Finastra, one of the world's top three FinTech companies, faced significant challenges in securing its APIs. APIs form the core of Finastra's service, connecting banks with FinTech services. However, API security has become increasingly complex over the years, with attacks on the rise and traditional application security tools failing to provide adequate protection. The company's API traffic grew by 51%, while malicious traffic increased by 211%. Attackers have realized that APIs are now used for more business-critical services and share an increasing amount of sensitive data, leading to a heightened focus on exploiting APIs for attacks. Finastra faced internal and regulatory pressures to secure its APIs. The company needed a solution that could prevent account takeovers, identify abnormal behavior, and differentiate between 'normal' abnormal (e.g., a changed API) and malicious traffic.

Hospital Sisters Health System (HSHS), a multi-institutional healthcare system with facilities in Illinois and Wisconsin, was facing a significant challenge in attracting and hiring healthcare workers, particularly nurses. The competition for such professionals was intense, and HSHS needed to differentiate itself from other healthcare organizations. However, their career pages were basic and lacked engaging content to attract and retain potential candidates. Previously, the Talent Acquisition (TA) team had invested in creating high-quality videos with an external team, but this approach was costly, time-consuming, and often required additional editing when employees featured in the videos left the organization.

Mott MacDonald, a global engineering company, was grappling with the challenge of sourcing highly specialized engineering talent. The company was operating on a traditional, reactive recruitment model which was proving to be inefficient in the face of the increasing scarcity of specialized talent. The company needed a long-term, sustainable solution to its recruitment challenges. The core aim was to improve key business metrics and build upon the previous year’s successes after a team restructuring. The company sought to effectively manage their candidate pipelines and better focus their recruitment efforts.

OHLA USA, one of the world's largest global construction companies, faced a significant challenge in its recruitment process. The remote nature of the hiring manager role made it difficult for recruiters to obtain feedback on candidate interviews. With over 40 open roles at any given time, and multiple candidates and interviews per role, the task of tracking down hiring managers for feedback across all hiring touchpoints was time-consuming and inefficient. The company needed a solution that would streamline this process, making it easier for recruiters to gather feedback and manage the recruitment process more effectively.

Servier Saudi Arabia, a branch of the international pharmaceutical company Servier, was facing a significant HR challenge. As part of Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 initiative to decrease unemployment, Servier was tasked with localizing talent and hiring for pharmaceutical professions such as medical representatives and medical affair officers. The company aimed to hire the best graduates and intermediate-level talent to boost their talent development program and lead a successful transformation with the next generation of pharmaceutical professionals. However, the traditional hiring process was time-consuming, often taking months to hire for a single position. This slow process was hindering Servier's ability to meet their hiring targets and compete in Saudi Arabia's competitive talent market.

Coherent, a company offering business software development services, was looking to expand into new industries. Their services, which transform Excel data into code, are widely applicable across various sectors. However, the challenge was to identify and quantify the conversion potential of opportunities in these new markets. They needed a tool that could provide insights into these industries and opportunities, and enable them to address these opportunities with contextual messaging. The company also required a solution that could unify their sales and marketing data.

CREALOGIX, a global leader in digital banking technology, was facing challenges in executing their Go-To-Market (G2M) strategy in emerging markets, specifically in Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands. The company was struggling with lead generation efficiency and effectiveness, establishing connections with relevant buyers, resolving contact issues, and discovering targeted opportunities for early contact with prospects. Their G2M strategy was aimed at various segments including retail, SME, and medium-corporate banking and wealth management firms. The main challenge was to develop the market, build brand relationships and presence, establish partner relationships, and identify potential opportunities.

Monarch Institute, a nationally accredited education provider based in Australia, faced a complex challenge. The education they provide is a complex product, and prospective students often struggle to understand government funding and eligibility criteria that vary from state to state. The institute needed a tool that could help students navigate their diverse needs in a frictionless way, even during off hours. The CEO, Nick Chapman, began looking for a chat solution that could provide a seamless experience for their students, replicating the same level of service they would receive during regular hours.

Ping Identity, a leading identity security company, faced a significant challenge in 2020. The web team at Ping noticed a significant shift in how users wanted to access information. The traditional method of acquiring leads by gating content and having users fill out a form was becoming increasingly outdated. The team wanted to shift towards a model that provided value upfront, demonstrating their thought leadership and value before asking for user information. The primary objective was to transition to an ungated content model, but they needed a tool to support this change.

Pipefy, a low-code business process automation platform, was facing challenges in bolstering their lead generation activities. Despite having a rapidly growing platform since its inception in 2015, the company was looking to automate as much of their internal processes as possible to make the jobs of their sales team easier. They were in need of a platform that would not only maximize the number of leads engaging with their sales reps but also facilitate successful collaboration between marketing and sales. The ideal solution would also create a superior buyer experience for website visitors, prevent emails from getting lost in inboxes, boost follow-up times, and create a channel to engage buyers on their terms.

Quadient, a company that provides intelligent communication automation, parcel locker solutions, and smart mailing and shipping solutions, was facing a challenge in generating more engagement and prospects. They identified the need for digital transformation to meet their customers' expectations and increase engagement with potential customers. The team was also looking for an efficient solution to effectively route support queries. They wanted to move forward into the 21st century and explore new ways of engaging with their existing customers while also trying to increase engagement with their prospects. The idea of a chatbot made sense to them based on their customers and their expectations.

In 2021, Roland DG, a global manufacturing leader, identified two key challenges that led them to consider an automated conversational solution in EMEA. Firstly, they observed that customers wanted to interact with them on their own terms, not just when their team was available. Secondly, they noticed that while many companies across various industries were using chatbots to directly engage their website visitors, manufacturing companies were yet to catch up with this trend. Recognizing these challenges, Roland DG began exploring various chat providers to guide their digital engagement strategy.

