You are in your hotel room, waiting for room service to deliver a bottle of water and an extra towel you requested.
Your room phone rings, informing you that your items have arrived.
You open the door — and standing there is a robot.
It greets you on its LCD screen and opens a compartment for you to collect your items. After interacting with you via its screen, it bids you farewell before taking the lift back to its docking station at the lobby.
This is not a scenario from the future — it is happening in several hotels in Singapore today.
And this is only just the beginning of artificial intelligence (AI) for robots.
In the very near future, robots with more advanced AI cognitive capabilities will be part of our lives too.
How AI can help your business
AI, which refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines, is increasingly changing the way we live and work today.
A vital game changer in the future of business innovation, AI is starting to infiltrate into a variety of technologies around us — including physical robots, automation of processes and data analytics.
Many organisations are game to adopt AI because the benefits include:
- The ability to predict and forecast future outcomes with data mining and modelling;
- Greater precision and accuracy in output deliverables at all times;
- The ability to scale beyond human physical capacity;
- More focus on customer engagement by taking away laborious tasks; and
- Business decisions made based on timely, data-driven insights.
How StarHub can help your business tap on AI
StarHub can help your organisation embark on an AI journey because it knows what it takes to get there and has the wealth of experience and expertise to provide holistic and customised AI solutions, including information and communications technology (ICT), connectivity, data insights and system integration.
By partnering industry-leading experts, StarHub is continually innovating on data analytics solutions, robotics and services to incorporate AI capabilities that help enterprises meet their business goals and, internally, enhance its operational efficiency and customer experience.
StarHub continues to integrate powerful emerging technologies, bring fresh ideas and expand its network to help our business clients improve customer experience. With our expansion in AI, ICT and digital, the company is confident that we will continue to be the trusted technology partner for businesses to ride the digital transformation wave.
— Dr Chong Yoke Sin, Chief, Enterprise Business Group, StarHub
The automation of processes with software robots, also known as robotic process automation (RPA), is already in use within StarHub.
To perform internal business process re-engineering and automation, the telco has built an in-house RPA Centre Of Excellence to deliver, monitor and measure the performance of these robots.
SmartHub, StarHub’s telco analytics solutions, provides a 360-degree view of consumer behaviour, leveraging anonymised meta data gathered from multiple sources — such as media consumption patterns, popularity of websites and applications, and geo-locations — by its experienced data scientists.
The availability of these near real-time insights benefits government agencies and enterprises in many industries, including property, retail, brands and research companies.
As a leading info-communications service provider to the local hospitality industry, StarHub also partners with hotels, robot manufacturers, service delivery companies and various tertiary institutions to offer robots-as-a-service and facial recognition technology.
“StarHub continues to integrate powerful emerging technologies, bring fresh ideas and expand its network to help our business clients improve customer experience. With our expansion in AI, ICT and digital, the company is confident that we will continue to be the trusted technology partner for businesses to ride the digital transformation wave, ” says Dr Chong Yoke Sin, Chief of Enterprise Business Group in StarHub.
AI solutions provided by StarHub
1. Data analytics
Telco-centric AI-powered data insights from StarHub have helped organisations to drive their business decisions in the following sectors:
Retail
- Retail owners can identify their catchment market and predict movement patterns of shoppers to strategise marketing campaigns
- and optimise placements/product offerings of new store locations.
- Marketing and leasing teams can source for the right mall tenants to provide differentiated experiences for visitors.
- A large local retailer has recently leveraged this use of pattern analysis to tie in the insights of physical and online behaviour of consumers for an enhanced customer experience.
Media and research
- Media agencies and research companies can obtain more in-depth and holistic views of their target audiences.
- Tapping on its big data, AI and learning algorithms, StarHub customised an on-demand data intelligence solution for Moove Media early this year.
- This creates asset-specific recommendation engines, AI-assisted psychographic segmentation, and other innovative solutions.
- It is South-east Asia’s first Out-Of-Home (OOH) commuter analytics and insights solution for advertisers.
2. Facial recognition technology
Facial recognition technology uses biometrics to map facial features from a photograph or video and compares the information with a database of known faces to find a match. StarHub’s involvement in facial recognition technology projects includes:
Campus: Collaborated with the National University of Singapore on the Face to Access trial project in September 2018.
Events: Implemented integrated facial recognition technology in a luncheon for on-site guest registration in February 2019.
Customer Care Application: Has plans to build in facial recognition authentication feature into My StarHub App, a customer care application for StarHub enterprise customers.
3. Physical robots
Physical robots that can interact with people and help hotels enhance service quality are some of StarHub’s robots-as-a-service solutions for the hospitality industry:
Relay robots
- In late 2016, StarHub worked with the Singapore Productivity Centre and Republic Polytechnic to introduce Savioke Relay, a front-of-house robot for hotels.
- These room-service robots can take the lift by themselves to make deliveries to guest rooms.
- Currently employed at Hotel Jen Tanglin and Hotel Jen Orchardgateway by Shangri-La; Studio M Hotel Singapore; Grand Copthorne Waterfront; M Social Singapore; M Hotel Singapore; and Orchard Hotel Singapore.
TUG robots
- As part of the Hotel Innovation Challenge project led by Laundry Network, StarHub has been working with Republic Polytechnic and ST Engineering to introduce its autonomous mobile robots into hotel back-of-house supply chain processes.
- These robots can transport huge laundry carts across RIFD-scanning stations to automatically count the items. They will then deliver the carts to the housekeeping staff on every guest room floor.
- Soon to be employed at Capri by Fraser, Changi City Singapore; Four Points by Sheraton Singapore, Riverview; and Grand Copthorne Waterfront.
4. Robotic Process Automation
Today, selected business processes in StarHub are handled either by attended or unattended software robots, depending on the nature of the tasks to be automated:
Attended software robots
- Are installed on a personal computer and act like a personal assistant. They are automatically activated by monitoring certain user actions on the screen or by user-triggered actions.
- Can handle tasks such as:
- Assisting helpdesk agent to retrieve all customer-related information from multiple backend systems to attend to a service call.
- Looking up websites for certain information pertaining to the user.
Unattended software robots
- Function with minimal or zero human intervention and are automatically triggered by systematic actions and/or scheduled frequencies.
- Can handle tasks such as:
- Automated downloading of PDF attachments and converting the data to Excel format before sending it to users.
- Monitoring of e-mail for specific actions based on input instructions.
- Looking up websites at scheduled timings to download information.
What it takes to be AI-ready
1. Data-driven insights: AI is only as good as the data it can access, understand and process. You need to figure out what data is meaningful to your organisation to unlock the insights that will meet your organisation’s core objectives.
2. Ready infrastructure: AI systems need to store, retrieve and process high volumes of data quickly, so it is important to invest in optimum hardware and robust networks with highly scalable bandwidth to support AI.
3. Predictive algorithms: Predictive algorithm models are needed to recognise data patterns to forecast outcomes, so your AI-based solutions must be tuned to the specific problems that your organisation is trying to solve.
For more information on how StarHub can help to enable your organisation’s AI journey, visit www.starhub.com/ai
Brought to you by StarHub.
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