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A leading retailer in Europe with more than 3,500 stores and an e-commerce component was losing money due to being undercut by competitors on price. They also found that their customer base tended to wait until the end of seasons for huge markdowns and would only then buy certain seasonal products, which skewed their predictions for how to stock items in the future and perpetuated the pricing issue. In addition, they struggled to efficiently change prices and keep them consistent across stores and online - often, this resulted in inconsistent pricing, especially when individual store managers made their own decisions on sales. The retailer wanted to improve their pricing strategy by understanding what drove customer purchasing decisions for specific products and what prices would resonate best, easily understanding the price offered by all competitors in real time, and updating pricing consistently across stores and online.

BGL BNP Paribas, one of the largest banks in Luxembourg, had a machine learning model in place for advanced fraud detection. However, the model remained largely static due to limited visibility and limited data science resources. The business team was keen on updating the model but faced challenges due to lack of access to data projects and the data team. The challenge was to harness a data-driven approach across all parts of the organization. The bank needed a solution that would democratize access to and use of data throughout the company, without compromising data governance standards.

Dentsu Aegis is a media buying company that allocates advertisers’ budgets on campaigns across various media using targeted segmentation. When pitching their services to potential customers, the sales staff recommends specific segments that would be the best to target with a particular campaign to maximize return. After they make the sale, the teams need to be able to deliver on those promises and actually maximize return with effective segmentation. However, the department struggled to quickly provide segmentation recommendations to the sales team. The teams built a data lake to collect data from multiple sources, but actually using the data meant embarking on the painful process of writing new code (Python, Spark, or SQL) every time. Every time they had a project, team members had to write a query, get the results, analyze those results with another tool, and write more code to reprocess and use the data. Without an easy way to replicate past work, each project required them to start their process from scratch, no matter how similar two prospects’ or customers’ use cases were.

In 2017, LINK Mobility, Europe’s leading provider of mobile communications, decided to scale up their data efforts for handling internal requests and externally with customers. Their primary offering is mobile messaging services, sending more than 6 billion messages a year worldwide carrying invoices, payments, and vouchers, associated with various services. They produce a lot of data and saw an opportunity to expand their offerings to provide more data-driven insight to customers surrounding the delivery and performance of their messages and services. They were looking to expand to customer dashboards as well as the ability to take action based on that data. However, with just a one-man data science team at the beginning of the project, they needed to be able to get up and running quickly and easily. They also needed to find a tool that would allow them to scale up data requests coming from inside the company as well as to be flexible enough to provide data insights to customers without having to use two different tools or platforms to cover their various needs, use cases, and data types.

Coyote, a French leader in real-time road information, was facing a challenge in retaining its customer base and enhancing its service quality. The company wanted to optimize its loyalty program to encourage customers to increase device use. To achieve this, Coyote needed a technical solution that would enable them to segment its customer base by user profile, qualify incoming data, and quantify device use through anonymous data analysis. The company understood that the more data it collected, the better its service would be. Therefore, improving retention rates was crucial to enhance the service quality and acquire more users.

DAZN, a subscription sports streaming service, was looking to grow their business in existing and new markets. They wanted to enable their small data team to run predictive analytics and machine learning projects at scale. They also wanted to find a way to allow data analysts who were not necessarily technical or experienced in machine learning to contribute in meaningful ways to impactful data projects. The goal was to support an underlying data culture with advanced analytics and machine learning at the heart of the business.

A major healthcare provider in the UK was struggling with staffing inefficiencies, leading to physician overwork, patient dissatisfaction, and high costs. The hospital's staffing process was largely manual and based on the number of available beds, which did not allow for efficient allocation of staffing hours. This lack of data-driven decision making was impeding the hospital's ability to deliver optimal care and retain the best doctors. The hospital sought a technical solution that would enable it to model patient inflows on a small scale and recommend staffing schedules based on patient demand forecasting.

Infopro Digital, a crossmedia company, wanted to offer more advanced targeting options to its advertising customers. Instead of basic category targeting, they wanted to leverage the user’s navigation path and behavior to more accurately target those who may be interested in a particular ad. This advanced targeting required experienced technical teams to handle a vast data lake. However, Infopro Digital’s marketing teams needed to be able to handle the queries and most of the day-to-day work themselves without the help of IT every time. The marketing teams had some prior knowledge of processing data using Microsoft Excel, but they were frustrated by its computing and speed limitations. Infopro Digital also wanted to develop any new processes and skills within the company to keep costs and production delays low.

