AI can increase efficiencies across your value chain, reducing your cost to serve. It can give your customers a personalised omnichannel experience, driving up key metrics like customer lifetime value. It can help you set the optimum price for your products throughout each product’s lifecycle. It really is game-changing to business fundamentals.
CEO, Peak
Peak's AI platform optimises inventories, pricing, and customer personalisation for businesses of all sizes, deployed in weeks – not years.
Peak is used by leading brands including Nike, Palace, PepsiCo and B&M. With a library of applications that fit a variety of use cases across sectors including consumer goods, retail and manufacturing, users can rapidly apply AI to deliver on commercial objectives, while giving them the tools they need to extend their use of it over time.
In today’s world, every company needs its own AI to compete and win. The AI can be used to optimise all key business decisions and allow businesses to run their operations like never before. But the journey to adopt AI can seem complex and out-of-reach for many. We spoke to Peak CEO, Richard Potter, about how organisations can embrace the power of AI. He believes there are three core elements to success:
Embracing AI can be daunting, but Richard suggests that none of these barriers are insurmountable.
Data quality or infrastructure shouldn’t hold you back: “Your data doesn’t have to be perfectly organised in a data warehouse to be AI-ready. Get started on your journey and your needs will become clearer.”
Don’t forget the power of people: “AI should be geared towards enhancing your teams’ capabilities, not replacing them — providing teams with more time to focus on other areas of importance and enabling more time for human creativity.”
Concerns about the cost of an AI transformation can be overcome: “Start small with a complex, data-rich functional area and build out from there. Taking a phased approach like this means you see a quicker return on investment before identifying the next business area that will benefit from AI.”
“The best way to explain what we do is to see it in practice,” says Richard, sharing a fascinating example of some of Peak’s recent work with FTSE-listed equipment rental and support services provider, Speedy Hire.
An excellent customer experience is at the core of Speedy’s business. That means always having the right products available whenever and wherever their customers need them.
With 3,500 products across 200 depots in the UK, and products that can vary from a simple cut-off saw to lighting towers, there is a complex network that needs to be managed. It’s a delicate balancing act between maximising the utilisation of products and maintaining availability for customers, and it’s only possible with the help of AI.
Speedy’s asset and logistics teams use the Peak platform to optimise their network by providing a demand forecast for each product. The platform then recommends how products should be distributed across the depot network, when to replenish them, and by how much – reducing unnecessary stockpiling by redistributing products to where they’re most likely to be needed. At a time when warehousing costs are skyrocketing, holding optimum inventory levels has an additional cost-saving benefit.
Speedy has transformed its daily decision-making with AI, building confidence in supply throughout its entire network. On average, the team makes a 4% saving on inventory whilst satisfying 8% more demand across the network every month. Better still, it now takes one hour, instead of over a week, to decide where products should go in the network to drive the most sales.
“Only around 24% of AI models built by businesses are currently productionised,” explains Richard.
“By bringing both technical and business teams onto one platform and providing an interface for commercial teams to engage with a model, Peak addresses many of the challenges faced by businesses looking to deploy AI.”
“It ensures models are always outcome focused, and speeds up the entire process end-to-end. This not only decreases the time to value for enterprise AI deployments, but also brings down the total cost of ownership; the flexibility enables more businesses to generate meaningful outcomes from AI.”
Here at Barclays, we too appreciate the need to design and develop innovative technological solutions that help our staff protect our customers. For example, at the Barclays Technology Campus, just outside Manchester, is our transatlantic tech command centre and one of the largest centres for information security in the UK. Here, some of the best minds in the business are developing the technology that is changing an industry.
Barclays offers a growing range of digital solutions to support our customers– from providing financial data analytics and insights that help businesses make informed decisions, to our PrecisionPay offering that makes virtual payments easier, faster and smarter.
If you’d like to understand more about how we could support you please contact our team.
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