The Corvus | August 2018
the next time you engage with them.
That’s providing relevancy and value to
your customers,” he added.
Analyzing the data in a personalized
manner and understanding that
each customer is an individual, not
necessarily a member of a demography.
Consequently, the historical Business
to Customer (B2C) is gradually evolving
into Business to Individual (B2I).
Arguably the most vibrant online
movie rental service- Netflix is a brand
big on cognitive systems, the company
estimates its algorithms produce $1
billion a year in value from customer
retention. Like any digital business,
Netflix has little time to catch the
customer’s attention and as such it
uses a broad set of data including what
each member watches, when they
watch, the place on the Netflix screen
the customer finds his/her videos,
recommendations the customer chose
or didn’t choose, and the popularity
of videos in the catalog. In the end,
each customer’s Netflix home screen
is customized for each customer based
on their different movie interests.
Netflix, not only saves about $1 billion
a year from cognitive systems, it also
helps find an audience for relatively
31
niche videos that would not make
economic sense for cable TV because
their audience would be too small to
support significant advertising revenue
or occupy a cable channel time slot.
How can cognitive solution help
Nigeria’s electricity challenges?
Power generation and supply is one
of the key indicators of economic
prosperity of a country. It is crucial and
unavoidably necessary for both human
existence and a nation’s development.
Nigeria has continued, despite several
reported efforts, to struggle with
providing just enough electricity for
its citizens. The average Nigerian uses
136 KWH per year and on relative
basis, this represents about 3% of
total power consumed by an average
South African and about 5% of that
of an average Chinese Citizen per year.
Nigeria aims to generate an excess
of 40,000MW of electricity by 2020.
From experience however, we can’t
hold our breath as electricity demand
significantly exceeds supply. With an
estimated population of over 180
million people, available research has
shown that an estimate for developing
How Cognitive Makes Everyone's Life Easier
countries to meet their electricity
demands is around 1,000MW per
million people. This implies that Nigeria
would require about 180,000MW
generation of electricity to meet with
her current demands. This is a far cry
from the present status of total installed
capacity the country possesses as well
as the 2020 target of 40,000MW.
So let’s say our power holding
company - for the sake of this article
– is called NEPA. NEPA uses cognitive
computing to distribute power. It will
have the data of every appliance and
energy generating device or machinery
in every household, office and industry.
From the kilowatts consumed, it can
tell exactly how much and at what time
energy is consumed by each appliance
in every single household, office and
factory using cognitive systems.
Imagine how effective NEPA will be if
it can redistribute power on a needs
basis only. I’ll give the example of
my household and my office. From
7.30am to 7:00pm, the only appliances
that consume power in my house are
my fridge and deep freezer while in
my office from 6:30am to 8:00pm all
lights, computers, air conditioners are
powered up. Imagine NEPA becomes