OVH, a global provider of hyperscale cloud services, was facing challenges with its dashboarding system. The business analysts responsible for disseminating data and insights to inform the commercialization and optimization of the website were spending more than 80% of their time on data preparation for the dashboard. The existing dashboard only provided basic, high-level metrics and did not combine different data sources for a complete view. This necessitated ad-hoc analysis, for which the analysts had little time. Additionally, the ETL process for the dashboard presented concerns for the data architects around data and insights quality, as there was a lack of transparency around exactly what data was being transformed and how.

PriceMoov, a service that delivers optimal pricing suggestions and solutions to its customers, was facing a challenge with data originating from old SI systems, Oracle, or MySql. The data was dirty and required a fulltime developer to perform long ETL steps in PHP for cleaning. Once cleaned, the datasets were painfully entered into a model, as they were custom-built pipelines. And once finished, the replication and deployment process for the next customer was taking weeks. This long and arduous data preparation process was causing stale pricing recommendations.

SendinBlue, a relationship marketing SaaS solution, faced a significant challenge in validating new customers and ensuring the quality of their databases. The company had to ensure that all contacts on the list were opted in, which required manual validation. This process was not only time-consuming and required a large workforce, but it also severely delayed account validation for customers, damaging SendinBlue’s reputation. As the customer base grew, manual validation became increasingly unfeasible. The company needed a solution that could automate the validation process and scale with the growing demand.

Technical Safety BC, an independent, self-funded organization, oversees the safe installation and operation of technical systems and equipment across British Columbia, Canada. Conducting physical assessments is costly, and false positive inspections can result in significant opportunity costs each year. Those same resources could be better allocated within the safety system; therefore, finding a way to more accurately predict hazards is of high strategic value to the organization, and it creates greater safety benefit to the public. Technical Safety BC was looking to find more high-hazard sites while operating at the same resourcing level by introducing more sophisticated machine autonomy in the risk assessment process. Some of the challenges faced included: uncoordinated heterogeneous data sources; data quality; speed of collaboration; and training challenges in the use of machine-recommended predictions.

The customer, a major hospital in Western Europe, was facing challenges in accurately measuring physician and healthcare organizations' performances due to uncoordinated heterogeneous data sources, irregular and poor quality data, insufficient risk-adjustment of results, and lack of automation in physician profiling processes. They were seeking to embrace an Accountable Care Organization (ACO) model to improve clinical outcomes and compete on cost. Some clinical processes, like prescribing expensive or unnecessary drugs or recommending longer hospital stays than needed, were costly and detrimental to patient care. The customer estimated that administering the wrong care at the wrong time represented upward of $1.6M loss per year, a problem that they believed could be solved with accurate physician profiling.

Essilor International, a leading ophthalmic optics company, was facing the challenge of improving the processes and performance of their surfacing machines to significantly enhance their production. The surfacing step in lens creation is complex and delicate, as it gives the lens its optical function. The company aimed to optimize this step to correspond to each person’s individual prescription and personal parameters. However, they were dealing with large, heterogeneous datasets from the surfacing machines and needed a scalable way to work with this data. The company was already using continuous monitoring technologies like IoT connected devices, but they wanted to take a step further by employing advanced algorithms and machine learning to take action from real-time insights.

Showroomprivé, an e-commerce retailer specialized in flash sales, faced challenges in targeting their marketing emails. Until 2016, the team selected the target audience for these marketing emails manually based on what they know about the brand. However, this approach presented several challenges. Brands often have overlapping or broad audiences, which meant touching some prospective buyers multiple times, while others not at all. This also meant casting out a wide net, potentially sending emails to people who were not interested in that particular brand. The ultimate goals of the project was for the marketing team to be completely autonomous in targeting and sending these emails.

The Law Society of British Columbia, a non-profit organization that regulates lawyers in British Columbia, was looking to increase the efficacy of their trust assurance audit program. The organization regulates 3,800 law firms and audits approximately 550 firms per year, which means that each firm is audited at least every four to six years. The Law Society has three decades of historical data, which enables them to categorize law firms according to their risk level: low, neutral, or high risk. The organization made the decision to focus on risk factors and, from there, work to adjust the audit schedule based on the risk category of each firm. The senior management team at The Law Society of BC firmly believes that AI and machine learning will play an important role in their responsibilities in the near future. They knew it was time to take advantage of their collected data and leverage technology to identify patterns and behaviors and increase effectiveness and efficiencies within Law Society programs.

