The demand for AI-powered technology

The amount of data that humans generate continues to grow, and so does the demand for technology that can process this data to reveal crucial insights. Successfully extracting insights from the terabytes of data created around the world, every second, is only feasible through the use of AI.

Various organisations worldwide, from small startups to multinational giants, are making great strides in developing AI technology and solutions. However, there are also many businesses that are not considering how AI can extend their capabilities.

Exploring the opportunities of AI is vital for businesses, and bringing that innovation in-house even more so, says Simon Dabbs, MD of Newsclip.

Since 2011, the company has been using machine learning with the aim to process media clips rapidly, efficiently, and with near perfect accuracy. Through a combination of human guidance and machine learning, the company’s work on its natural language processing (NLP) engine has helped it to achieve these goals.

The media update team sat with Dabbs to find out how having an in-house development team has allowed Newsclip to tackle the world of data-driven media intelligence.

The need to innovate internally

In the coming years, more companies will start to tackle and overcome the AI learning curve. Aligning their technological innovations towards a specific goal will become essential for these businesses, if they want to avoid innovating merely for ‘innovation’s sake’.

Dabbs notes that in-house technology development teams are better positioned to understand the core objectives of the business and focus their efforts on creating solutions that solve specific problems. According to Dabbs, developers with in-depth knowledge of the business and the data available to them are also more likely to create first-to-market AI solutions.

“In-house technology development has huge financial and administrative overheads. However, the long-term business stability and cutting-edge development that comes with this is not only rewarding, but invaluable. It’s why we have a development team and will continue to invest in it,” he says.

How Newsclip is innovating with AI

“The products our development team creates are critical to our clients,” he continues. “With our purpose-built image recognition technology, media analysis platform, tree-view system, and, now, our Data Engine, we can provide our clients with all the answers.”

Newsclip has shown, since its founding in 1983, that innovation is part-and-parcel of the company. It started monitoring websites and blogs in 2001, introduced automated media coverage reports in 2006, and launched amaSocial, its social media tracking service, in 2014.

Since first entering the media monitoring industry, the speed at which media content is produced has increased – and so have the expectations of its clients.“People’s expectations have become ‘now’. If they don’t get a quick response from a company on social media, or the load time of a website is longer than three seconds, they move on,” Dabbs explains.

“It’s our responsibility to provide our clients with cutting-edge, modern ways of managing vast arrays of information. Clients need to make informed decisions as quickly as possible and Newsclip provides them with the intelligence to do so.”

Dabbs concludes by noting that “customers are demanding change. Without investment in AI technology – especially investing in-house – few will survive the next wave of innovation.”

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To find out more about Newsclip, visit www.newsclip.co.za or read how the company’s Data Engine works in our article, Newsclip demonstrates the power of AI in text processing.