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With this rising tide of technology, machine learning is more available and powerful than ever. It’s the culmination of many things — the compute power of your phone, the resolution of your camera, the bandwidth of a cellular network, the availability of machine learning as a service (image identification, voice comprehension, sentiment detection, etc.). So, don't debate whether or not machine learning is available to your business or if it’s something you can use. Spend your time figuring out where to use it and how to use it, because if you don’t, someone else will.

On May 9th, Google announced ML Kit for Firebase. Aimed at ordinary developers, rather than data scientists, this release brings machine learning functionality direct to both iOS and Android devices. Six features headline the release: * Facial recognition * Barcode recognition * Image labeling * Landmark recognition * Text recognition * Custom Models Like Apple's CoreML, Google engineered ML Kit to run machine learning models on a device, not to build those models.

I often hear the terms customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) used interchangeably; it’s an understandable oversight, but one that has the potential to cause confusion and send marketers down the wrong path as they seek to advance the cause of their brands through improved experience.

At CapTech, we’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about practical AI and Voice applications for consumers, even doing tech challenges internally to experiment with these technologies; I'm going to share some of those learnings here. But first, let's define terms. For the purposes of this blog, we’ll think of Voice (sometimes referred to as Natural Language Processing) as the interface or “presentation layer” - the way the consumer interacts with the technology. AI is the brains behind it and Machine Learning is how it gets smart. For now, we’re going to get into applications of these concepts for consumers. There are seven patterns we’ve found helpful for thinking about Voice and AI, but we're going to focus on the first three basic or foundational ones here.

What are “hybrid” and “blended” agile methodologies, and what does it mean when people talk about “by-the-book” agile?

Our Customer Experience (CX) team began with a brand exploration that led to deeper insights around the true essence of the Duke’s brand – its authenticity. From the founder, Eugenia Duke, the original recipe, unique taste, classic label and volunteer celebrity chefs, Duke’s screams authenticity.

On September 19, 2016, CapTech’s Chief Technology Officer Vinnie Shoenfelder was a guest on Bloomberg Radio’s Taking Stock show with Pimm Fox. In a six-minute segment that originally aired at 3:30 PM EST, Vinnie discussed transforming business for the digital age and how customers are demanding authentic experiences.

While there are an infinite number of things that can cause issues that keep the team from finishing stories, having the discipline and rigor to continually discover the root cause will more often than not lead to change management challenges. These change management issues usually are not within the team but are caused by the servant leaders who support the team. In each of the scenarios below, the team is perfectly capable of developing and testing software that solves problems identified by the product owner. However, in each case the support system for the team is ineffective or doesn’t accurately set priorities which has unintended impacts on the team.