Naspers and its European-listed subsidiary Prosus are taking advantage of group-wide synergies to advance the use of AI, with Brazilian online food delivery platform iFood and online classifieds platform OLX taking the lead.

According to Euro Beinat, head of artificial intelligence at Prosus, AI advancements made by one company in Prosus are shared with others in the group, leading to faster development and adoption rates.

After iFood developed a model that uses AI to detect fraud in online transactions (and reduce losses) – the model is able to identify fake merchants, promotion abuse and refund abuse and has led to iFood achieving a 0.1% chargeback rate – OLX tweaked it to its own use cases, and AI now handles 98% of moderation on the platform.

“The fraud detection tools and algorithms that iFood uses are similar to the ones that OLX and other companies in the group use. There is a lot of this interaction across the group, and it is this interaction that makes companies go faster than they are able to go alone,” Beinat said in a recent webinar attended by TechCentral.

AI is used in a variety of use cases at Prosus, including for e-commerce recommendations at OLX and eMAG, content personalisation at PayU and iFood, personalised marketing campaigns across the board, personalised learning paths at Brainly, and security throughout the group.

To achieve this, Prosus grouped all its data science and AI teams into a single “community”. Part of the rationale was to help its professionals in the AI, data science and machine learning domains keep pace with advancements, Beinat said.

Annual reportback

According to Beinat, the community often runs training sessions, workshops and hackathons. An annual groupwide conference, with this year’s event taking place soon, brings the entire Prosus stable together for each team to share what they have done with AI and data science in the past year.

Beinat said the AI community within Prosus also bolters the company’s investment proposition, since newly acquired start-ups are able to leverage AI and machine learning expertise across the group.

Read: Naspers boss says group to ‘reimagine e-commerce’ through AI

However, Beinat said companies must be careful not to view the technology as a panacea for business problems. Instead, he advises that business processes must be broken up into all their composite steps, after which those steps most suitable for AI optimisation be identified and worked on appropriately.

“Sometimes people look at AI and believe it will solve 100% of their problems, but there are occasions where it fits very well and others where it is inappropriate,” said Beinat.

In a recent interview, Naspers and Prosus CEO Fabricio Bloisi said the group is focused on ensuring AI is deployed across all its markets across India, Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia. Bloisi described AI as a big opportunity that is going to “change our company completely”. – © 2024 NewsCentral Media

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