Skai Named “Best Overall AI-based Analytics Company” in 2021 Artificial Intelligence Breakthrough Awards Program 

We are proud to announce that we have been selected as the winner of the “Best Overall AI-based Company” award in the fourth annual AI Breakthrough Awards! 

About the award

The annual competition is held by AI Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global Artificial Intelligence (AI) market today. The mission of the AI Breakthrough Awards is to honor excellence and recognize the innovation, hard work and success in a range of AI and machine learning related categories, including AI platforms, Deep Learning, Smart Robotics, Business Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, industry specific AI applications and many more. This year’s program attracted more than 2,850 nominations from over 17 different countries throughout the world. 

Why we won

Today, data is more readily available than ever but comes from disparate sources and various formats; remaining mostly (80%) unstructured and unused by organizations paying to leverage it. In today’s digital-native era, brands are increasingly looking at how they can use external data to better understand the consumer and market landscape to drive competitive advantage. 

At Skai, we solve this problem by connecting relevant data sources such as consumer discussions, product reviews, patent filings and sales data into a single platform. The preconfigured, preconnected data is cleansed, augmented, normalized, clustered, and refreshed continually using machine learning, behind the scenes. It feeds into a patented analytics engine that surfaces trends and predictive insights to support decision-making in all areas of go-to-market for consumer brands—from product innovation and development to strategy, brand positioning and media activation.

Our unique (and now award-winning!) AI capabilities include:

Proprietary Data Classification. Collecting, connecting, and classifying large external data sets over time is difficult and expensive to maintain, but at the core of the platform. Its semantic data classification, with patented natural language processing (NLP) technologies and machine learning (ML), understands the structure of sentences and contextualized meaning of each part—delivering more than 90% accuracy when classifying unstructured data types. 

Product Clustering Engine. For brands using multiple third-party distributors, tracking specific product performance is a major challenge due to data deprecation, privacy regulation and no universal identifier. We solve this with product clustering, a NLP technology incorporated in the Skai platform. The capability identifies the same products that have different names across different ecommerce sites for a single view into product performance. This is an essential step before applying predictive analytics to ecommerce data to achieve accurate foresight.

Brand Refinement Engine. When a brand name is spelled or called differently across retail sites, it can be challenging to precisely identify every mention. Our brand refinement capabilities, part of a new set of AI-powered named entity recognition features, allow accurate representation models for recognizing FMCG brand names at scale and gleaning insights relevant to brand positioning, affinity, and opportunity.

AI-Predictions Engine. Skai utilizes cutting-edge machine learning methodologies to identify market trends and develop qualitative predictions around products, features, or audience. We are able to input and connect billions of classified data points from thousands of disparate sources, analyze and cross-reference insights to generate richer, more accurate and, ultimately, actionable predictions than relying on a single source, or multiple disconnected sources.

Actionability/Results. Skai’s unique capabilities transform data into insights that drive significant and measurable impact for household-name brands, including:

• A leading pet food brand reduced time-to-market for new product launches by 300%
• Nomad Foods saw 3 years of growth for a product line that was previously declining 4 years in a row 
• Pepsi used the platform to inform product innovation for its next billion-dollar brand

James Johnson, managing director of AI Breakthrough, said of our win, “Skai emerges as an incredible leading-edge solution in the AI space. Congratulations for being our pick for the highly competitive ‘Best Overall AI-based Analytics Company’ award.”

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