Companies today have plenty of data at their disposal, but being able to act on it is another matter, according to Aily Labs’ founder and chief executive officer Bianca Anghelina.
Among the challenges in gleaning insights is the tendency toward siloed data management, with product, commercial, supply chain and finance teams holding their own data. Adding complexity, these disparate systems don’t always use the same vocabulary. In a one-on-one chat with Amanda Smith, chief executive officer of Fairchild Media Group, at the Beauty CEO Summit, Anghelina explained her motivation for creating Aily: breaking down siloes between teams and creating one common language so there is a single source of truth.
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“When I founded Aily back in 2020, I didn’t want to just bring yet another tool, I wanted to really reinvent the way enterprises make decisions and empower every single employee with a decision adviser,” Anghelina said.
Aily Labs, which recently raised $80 million, has a suite of AI tools including scenario modeling, decision intelligence and agents. By leveraging AI, decisions that used to take weeks or days of research can be accomplished within minutes. For CEOs leading through disruptive times, where situations can change rapidly, having this decision-making support allows them to respond in real time. “Getting from data to insight is amazing, but getting from insight to action is where the real business impact starts,” Anghelina said.
As an example, one of Aily Lab’s customers had strong sales for a new injectable product, but was receiving consumer complaints about the needle. It deployed AI agents to digest the consumer feedback, and quickly, they were able to deduce that the issue was not with the physical product but was due to incomplete user education for application. Rather than having to pull the product and lose sales, the company overcame the issue by creating a video to better explain how to use it.
Anghelina noted she is “not a big fan of pilots,” adding that she hopes to hear companies talk more about going “all in” on AI this year. She suggested using AI to tackle a process that involves all areas within an organization, such as forecasting. “The power of AI is not to be applied on a little pilot, on a little area in an organization,” she said. “The power of AI is to be applied at scale and identify patterns we as humans would never get to experience.”
Artificial intelligence rollouts are often considered IT deployments, but she urged companies to instead treat them like a product launch, putting the focus on achieving customer satisfaction and business growth. Aily Labs’ rapid implementation process can have teams up and running in mere days. As companies use the tools more, the AI progressively learns and can serve up better suggestions.
With wider data accessibility comes a culture change throughout an organization, ushering in “radical transparency” and bringing decision-making to more players. This also enables teams to look at the bigger picture and what is best for the business at large. “Everyone looks at the same data in real time,” Anghelina said. “There is no more hedging, because one product team looks at the data better and knows how to ask the questions better. Everyone is optimizing for the good of the enterprise.”