Here is the summary of HBR article on Digital.The article is written by Ming Zeng Head of Alibaba's Academic group.
1- Become a smart business: Alibaba lends about $ 13 billion to about 10+ millions small businesses. Due to its ML engines it has crunched data to know, who to lend when, how much at what interest rates. Alibaba is smart business as it has created a data driven ecosystem. And most of its decisions are data driven and augmented by algorithms
2. Alibaba Machine Learning(ML) analyzes every transaction, every communication between seller and buyer, every connection with other services available at Alibaba, indeed every action taken on the platform, affects a business’s credit score. At the same time, the algorithms that calculate the scores are themselves evolve in real time, improving the quality of decision making with each iteration.--
3. This micro-lending operation has a default rate of about 1%, far below the World Bank’s 2016 estimate of an average of 4% worldwide. Thanks to data.
4. To become a smart business, your firm must enable as many operating decisions as possible to be made by machines fueled by live data .
5. Datafy customers - For many businesses, the data capture process will be more challenging. But live data is essential to creating the feedback loops and hence create insights.
6. Let the data flow - Magic happens when data is integrated from one system to the other. APIs are critical. Connect one to the other and run the algorithms to find the patterns
7. At Taobao(Alibaba company) goal was to tailor things to each individual’s needs. This would have been impossible without advances in machine learning. Today, when customers log on, they see a customized webpage with a selection of products curated from the billions offered by our millions of sellers. The selection is generated automatically by Taobao’s powerful recommendation engine. Its algorithms, which are designed to optimize the conversion rate of each visit, churn data generated across Taobao’s platform, from operations to customer service to security.
8. In 2016 Alibaba introduced AI-Chatbot. chatbots are “trained” by experienced representatives of Taobao merchants. They know all about the products in their categories and are well versed in the mechanics of Alibaba’s platforms—return policies, delivery etc. Using a variety of machine-learning technologies, such as semantic comprehension, context dialogues, knowledge graphs, data mining, and deep learning, they- Chatbots decide without any human interaction.
9. Chatbots can also make a significant contribution to a seller’s top line. Apparel brand Senma, for example, started using one a year ago and found that the bot’s sales were 26 times higher than the merchant’s top human sales associate!
