Headquartered in Irvine, California, Neudesic helps clients achieve business breakthroughs and advance their organizations through smart technology deployments. Customers come to Neudesic for help tailoring their technology investments to create higher levels of alignment to their business, while addressing specific business needs.

Over the last decade, as Neudesic worked with organizations embarking on transformational and digitization projects, data became a central theme for clients—how to harness it, make sense of it, and generally get more value out of it. They realized a central challenge for clients was that they might have vast volumes of data, but that they largely sat untapped. And so they worked with clients to change that dynamic, opening the potential for data to generate new sources of value, from better visibility and insight into customers, or competitors and their market, to uncovering ways to refine operations and reduce costs, or even creating new business models.

The next frontier in data

Ten years ago, the approaches to drive insights from data might include things like building a data warehouse or deploying traditional analytics (or “hindsight” analytics, assessing past performance). But today, AI has dramatically changed what’s possible. For Neudesic, bringing AI into their technology practice was a natural next horizon in their decade-long quest to make data more valuable, and actionable.

Working with AI solutions required new data science and engineering skills. Recognizing the need, Neudesic built a global team of data scientists, to both interact with clients, but also help spread AI knowledge and expertise within the company. At the same time, data scientists are also trained on business functions and knowledge, to ensure AI goals are always aligning back to clients’ business goals.

Along the way, the company has invested in creating IP designed to assist customers in planning their data journeys, things such as the Neudesic Insights Development Workbench, a conceptual framework that guides customers in building data insights, from initial collection to analysis and final usage by end business users.

Making a great partnership even better

When Neudesic embarked on building its AI practice, it knew Microsoft would be an important ally. With a strong Microsoft heritage going back to its founding members (several of which came from Microsoft), Neudesic has been a long-time partner.

That relationship became supercharged since Satya Nadella came onboard. Mike explains that, “when Microsoft introduced the One Commercial Partner organization and its partner-centric focus, it was a very positive experience for us. Our relationship has become much more collaborative, and as a result, we’ve been able to do great things together, from developing AI solutions for clients to co-selling.

The partnership has enabled Neudesic to align with Microsoft product teams, and in turn, help them in growing the offerings they bring to their customers. “At the end of the day, our partnership succeeds because it’s based on trust and mutual respect. There’s trust that we at Neudesic will be good stewards of the platform. And there’s trust that together we’ll do amazing things to grow our businesses,” says Mike.

Helping clients get confident with AI

Together with Microsoft, Neudesic is giving clients the tools, and knowledge, to build confidence and mastery over their new AI solutions—in effect, to become self-sufficient in how they leverage new AI-powered data insights.

One such example is the NBA. Every year, during the NBA’s regular season, 30 teams play a total of 82 games. Each of those games generates terabytes of data, a big portion of which is in photos. The organization struggled to manage and curate this massive stream of photos, with each photo needing to be manually identified, tagged, and organized in a process that would take weeks.

Neudesic partnered with Microsoft and the NBA to develop the Photo Sorter application, using Microsoft Cognitive Services and leveraging Cognitive Search to automatically sort and curate the influx of photos from each game. Garth Case, Vice President of IT at the NBA, says the new system saves them massive amounts of time: “Photos from one event could take up weeks to categorize and process. Using Photo Sorter, we can now reduce that to a few hours. When the system is properly trained and is used to optimize our process, we can whip through it in a few hours.”

For Garth, this is only the beginning. As they dig deeper into game data, and not just from photos, he sees additional opportunities to use automation to drive more personalized, value-based engagement with fans across the world.

Looking ahead, with Microsoft

As Neudesic considers what’s next, the future looks bright with possibilities. And as Microsoft continues to advance its AI platform, the opportunities to find new applications that bring value to clients are endless. For Neudesic, the core opportunity remains in helping clients get clear on their business strategies, and the outcomes they wish to achieve, and in grounding AI to clear goals and tangible results.