Malakoff Humanis, the leading non-profit group health insurer in France, was facing growing challenges in keeping up with customer demands and providing quality customer service. The company offers supplementary health, welfare, and pension contracts to companies, employees, self-employed individuals, and single-payer individuals. It covers healthcare reimbursements in addition to the French social security and guides clients in their choice of care establishments. The company has a dedicated data science and analytics department led by a Chief Data Officer. The data department is comprised of four main branches, each in charge of Data Science and Analytics, Data Governance, Data Architecture and Cloud, and AI and Data Visualization. However, the company was struggling to effectively manage customer claims and improve telephone customer assistance.

Heetch, a French company founded in 2013, has grown quickly to 250 employees united around one goal: making mobility more accessible by offering a smooth user experience. The company has gathered troves of data from drivers, passengers, global operations, and more since its launch, yet they struggled to scale their ability to actually leverage that data. Five years in, data warehouse costs were spiraling out of control, and performance was suffering as the amount of data grew. The company needed to find a solution that would allow anyone across the organization to work with large amounts of data while also ensuring optimized resource allocation.

La Mutuelle Générale, a French insurance company with over 70 years of experience in the market, serving over 1.4 million customers and 8,000 enterprise clients, and generating more than €1.1 billion in turnover annually, was facing a challenge in customer acquisition. The competition in the insurance industry is fierce, with organizations all vying to capture the same type of customer. The cost of acquiring a new customer has significantly increased in recent years. To address this, La Mutuelle Générale sought to develop a decision support tool for sales to aid their understanding and prioritization of prospects based on their likelihood to convert and their potential value compared to their cost of acquisition.

MandM Direct, one of the largest online retailers in the United Kingdom, faced a significant challenge as they grew rapidly. With over 3.5 million active customers and seven dedicated local market websites across Europe, the company delivers more than 300 brands annually to 25+ countries worldwide. Their accelerated growth meant more customers and, therefore more data, which magnified some of their challenges and pushed them to find more scalable solutions. The two main challenges were getting all the available data out of silos and into a unified, analytics-ready environment and scaling out AI deployment in a traceable, transparent, and collaborative manner. Initially, the company's first machine learning models were written in Python (.py files) and run on the data scientist’s local machine. However, as the number of models in production increased, the team quickly realized the burden involved in maintaining models.

Coyote, a European leader in real-time road information, uses IoT-based devices and mobile applications to warn drivers of traffic hazards and conditions. The company collects extensive data on the different uses of its community, such as mileage, time spent on the road, or the number of alerts issued by the community members. Initially, Coyote started with predictive analytics for improving their customer retention. However, they wanted to leverage the value of their vast data sources and implement a data-driven strategy at the heart of their core products and services. They aimed to improve road safety using IoT devices.

Finexkap, a leading fintech providing digital solutions for B2B operators, marketplaces, and e-commerce in western Europe, was facing a challenge with its data science team. The team, consisting of only three data scientists, was using Python in notebooks and a bit of C# to automate processes, but they didn’t have any visual tools for building data pipelines or to conduct on-the-fly data analysis. This method was functional but extremely tedious, and in the long run, they realized it was not sustainable, especially with the company’s growth and plans for future products and expansions.

Provincie Noord-Holland (PNH), a province in the Netherlands, embarked on an initiative to become a more data-driven organization. However, they faced challenges in determining the necessary steps to achieve this goal, including the required technology and expertise, setting up experiments, and implementing new processes. They also faced unique challenges as a public sector organization, such as the need to consider regulations and societal impact when conducting experiments and working with data. Additionally, they had to work within a closed IT environment, limiting their access to data science tools. They also realized the need for data scientists and technology to help them succeed with their data science initiatives, and the importance of being both data and business-driven to generate positive performance and encourage buy-in among organization-wide stakeholders.

Buildertrend, a leading construction project management software company, was looking to disrupt the residential construction industry by leveraging data science to improve business operations and make residential contractors more efficient. They were seeking a data science platform that could enhance speed and agility in their data-to-insights process, enable company-wide collaboration on data projects, and empower their data scientists with the right tools and resources. The company was also keen on automating repetitive tasks, improving documentation practices, and increasing the amount of data included in their models. One of their key use cases was churn reduction, where they aimed to efficiently target at-risk accounts to drastically reduce churn.