Infosysis a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting with over 30 years of experience managing global enterprise systems. The firm works to empower businesses with agile digital scale and helps customers in over 50 countries navigate digital transformation.
Infosys is an AI thought leader with an analytics and AI-powered core competency that prioritizes value realization and business transformation. The firm has worked with customers across multiple industries, including manufacturing, retail, healthcare, finance, oil and gas, and more to uncover how analytics, AI, and machine learning (ML) can solve specific business challenges.
A close collaborator with Microsoft for 25 years, Infosys is a recognized global leader in implementing Microsoft cloud technologies powered by Infosys Cobalt. Infosys relies on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform for its marquee AI and ML use cases. Microsoft offerings in this space represent a strategic edge for Infosys customers.
Using Azure services to change the game
Infosys created a transformative solution to help a leading global food and beverage company determine competitor product recipes, a key part of competitive intelligence. Traditionally, the customer relied on food labs to determine the makeup of competitor products, an expensive and time-consuming process. Using Azure ML, Infosys developed ML models that automatically reverse-engineer product formulations using publicly available information, such as nutrition data and labels.
Infosys also integrated market-share information in the framework to prioritize data on competitors’ products. The model shows which recipes the company should make a priority, based on the impact of recipe changes or new recipe releases.
This solution was built on Azure Machine Learning, which simplifies and automates ML management. The Azure service enables Infosys to try several different models, keep track of successes and failures, and find patterns across various experiments.
Azure ML provides libraries that helped Infosys build, train, refresh, and publish the ML models. These libraries feature out-of-the-box functionality, cutting down on the amount of code that the Infosys team needed to write.
Infosys also used Azure data solutions for this project, including Data Lake Storage. Infosys was able to load huge datasets using ML workspaces, increasing confidence in the results.
Infosys deployed Azure Data Factories (ADF) for serverless data integration and to move data between the original source and ML workspaces. This allowed business users to schedule the ML process through a simple file drop operation into a network-shared folder, without the need to rely on data scientists or analysts.
The customer realized several immediate benefits from the Infosys solution. Now, it can:
- Track competitors on a near real-time basis in terms of cost, product composition, and variety of recipes
- Complete investigations in hours, at 80 percent accuracy, versus six months previously
- Continuously benchmark against more than 200 competitors, versus only a few top competitors previously
The customer has also expanded the consumption of insights to other groups across the company and is looking to grow this capability in other regions in addition to the U.S.
The Infosys solution has the potential to disrupt food testing R&D globally, with wide applicability across product categories in the packaged food industry.