Blog
Field notes from enterprise AI
Writing on enterprise AI delivery: the engineering, the sector applications, the governance calls, and what we've learned from a decade of putting AI into production.
Featured posts
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The Hidden Cost of Waiting on AI
What's the risk of doing nothing? Richard McLean explores why staying on the sidelines might be the most costly choice.
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From Chaos to Clarity: Navigating Data Duplication, Abundant Data, and Query Optimisation
A practical guide to making Retrieval-Augmented Generation models perform on real enterprise data, covering data cleaning, deduplication, and query strategies like vector search, semantic reranking, and HyDE.
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The Importance of Explainability in AI
With generative AI now routine, businesses need to weigh up when a transparent 'glass box' model is the better choice over a powerful but opaque one, especially in finance, healthcare, legal, and education where decisions carry real weight.
All posts
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The Hidden Cost of Waiting on AI
What's the risk of doing nothing? Richard McLean explores why staying on the sidelines might be the most costly choice.
-
From Chaos to Clarity: Navigating Data Duplication, Abundant Data, and Query Optimisation
A practical guide to making Retrieval-Augmented Generation models perform on real enterprise data, covering data cleaning, deduplication, and query strategies like vector search, semantic reranking, and HyDE.
-
The Importance of Explainability in AI
With generative AI now routine, businesses need to weigh up when a transparent 'glass box' model is the better choice over a powerful but opaque one, especially in finance, healthcare, legal, and education where decisions carry real weight.
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Enhancing Education with RAG: How Universities Can Benefit
How universities can use Retrieval-Augmented Generation to keep AI responses grounded in their own course materials, improving search, personalising the learning experience, and giving students access to multimedia resources through a single interface.
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💡 Introducing Sophie
How ElementX, in partnership with UneeQ, brought a digital human named Sophie to the Aotearoa AI Summit panel as an unscripted AI participant, pulling insights from a large language model in real time.
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Happy 10th Birthday, ElementX!
Founders Daniel Xu, Ming Cheuk, and Richard McLean reflect on a decade of building ElementX (formerly Spark 64), the AI breakthroughs they have lived through, and the lessons they pass on to organisations starting their own AI journey.
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Assisted Search: The Natural Evolution of Search
A walkthrough of the four levels of search (keyword, semantic, contextual, and generative) and how enterprises can move beyond simple keyword matching to give customers and staff faster access to the right answer.
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Unleashing the Power of Search: Exploring the 4 Levels of Advanced Search for Enterprises
Why AI-assisted search is the next step beyond traditional search engines for enterprises, with examples from healthcare and legal, plus the guardrails and disclaimers needed to manage the risk of inaccurate AI-generated answers.
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Revolutionising Tier 0 and Tier 1 Support with AI Virtual Assistants
How AI virtual assistants can power Tier 0 (self-service) and Tier 1 (basic) customer support, covering FAQs, knowledge bases, virtual assistants, and smart search.
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Zero/Few/One-Shot Learning
An introduction to zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot learning techniques that let machine learning models work with very little training data, where each approach shines, and where it falls short of traditional deep learning.
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Our 2023 summer internships
A look at the projects our 2023 summer interns Fuki and Raining worked on at ElementX, from attribute extraction to generative 3D models.
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Attribution Extraction for Retail Products
How natural language processing makes it practical to pull structured product attributes (RAM, screen size, features) out of free-text supplier descriptions, helping retailers tag thousands of products and improving the on-site shopping experience.
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The Future of Retail: How AI is Changing the Way We Shop
How AI is reshaping retail: personalised recommendations, conversational shopping assistants, smarter product search, and inventory management, with examples including The Warehouse Group's gift recommendation engine.
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9 Awesome Applications of Computer Vision
Nine industries where computer vision is delivering measurable ROI today: retail, manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, agriculture, banking, energy, food and beverage, and environmental monitoring.
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Chatbot Implementation: Our CTO's Blueprint for Success
CTO Ming Cheuk's six-step checklist for planning a chatbot project, from defining the underlying problem and choosing a platform to training the model, monitoring metrics, and maintaining the bot once it is live.
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AI Governance Series: To Build or to Buy?
How boards should approach the build-or-buy question for AI, covering trade-offs around speed, control, talent, maintenance, and capex versus opex, plus the often non-binary middle ground of building on top of pre-trained models.
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Looking Ahead to 2023: AI Developments our Founders are Watching
Founders Ming Cheuk, Daniel Xu, and Richard McLean on the AI developments they were watching for the year ahead: foundation models, generative AI in production, AI in defence, and the democratisation of access for smaller organisations.
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AI Governance Series: Keeping regulation and compliance concerns front of mind during AI project planning
As AI continues to become more widespread in our daily lives, it is important to consider the regulatory and compliance requirements associated with such projects.
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AI Governance Series: Preparing for and Avoiding Roadblocks to Adoption
Part three of the AI Governance series. Three roadblocks that quietly kill AI projects: data preparedness, organisational culture, and change management, plus the questions a board should ask before greenlighting a project.
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12 Use Cases for Virtual Assistants that are Helping Businesses Drive Customer Satisfaction Around the World
A walkthrough of twelve real-world chatbot deployments, from Domino's pizza ordering to the University of Auckland's student service bot, showing how virtual assistants are reshaping customer support across industries.
