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Entrepreneur Victor Madu on the future of e-commerce post the pandemic

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COVID-19 has turned the world on its head. The business world, in particular, has felt the impact of the virus in a big way. While traditional brick-and-mortar industries which rely on face to face interaction and physical footfall have taken a severe hit, the e-commerce industry has positively flourished under the ‘new normal.’

Entrepreneur Victor Madu is the CEO of ‘For the Leaux Clothing’ and believes COVID-19 will be remembered, amongst other things, as an agent of monumental change in the retail industry. Here are excerpts of an interview with Madu:

IM: Victor, how has COVID-19 impacted e-Commerce?

Victor: The e-commerce revolution is just beginning, but I believe historians will look back and highlight the significant role COVID-19 played. The statistics speak for themselves. E-commerce giant Amazon nearly doubled its sales in May of this year, and every click to purchase is another step on their journey to complete market domination.

IM: Do you think e-Commerce has survived the pandemic as compared to other sectors?

Victor: Unfortunately, many companies won’t survive this terrible pandemic, and that needs addressing, but the profits and power of the e-commerce sector are constantly growing. I’ve seen the upsurge in demand within my own company, and it’s been quite unexpected and phenomenal.

IM: Although there has doubtless been a dramatic rise in online shopping habits worldwide during the pandemic, with more and more people opting to shop from the comfort of their own homes, do you think this trend will continue when COVID-19 has finally been beaten, or will consumers be eager to rush back to the mall for a physical shopping experience?

Victor: There’s no doubt that there will always be a place for physical stores that offer both quality and choice. People love to do things in the flesh, and shopping is no different. But, and it’s a big but, shoppers have found the habit of buying mostly online a hard habit to break. It’s convenient, time-saving, extremely accessible, safe, and the choice online is limitless. I don’t think there’s any going back. My advice to more traditional businesses during this difficult time is to build and enhance your online presence if you’re serious about investing in the future. You cannot rewind the clock, but you can certainly adapt and thrive in the post-COVID-19 landscape.

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Intel has Optimized 500 Artificial Intelligence Models for Core Ultra Processors

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“An important milestone has been reached in Intel’s efforts to establish itself as the leading chip supplier for AI PCs: the company announced that over 500 AI models have been optimized for its Core Ultra processors.”

The AI models, according to the Santa Clara, California-based company, cover “more than 20 categories of AI, including large language, diffusion, super resolution, object detection, and computer vision,” as of Wednesday. These models are available from industry partners Hugging Face, PyTorch, ONNX Model Zoo, and OpenVINO Model Zoo.

These include Google’s Bert natural language understanding model, Microsoft’s Phi-2 small language model, Meta’s Llama large language model, OpenAI’s Whisper speech recognition model, Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion 1.5 text-to-image generation model, and the Mistral language model.

Models “form the backbone of AI-enhanced software features like object removal, image super resolution, or text summarization,” according to Intel, which highlights the significance of its optimization work. It further stated that the models are compatible with the Core Ultra’s neural processing unit (NPU), GPU, and CPU.

According to the company, “the breadth of user-facing AI features that can be brought to market and the number of enabled/optimized models are directly correlated.” It is impossible to design a feature without a model. The feature cannot operate at its peak efficiency without runtime optimization.

The semiconductor giant is in an arms race with rivals AMD and Qualcomm to not only provide the best processors for AI PCs but also to enable compelling software experiences with the goal of creating greater demand for their respective products.

Along with the AI model optimization project, Intel has been developing over 300 AI-powered features for PCs with Core Ultra processors in collaboration with more than 100 independent software vendors (ISVs). In December, the company released its Core Ultra lineup; this is being done as part of its AI PC Acceleration Program, which was started a few months prior.

The company stated that the work it has done to establish AI PCs as a new device category and the investments it has made in client AI processing, framework optimizations, AI tools like OpenVINO, and other related areas have made its software enablement work possible.

Robert Hallock, vice president and general manager of AI and technical marketing in Intel’s Client Computing Group, said in a statement, “This unmatched selection reflects our commitment to building not only the PC industry’s most robust toolchain for AI developers, but a rock-solid foundation AI software users can implicitly trust.”

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Conduent and Microsoft Collaborate to Use AI to Increase Business Efficiency

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AI-Powered Strategic Alliance for Improved Business Operations

Conduent, a provider of business services, recently announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft. The purpose of this partnership is to lead the way in generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications in important industries. The partnership’s primary goals are to use AI to transform healthcare administration, improve customer support, and strengthen fraud detection systems.

Boosting Cloud-Based Secure AI Adoption

Conduent’s clients will be able to take advantage of a secure cloud environment at a faster rate thanks to the synergy between Conduent and Microsoft. Three generative AI pilot programs are presently being developed by the alliance, one of which aims to efficiently extract data from medical documents. The goal of this project is to use Microsoft’s Azure AI Document Intelligence and Azure OpenAI Service to expedite the resolution process.

AI’s Strong Effect on the Growth of Small Businesses

The applications of AI go beyond the healthcare sector and include small businesses, where AI is thought to be a growth accelerator. AI has many uses, from enhancing customer service to automating marketing campaigns to expand its market reach. Particularly tailored AI solutions are being developed for small businesses, taking into account their unique resource limitations, making advanced AI tools more accessible to them.

Businesses with limited resources can now benefit from AI models developed by companies like Microsoft, which has garnered attention and given them a competitive advantage in the market. Supporters of these scaled models emphasize how easy it is to integrate, how affordable, and how little data these models require—all of which are advantageous for most companies that handle large volumes of sensitive data.

Conduent and Microsoft’s partnership is a big step toward bringing artificial intelligence (AI) into conventional business models, optimizing workflows, and establishing new benchmarks for customer and client interaction.

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A positive mindset, steering positive financial change, meet Oz Clement Knight

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Oz Clement Knight pushes boundaries as a top financial educator and entrepreneur, inspiring lives worldwide.

It is sometimes not just about feeling passionate about working in a particular field; it is more than that for a few rare professionals and business owners who strive for excellence daily, besides feeling passionate about all they choose to lay their hands on. When we saw the rise of Oz Clement Knight, who has been in the financial sector for several decades, we understood how a person needs to surrender to his aspirations and goals in life to push boundaries and steer positive change.

Oz Clement Knight is all about this and beyond. At every step in his journey, he has proved why he deserves to be called a leader in the financial realm, for he has stayed committed to taking his clients to the financial success they wish to achieve and, in the process, has reached the forefront of the industry.

He has been pioneering financial success for others through two incredible ventures, namely OHL Ventures Fund LLC and Ozmarq Holdings Ltd. The former is a Delaware series limited liability company to make venture capital and growth equity investments in diverse leading seed stage, early stage, and developmental stage and later stage private companies, with companies engaged in social media, social media, life sciences, and clean tech businesses. Through the fund, he promises to create returns for investors by helping them identify and invest in potential leading-edge companies that can later provide them with massive returns.

The latter serves as the Manager of the fund that will establish a series of funds for purchasing securities of a portfolio company/companies from a secondary source, making a separate and distinctive investment directly in a portfolio company/companies, and/or investing in the interests of investment funds, special purpose vehicles, or other entities whose portfolios consist of one or more portfolio companies.

With his years of experience and knowledge in private wealth management, investment banking, and capital markets, the financial educator, who loves spreading his knowledge among others, especially the youngsters in the field, has ensured that he offers financial services that cater to the individual needs of his clients, eventually empowering them to navigate the varied financial complexities in their journey to reach financial success.

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