Collecting, tracking, and relaying information over multiple channels is foundational for modern organizations—having constant updates about business operations is critical to success. This is also true in the world of machine learning and analytics—staying up to date on the results of an AI model or getting an early notification of an impending machine failure by a predictive maintenance model can have a huge impact on daily business.
While in earlier articles we have claimed that getting models to deployment is of utmost importance for a successful AI strategy, I would go even one step further:
What use is a deployed model when nobody gets to see its results?
To have any significant impact, a model’s output must be communicated quickly, either by a human or another system. When too much time passes, any potential gain by reacting in advance is lost or, at the least, greatly reduced.
Introducing the RapidMiner Communication Extension
With our latest extension, we tackle the human side of this model consumption dilemma. To get users more timely event notifications, we’ve added two new options to send outgoing messages from RapidMiner. Embedded as operators in the process workflow, users now have the option to directly send notifications via text message to a mobile phone number or to a Microsoft Teams channel.
Both options allow a model’s output to trigger an immediate reaction and to reach a larger audience than the core RapidMiner users within an organization.
Microsoft Teams is a well-established communication platform in large organizations, and especially in recent years with more people working remotely, it has become the go-to communication hub for many businesses. By adding an incoming webhook to an existing Teams Channel, you can easily specify your target audience.
While text messages (SMS) have fallen out of favor for private communication (compared to other messenger apps on your phone), they still provide a very fast and stable method to reach people worldwide, without the need of an extra app or dedicated user account.
How RapidMiner Users Are Leveraging the Communication Extension
Let’s take a look at how the extension has already made an impact on our customers’ operations.
Notify Workers in the Field
An energy provider maintains a large solar farm in a remote, rural area. All the panels are connected, and their power generation profiles are monitored by predictive maintenance models that are scored at the edge. Because the location is in the countryside, mobile phone reception is the most stable communication channel. The workers on-site will get real-time text messages with the panels that need to be checked next.
Address High-Priority Issues Faster
An IT team uses AI-enabled ticketing software to analyze and automatically prioritize employee tickets. The software runs on a model that uses text analytics to detect urgent issues. In addition to the regular IT communication channel, urgent messages are also dispatched to a special MS Teams channel that’s accessible to multiple teams. With the extra notification, the response time for high priority cases can be reduced.
Wrapping up
As you’ve seen, the new RapidMiner communication extension can help you improve your processes’ visibility and reach. By adding two new outgoing communication channels to the RapidMiner portfolio, you can dispatch critical AI decisions more quickly and reach out to people within your organization more efficiently.
If you’re already a RapidMiner user, download it from the Marketplace. You’re also welcome to start a discussion on our Community to share your experience or ask any questions about how to use it.