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AI Governance Series: Consideration of key stakeholders in the board decision making process
Part two of the AI Governance series. How directors should think about the impact of an AI project on customers, employees, shareholders, the wider community, and government regulators before committing to it.
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What is Explainable AI, and Why Does Your Business Need It?
An introduction to Explainable AI (XAI), covering why it matters, the difference between global and local explanations, and the methods like LIME and SHAP that make complex models legible to humans, regulators, and end users.
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What is Edge AI and How Can I Leverage it Successfully?
A primer on Edge AI: what it is, the trade-offs around speed, security, location, cost, and processing power, and the practical case for a hybrid approach that mixes on-device inference with cloud processing.
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Does Artificial Intelligence deserve a place on the board agenda?
Part one of the AI Governance series. Why AI belongs on every board's agenda, the questions directors should be asking, and what readiness looks like for organisations considering an AI investment.
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Introducing ElementX
Spark 64 has become ElementX!
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Fireside AI Episode 3: DALL-E with Ming
This week on the Fireside AI podcast we talked all things DALL-E.
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Defence against Big Tech
Three strategies for legacy businesses to compete against tech-first disruptors using AI and data: move up the value chain by productising data, automate operations to improve efficiency, and differentiate on customer experience.
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How AI Chatbots are Transforming Customer Support Services
Chatbots designed to relieve bottlenecks in customer support centres can drive incredible results for your business. Chatbots can take many forms and perform many tasks - have you considered all the available options?
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The Essential Chatbot Terminology You Need to Know
Chatbot terminology can be overwhelming for individuals without a technical background. This guide breaks down the concepts associated with this emerging customer service tool.
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Our Third Hackathon Retreat
Check out what the ElementX Team got up to over our company Hackation weekend!
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The Humble Beginnings of the Imposter Bot
The story of how Team Humble Wisdom's Hackathon project - the Imposter Bot - came to life. Written by team captain and fearless leader Ming Cheuk, CTO of ElementX
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Is Google Vertex AI right for your project?
What are the advantages of using Vertex AI? Who should be using it? And why Vertex AI over other platforms?
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Lunch and Learn: An Introduction to Reinforcement Learning
This Lunch and Learn webinar provides a detailed overview of reinforcement learning, its applications and use cases, and a selection of resources you can explore to learn more about reinforcement learning.
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Improving CX with AI automation: Six opportunities to delight your customers
The relationship between AI automation and improved customer experience cannot be understated - here are six ideas you can employ to improve CX through automation.
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TechWeek 2021: Integrating AI into your Contact Centre
ElementX held a Techweek 2021 webinar highlighting you how you can integrate AI into your Contact Centre. We demo GPT-3, phone bots, UneeQ Digital Humans and more!
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Building Chatbots People Actually Want to Use: Customer Perspectives on Chatbots
With all the information on how to best build Chatbots, there's surprisingly little that tells us what customers actually think about them. This article will give you some insights on customer perspectives on Chatbots and how businesses can best facilitate their adoption.
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[AI]nnovation News: Feb 2021
Things in the AI world keep on moving forward, don't they? In this instalment, ElementX highlights the emerging AI technologies across fashion retail, healthcare, photography and more!
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How Do I Choose a Conversational AI Platform?
Conversational AI is steadily becoming synonymous with great Customer Service. But with all the platforms available out there, how is your organisation supposed to choose the conversational AI platform that best suits your needs? In this blog, we go through the key aspects you need to look out for in your conversational AI journey.
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[AI]nnovation News: Jan 2021
The world of AI is rapidly evolving - it's hard to keep up! In this recap, ElementX highlights what innovations are developing and emerging across health, finance, fashion and beyond.
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When AI Goes Wrong
Like any emerging technology, AI can be vulnerable to exploitation and attacks.
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Human or Chatbot?
How to tell if you're talking to a chatbot or a human? We shed light on the different types of customer messaging support.
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Can Computer Vision Solve My Problems?
Ever wondered if Computer Vision could help you? We'll walk you through the questions you need to answer, in order to assess whether it is the right solution-fit for your business/technical problems.
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Which chatbot platform should you use?
Unsure where to start with chatbots? We show you tools that can help you on your way.
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TechWeek 2020: The State of Artificial Intelligence
ElementX held our very first TechWeek 2020 webinar, all about what is happening in the world of Artificial Intelligence and how businesses can best leverage all that it has to offer to stay ahead of the curve.
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COVID, AI, and Marketing
The business world is constantly evolving - now more than ever due to Covid-19. Want to know what your organisation's marketing team can do to keep up with the help of AI? Here's how.
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What are chatbots? How do we use them?
New to the world of chatbots? We talk about what makes chatbots work and how you might want to use them yourself.
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How AI is Helping Tackle the Coronavirus Outbreak
The advent of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning has revolutionised the way we are able to track and combat medical epidemics, like Coronavirus (Covid-19). Let's take a look what's happening in the world today.
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Why is Computer Vision Hard?
Computer Vision has come a long way, but why is it so challenging? We dive into this question to see how far Computer Vision has come and what factors make it so tricky to complete.
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Teaching Machines to Read
Is it possible to have a computer read an unfamiliar passage of text, comprehend, and answer questions from it?
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What is Computer Vision?
With all the buzz about computer vision, what actually is it? We take you through the concept of computer vision, highlighting its current and potential uses.