Internet of Things (IoT) and AI technologies are now an everyday necessity for enterprises to effectively compete and grow across a wide range of industries. The global pandemic only accelerated this adoption, with spending on edge computing hardware and services expected to reach $176 billion in 2022, an increase of nearly 15 percent over 2021.

Global enterprises need turnkey solutions that support a consistent code base across their operations, ensuring smooth integration of multiple use cases and consistency in branding. meldCX, supported by Intel IoT technologies and Microsoft Azure, provides the building blocks for organizations to do so with ease.

meldCX satisfies the challenge of automating traditional in-person processes such as self-service, assisted selling, kiosk, machine vision and AI — maintaining single point of integration to multiple legacy and modern systems for enterprise customers.

By reducing pain points and making the implementation of IoT and AI solutions faster and easier, meldCX is enabling enterprise customers to responsibly use AI and machine vision to accomplish a variety of business goals while also addressing privacy concerns. 

Democratizing IoT technology for customers

To provide premier customer experiences while also minimizing service calls, Marriott and Australia Post turned to AI and intelligent edge tools, utilizing two of our primary products, meldCX Core and Viana™. These products were designed so that customers can deploy them without needing a specialized technical team. 

Instead, these solutions are designed like digital building blocks, with simple interfaces that can be used to construct increasingly complex IoT and AI systems. These low-code/no-code systems run with minimal system requirements and can seamlessly integrate into with existing devices and systems. Just like web design and no-code interface tools that let users drag and drop graphical elements together, customers can plug together different pre-made modules and feed them with our own domain-specific data. The goal is to reduce end customers’ timeframes, costs, and need for expertise.

For Marriott, this ensures that their Self Service Experience kiosks have a consistent code base and experience across Marriott’s differing hotel brands — down to details such as signature brand colors via kiosk led highlights.

For Australia Post, when a customer scans their package with Australia Post's parcel drop-off kiosks, data of package dimensions, weight and handwritten information are aggregated against sender identity and shipping prices — mitigating issues surrounding manual entry, guesswork and shipment delays. 

Both of these solutions combine powerful Viana machine learning and computer vision technology, built on the meldCX Core platform. 

The meldCX Core employs Intel silicon and Microsoft Azure cloud and software tools to give businesses the centralized platform they need to build apps, re-use existing ones, and manage them all from a single dashboard. 

Enabling vision while addressing privacy

When automating security for self-service, computer vision can check to make sure the correct person is checking and verify they are using their own credit card. While these vision capabilities are useful for a wide range of uses, it is important to consider privacy and ethical responsibilities as well.

Viana’s AI technology allows organizations to process machine vision and AI data while video data streams remain private. Viana uses fast Intel Movidius vision processing units (VPUs) and the Intel OpenVINO™ toolkit to separate analytic data from the actual raw video before taking that data to the cloud. Additionally, Viana is trained using anonymized, synthetic data so that personally identifiable details aren’t used, either.

Harnessing the latest cloud computing technology and inferences at the edge, accurate insights from anonymized data on how people work, shop, learn, and play in physical and digital spaces can be provided in real time. Most importantly, humans, not AI, can make critical business decisions using this generalized information. That ensures Viana produces useful data while also keeping it anonymous and secure and adhering to ethical AI principles. 

Because Viana is a digital building block among our suite of products, you can control its vision analytics abilities through a simple interface. We have modules ranging from digital signage content effectiveness and zone engagement tracking, to license plate recognition and parking management. As with our other products, it also can be easily retrofitted into existing systems.

Learn more about meldCX and our partners

Built with intelligent edge and cloud technology from Intel and Microsoft Azure, our solutions lower the barriers to benefitting from AI and IoT-driven efficiencies.

We have spent considerable effort to optimize the way our technology works with the Intel chips and Microsoft Azure IoT Edge and IoT Hub, as well as Azure Stack, but customers only need to learn how to use our unified API to implement this solution. Low code / no code systems allow organizations to capitalize on the tangible benefits the technologies can deliver. 

In addition to being part of The Intelligent Edge partnership with Intel and Microsoft, our customers and partnerships include large companies around the globe across retail, education, government, and several other industries. Learn more about our innovative yet approachable solutions, meldCX Core and Viana.