There is no ecosystem on earth quite like Apple and its offerings. The release of the new iPhone series and Apple Watch 4 are stunning achievements, both in functional and aesthetic design. While the product offering itself is compelling, the unsung hero of yesterday has far-reaching implications in the world of enterprise mobility, and may just change the trajectory of mobile technology forever — Apple’s Neural Engine.
This new chip technology embedded in each of the new iPhones will give native developers on the iOS platform the ability to run their own machine learning algorithms in concert with the onboard operating system, allowing endless possibilities to create interactions between software and the phone’s newly heightened spatial and environmental awareness. A.I. in enterprise mobility has largely been limited to app-based interactions — creating relationships between content, making recommendations based on relevance or user engagement, and has not yet been truly personalized to the user’s full range of behavior on a device, as the hardware and OS level connections simply did not exist.
Most importantly, this change will create a more cohesive experience between the applications you use each day and the intuitive user-experience you’ve come to expect from iOS. Less friction coupled with more speed absolutely equals greater productivity.
So what does this mean for the enterprise worker?
Let’s use the Bigtincan Sales Enablement platform as our example. Today, Bigtincan has a proprietary machine learning technology called SalesAI, that tracks how users, by role, digest and present content, and makes recommendations to the most relevant documentation to drive the sales cycle with each customer. It does so in three ways:
- First, SalesAI digests every piece of content published to the Hub and creates mathematical relationships for relevance between keywords and topics, regardless of file names. This creates an index of relationships based on the actual language used within the content itself, not simply it’s naming conventions.
- Then, the system allows for connection to your CRM, both on the marketing and sales side of house, tying the content to the campaigns and customer types for which it was created, allowing for real-time visibility to how the usage of content is impacting sales cycle and lead movements.
- Finally, SalesAI tracks all usage and engagement on the content, by employees and customers, and automates that activity against your CRM records, providing a clear view into the behavior that drives the sales cycle forward - what content, at what stage in the deal, with what customer-type will create ownership of the product. This powers the recommendation engine, creating a cycle of intelligence that can’t be broken.
It’s about measuring and replicating success through the right behaviors. That’s what sales coaching has always been about. The power is truly in the data you have access to and Apple’s announcement yesterday opens up a whole new set of data — specifically speech and image recognition — and allows will allow the algorithm to process this data 9 times faster, and at 10% of the energy consumption today.
Applying Apple’s Neural Engine in Enterprise
Imagine this scenario. You’re in a meeting with executives at a major prospect. You’ve fought hard to get here, through an RFP process with 15 competitors, multiple stakeholder engagements and this is the moment you need all the answers. You’ve prepared as best you can — market insights, case studies and account intelligence at the ready.
The CIO cuts you off mid-sentence and asks a pointed question about support in your product for a system they have you’re unfamiliar with. The sweat begins at your brow-line, followed by the uncomfortable reality that this moment could make or break the deal. You could search your website or Sharepoint for the relevant terms, taking precious minutes while the room awaits your response impatiently, or you could defer and promise a response later leaving it to chance that your competitors aren’t better prepared. Either way, you’ve lost control of the dialogue and potentially the opportunity at-large.
With this new processing power from Apple and Bigtincan Hub, the future is a lot brighter. Using Siri, you simply ask for content related to the aforementioned system. Apple’s neural engine processes your speech in record time, engages Bigtincan Hub’s machine learning algorithm and moments later, all relevant documentation is in the palm of your hand. Support or not for that system the CIO asked about, you can now answer clearly and confidently.
The Bottom Line
Our perception of the value technology has is often tied to the simplest moments. How it helps us navigate, learn, engage and communicate. The speed and accuracy of the technology in these moments is paramount to our view of value. It becomes our trusted advisor, our solace in times of stress and our voice in the digital world. The bridge we’re now crossing, with Apple at the helm, will create a level of engagement and productivity we could’ve only dreamed of in 2007 when Steve introduced the world to iPhone.
Apple made its way into the enterprise in the consumers pocket. The more you can utilize and build on this emotional connection we have to our devices, the more powerful that tool becomes. This is just another step for platforms like ours to get even closer to what you really need, each moment of your working day.
