What is Peak?
Peak is a decision intelligence platform that enables customers to build and integrate AI-powered solutions that provide predictive insight and direct decision making, driving commercial outcomes across multiple business functions.
Current industry lanscape
Have you heard of Decision Intelligence (DI)? Gartner has recognized DI as one of 2022's top 12 strategic tech trends and believes more than a third of analysts will be leveraging DI by 2023. Decision Intelligence is the commercial application of AI to the decision making process, it takes a holistic approach to analyzing an enterprise’s data and provides outcome-focused solutions. DI is always outcome focused and must deliver a tangible return on investment before it can be classified as DI – that is the main difference between AI and DI.
As reported by VentureBeat, approximately 90% of AI-led projects fail to make it into production. This is down to a number of factors, a lack of commercial understanding from technical teams and a requirement for multiple technical skill sets to build and then deploy a solution. Since it is outcome focused, DI has the potential to address many of the issues faced by businesses currently struggling to productionize AI.
Enter Peak: an early leader of the Decision Intelligence category, Peak’s unique platform provides enterprises with AI-powered solutions that drive commercial outcomes. Used by leading brands including Nike, Pepsico, KFC and ASOS, Peak’s DI solutions have historically been built by its in-house data science team in consultation with customers. But from January, the Peak platform will also be available to businesses to build their own AI-powered DI solutions. This is a huge leap forward for commercial AI, and will see both technical and line of business users united on one platform for the first time.
Fortune 500 companies are spending an average of $75 million on AI talent, but only 10% of all machine learning models are actually being put into production with an organization. Peak breaks down the silos between commercial teams and data science teams, helping to remove a number of barriers to deployment and making it easier to productionize AI models, so they can deliver the value.
The creation of Peak
Peak was founded by Richard Potter, Atul Sharma, and David Leich. They were at a pub following a day at a conference and started talking about all of the different AI and business intelligence products that were available at the time, how companies had to purchase so many individual licenses to complete a task, and wondered to themselves, “Shouldn’t there be an easier way to do this?”
They wanted a way to simplify things for businesses, to break down silos within enterprises so that teams could work together and everyone would be able to leverage useful outcomes based on data, not just for present hurdles that may arise, but also for future ones. The three jotted down a rough sketch of the platform on a napkin and Peak was born (and the napkin is still in the office today!).
Peak's goal
What Peak is offering to enterprises is a huge leap forward for the industry and makes AI applications widely accessible within a business, uniting technical and line-of-business teams on the same platform for the first time. Businesses looking to deploy AI will now be able to simplify their technology stack; cleansing data, building, training and deploying outcome focused AI-solutions from one platform.
Peak’s DI platform has supported a variety of enterprises across retail, CPG, and manufacturing industries to make more informed business decisions that yield impactful outcomes. A few examples of results include 1400% return on social advertising spend from a Northwest retailer, 27% increase in product sales margin from AI-driven rebuying at a fashion company, 64% lower cost per acquisition for a retail company’s social ad campaign, and 90% increase in campaign transactions vs. non-AI campaigns for a fast fashion company.
Customer experience
A leading CPG company wanted to explore how AI could be used to optimize their transport distribution network. The goal was to reduce the amount of wasted movements of their goods as they leave the factory via their distribution centers prior to final shipment to their customers. The two key objectives were to improve sustainability and to maintain profits while doing so.
Expensive and inefficient stock moves were being made between this company’s distribution centers in attempts to limit wastage. This process was based on reactions, which limited their ability to forecast demand in advance and was unstainable.
After realizing that such restrictions were limiting their ability to operate efficiently, and that there was a huge opportunity for them to get this right, they also realized that the opportunity to implement AI was huge – but they couldn’t do it themselves.
By leveraging the company’s data, Peak was able to optimize stock levels at each distribution center and significantly reduce the movement between centers. The new efficiencies were able to address the goal of improving sustainability while also maintaining profits, seeing a reduction in truck journeys between distribution centers by 200,000 km — the equivalent of reducing 147 tonnes in CO2 emissions — and a 10% reduction in logistics costs through better supply chain management.
The team culture
Peak is built on strong values of smart, curious, open, driven and responsible. Its founders want Peak to be a company people love being a part of, and that means building a company people feel responsible for. If they have an issue or see something that they feel needs to be addressed, they should be driven and responsible enough to raise it, and the management team should always be open and curious to those suggestions.
And it’s working! This year, Peak received a Best Companies 3-star accreditation, which recognizes extraordinary levels of employee engagement, and was ranked by The Sunday Times as one of the Best 100 Companies to Work For in 2020 and 2021.
Founder Quote
"Modern businesses are complex and operate in an ever-changing world. It’s becoming impossible to run them without AI. With Decision Intelligence enterprises are enabled to make consistently great decisions, faster and more accurately than ever before.
DI breaks down silos between commercial teams and data science teams, simplifying the task of data scientists and engineers, to rapidly create and deploy AI applications to business users. This makes it so that theoretical models, which are expensive to create, can deliver the value they were intended to. Not just once, but again and again in the day-to-day operations of a business. These applications empower day-to-day decision makers across businesses to achieve transformational gains." - Richard Potter, Co-Founder & CEO
Check them out: https://peak.ai/us/
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