latest buzzwords – data science and analytics. For someone who isn’t a numbers geek or hasn’t studied...
How Artificial Intelligence is changing the face of Marketing
Have you, as a marketer, sat back and thought about how much energy you expend in identifying keywords, creating blog rollout plans, personalizing content for marketing, creating all those social posts and overall formulating content strategies? Now, step back and...