​Nitor invests in Artificial Intelligence

Nitor Insight’s launch has been prepared by Nitor’s Data Scientists Sami Airaksinen , Tuomas Ritola, and Juha Syrjälä as well as Principal Consultant Otto Manninen.

“We are extremely excited about launching Nitor Insight. AI and machine learning are an essential part of sustainable digital development. By broadening our offering, we can produce even better services for our current customers as well as target entirely new business areas,” Matti Vilmi, Nitor’s CEO, explains.

AI, machine learning, and data science have become increasingly popular within the past few years and continue to be hot topics. Advanced technologies, increasing amounts of data, and the development of platforms such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, make the solutions an even bigger part of everyday life.

“Our customers handle large amounts of data, and machine learning is a way to create value out of this data. We have utilized machine learning throughout the years in making prognoses and recommendations within, for example, the media, finance, retail, logistics, and transportation industries. Lately, we have especially worked with different kinds of customer-service chatbots and other speech-related services,” Otto Manninen says.

Even though there is plenty of hype around AI, practicality and creating real value is a priority at Nitor Insight. Machine learning enables automation of solutions that wouldn’t have been sensible with traditional methods. People can focus on solving more important problems, aided by machines.

“The benefits are obvious: machine learning is now mature enough that it can be used in business-critical systems. Consumers are also increasingly starting to demand intelligent functions from all the services they use. And these are now often based on machine learning,” Tuomas Ritola explains.

In addition to automating routine actions as well as supplementing current digital services, AI and machine learning offer many interesting new possibilities. Ideas move quickly from the academic world into productization and commercialization.

“The development of speech recognition and natural language processing has created opportunities for new kinds of chat-based services. The AI platforms and personal assistants from the big service providers will slowly change people’s habits and expectations of how to transact with businesses,” Juha Syrjälä says.

“I would estimate that the next big discussion topic after deep learning will be Generative Adversarial (Neural) Networks or GANs. These neural networks enable AI to learn how to create realistic photographs and other visualizations. It will be also interesting to see when Neural Processing Unit or NPU-accelerated devices become common and alter the current computation ecosystems,” Sami Airaksinen adds.

With Nitor Insight, AI, machine learning, and data science are now a significant part of Nitor’s services. They are a part of Nitor’s sustainable digital development that already includes pragmatic architecture, design, large-scale agility, and technology services.