LUCA Artificial Intelligence of Things, how things plan to make our lives simpler Just as in the Grimm Brothers fairy tale where two little elves teamed up to help the cobbler have a better life, Artificial Intelligence and IoT, Big Data technologies...
Patrick Buckley The Hologram Concert – How AI is helping to keep music alive When Whitney Houston passed away in 2012, the world was shocked by the sudden and tragic news of her death. Fans gathered around the Beverly Hills hotel in Los...
Olivia Brookhouse New ways of working with Artificial Intelligence The situation in which we all find ourselves this month is something none of us could have imagined. Due to coronavirus, we are all confined to the walls of...
LUCA Movistar Team: the best cyclists, the best behind the scenes team, the best strategy and Big Data By Mikel Zabala, PhD (Sport Scientist, Lecturer at Granada University and member of the team of trainers for the Movistar Team), Javier Carro (Data Scientest en LUCA), y Pedro...
LUCA Deep Learning and satellite images to estimate the impact of COVID19 Motivated by the fact that the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) pandemic has caused worldwide turmoil in a short period of time since December 2019, we estimate the negative impact of...
LUCA Success Story: LUCA Transit and Highways England The transport industry is very receptive to the application of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence strategies, as there are clear use cases that can maximize a companies’ efficiency and...
LUCA LUCA Tourism at the Mexico Balloon Festival Each year, the Festival Internacional del Globo (FIG), brings together over 200 hot air balloons that fill the sky above the ‘Parque Metropolitano in León, Guanajuato, in what is an...
LUCA Traffic spikes before football games? The effect of the World Cup in Germany Post written by Telefónica NEXT Once every four years, The FIFA World Cup brings fans together in a month of surprising events. Every game is different, but each is filled...
Business Messaging – From humble SMS to conversational commerceLUCA 20 June, 2018 Written by Jenny Whelan, Head of Business Affairs – LUCA Advertising We all know SMS. With 5 billion users, the reach of SMS as a messaging channel is unparalleled. Combined with its reliability, this is why brands continue to use SMS to connect with their customers. 2.21 trillion Application to Person messages (A2P) are sent per year. A2P SMS is a big business and is still growing (~5% CAGR) to reach $90bn by 2021 Historically, the SMS channel has been used for alerts, for PSMS (Premium SMS), as a carrier for simple content and services, and as a billing mechanism. With the transition to an app based economy many such use cases for A2P SMS have declined, offset by the emergence of alternative opportunities such as authentication, notification, loyalty and awareness, booking and delivery information, to name a few. Figure 1: Infographic – SMS: The World’s Best Inbox. Despite the ubiquity and reach of SMS, it does have some limitations and new technologies have disrupted the messaging market. We see Messenger has 1.3 billion monthly active users (MAUs), WhatsApp boasts 1.2 billion MAUs, Slack has three million people sending messages every day, iMessage, LINE, and WeChat are also contributing to an upsurge of messaging users. These platforms were originally created as person-to-person (P2P) communication channels, but businesses are in the early innings of using these messaging platforms to engage customers and prospects. These platforms offer more features for brands and customers to interact, generating a whole new concept to messaging, being named Conversational Commerce. Although it’s early days we are seeing huge adoption and growing APRUs (Average Revenues per User). Figure 2: Average Revenue Per User of various messaging services (Souce: Samsung). WeChat, for example, has taken China by storm and is now a basic human need for any business or individual. It now has 1billion Monthly Active Users (MAUs) and a monthly APRU of approximately $7 (in 2017). New entrants and new ways of interacting between brands and customers has meant messaging is undergoing a significant transformation. Telecommunications companies (MNOs) are impacted by this transformation and they have an important role to play in shaping the future of messaging. MNOs have to evolve their A2P SMS business; to defend revenues; to provide solutions that both brands and customers want to engage through; and to ensure accelerated movement towards new business and increased revenue opportunities. Rich Communication Suite (RCS) will provide an update to the SMS channel Figure 3: A comparison of SMS and Rich Communication Suites (RCS). The RCS experience will involve more colour, more interaction, group chat, photo sharing, carousels etc. It will have chat bots to engage with the brands customers want to speak with as well as discovery functions to find companies to engage with. According to a study conducted by Nielsen (in 2018), 67% of people say they will message with businesses more over the next two years, and 53% say they are more likely to shop with a business they can contact via chat. Figure 4: Example of a Rich Communication Suite (RCS). RCS is an operator service that will work on any RCS-enabled smart device or network, and will give customers the experience they’ve come to expect from OTTs, natively in their handset. According to the GSMA, 50 operators have launched RCS in 40 markets so far, serving 159 million monthly active users. RCS launched across all operators in the Japanese market in May 2018 and we are seeing new launches constantly arise. 2019 will see the commercial launch of RCS into Business Messaging. Figure 5: Press announcement from GSMA (Source GSMA). We are living a moment of rapid transformation in Business Messaging. MNOs have an important role to play in this transformation, shifting the humble SMS experience to engaging conversation commerce (enabled by RCS), which customers and brands have come to demand. Exciting times ahead, watch this space! Don’t miss out on a single post. Subscribe to LUCA Data Speaks. 5 AI uses in PhotographyDeep Learning vs Atari: train your AI to dominate classic videogames (Part II)
Patrick Buckley The Hologram Concert – How AI is helping to keep music alive When Whitney Houston passed away in 2012, the world was shocked by the sudden and tragic news of her death. Fans gathered around the Beverly Hills hotel in Los...
Patrick Buckley Robot Waiters – The future or just a gimmick? As we continue to battle the COVID-19 pandemic, the hospitality industry is looking to technology as a way to keep workers safe. Could robot waiters be the answer? In...
Patrick Buckley How will AI change the labour market for the better? From the way we shop, to the way we learn, the digital world in which we live is unrecognisable from the reality of a decade ago. One area which...
Patrick Buckley How AI is helping fashion retailers stay afloat With an estimated current global market value surpassing 406 billion USD, the fashion industry is one of the most significant yet vulnerable industries out there. In an ever-worsening socio-economic...
LUCA La transformación digital en la gestión del agua, ahora más que nunca Hoy en día mantenemos la incertidumbre de cuándo dispondremos de una vacuna o cuál será el impacto real en la sociedad y en la economía que nos deja esta...
Patrick Buckley Thanks to AI, the future of video-conferencing is in sight. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, video-conferencing has become the backbone of both our work and social lives. Today, on #WorldHugDay, we take a look at some of the ways in which...