Autogrill, a leading provider of food and beverage services for travelers, operates in 31 countries with over 60,000 employees and an annual turnover of €5 billion. The company operates 4,000 points of sale worldwide in 1,000 locations, including concessions of well-known brands such as Starbucks and KFC. With around 400,000 transactions and up to 1 million receipt lines a day in Italy alone, tracking the performance of individual concessions was a significant challenge. The company needed a solution to monitor in-store sales more closely and react faster to sales trends. The existing system provided sales updates on a daily basis, but with a day’s delay, making it difficult to react quickly to changes in consumer behavior and trial new promotions effectively.

AZ Delta, one of Belgium’s largest hospitals, was faced with the challenge of leveraging its vast amount of medical data to generate insights and improve healthcare. The data was digitally available but not in a single location and was difficult to work with at scale. The hospital's on-premises IT infrastructure was not capable of powering large scale data analytics. The data was complex and varied, with a single patient’s Electronic Medical Record (EMR) containing thousands of data points. With over 650,000 patient consultations a year, storing, processing, and analyzing this data was a significant challenge. The data needed to be processed and normalized before it could be mined. Manual queries took up to 15 minutes to run due to the scale of the project, limiting the hospital's ability to efficiently utilize the data.

Materials Market, a UK-based online platform connecting construction material suppliers with customers, was facing a significant challenge with their website's conversion rate. Despite the company's rapid growth and impressive sales figures, the site's conversion rate was a mere 0.5%. Andrew, the Operations Director, identified three key areas of concern through Hotjar, a user interaction tracking tool. These included a confusing call to action (CTA), issues in the checkout flow leading to higher than expected drop-offs, and a problematic cookie policy causing visitors to bounce. The CTAs were obscured on mobile and confusing on desktop, and the checkout process was cumbersome and lengthy, causing one in every four visitors to abandon their purchase. The cookie policy was also causing confusion among users, leading to a high bounce rate.

The Good, a leading Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) agency, was tasked with improving the conversion rates for Swiss Gear, a company selling a variety of goods including high-quality backpacks, luggage, travel accessories, and watches. Swiss Gear's website had been producing strong sales numbers, particularly during the holiday season. However, the company wanted to maintain these sales numbers year-round and convert existing traffic into buyers at a higher rate. The challenge was to identify areas for improvement on the website to enhance the user experience and increase conversions. The Good needed to understand the users' needs and behaviors on the website, without letting their own biases and knowledge guide their decisions on what to test.

AllSaints, a global fashion retailer, faced a significant challenge in managing its online sales platform. With over two million visits per month to the AllSaints website, delivering a smooth, fast online experience was crucial. However, predicting sales during peak demand periods was difficult, and the need for infrastructure often doubled during these times. The company had to maintain more than 60 servers to meet peak demand, but almost half of these were idle outside of peak periods, making the solution expensive. Additionally, installing additional capacity was a slow process, delaying structural changes such as expansion into new territories or the deployment of new features. As an established luxury brand, AllSaints knew that its customers valued consistency and a seamless online experience. Shortfalls in infrastructure capacity compromised that consistency by causing site instability and degraded performance.

The Institutes RiskStream Collaborative™, in partnership with Nationwide, Prudential Financial, and Securian Financial, faced the challenge of efficiently processing death benefits and claims. The existing process was inefficient and manual, requiring comprehensive decedent information for verification and validation of death claims. However, no single source had emerged to fill this need. The challenge was further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which made the timely closure of life insurance and annuity claims more critical than ever. The lack of a centralized, secure, and transparent system for sharing decedent information among insurance carriers posed a significant challenge.

Cargo, an NFT creation, management, and monetization tool, was facing a significant challenge with its batch minting approach. This approach, which uses the newer ERC-2309 standard, allows creators, developers, and businesses to create an unlimited number of NFTs in one transaction at a similar price-point to creating just one NFT on other platforms. However, batch minting requires a lot of bandwidth. Initially, Cargo connected to the blockchain via another node provider. However, Layer 2 solutions are new chain types and not every provider has the ability to quickly increase capacity. Consequently, Cargo hit rate limits using that service, which slowed requests and at times resulted in not being able to access the Matic / Polygon blockchain. Furthermore, node outages dramatically impacted the platform and its users. If users were in the process of minting NFTs and Cargo suffered a node outage, those NFTs might not show up for users, or might show up blank. This led to increases in support tickets, and decreases in overall customer sentiment.

Before the inception of Dune Analytics in 2018, there was a significant challenge in the Ethereum community regarding the analysis of Ethereum activity data. There were limited resources to answer arbitrary questions about Ethereum activity with data or to track how that data evolved over time. A few sites reported specific metrics, but they lacked transparency and flexibility to interact with the metrics and data provided. This lack of comprehensive and interactive data made it difficult to benchmark metrics across different dApps in a meaningful way. Consequently, community discussions and product decisions were often based on inconsistent comparisons or made without considering data at all.

The case study revolves around a leading private hospital in London, UK, founded in 1982, that was grappling with the challenge of safeguarding large volumes of sensitive and private patient data. The hospital, like all healthcare institutions, had to manage and maintain a wide range of specialist systems, including life-saving medical equipment. Ensuring these systems were always operational and that patient data could be accessed and shared across the network instantaneously was crucial. At the same time, the hospital had a strict duty to prevent this sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands. The hospital also had to comply with the requirements of the GDPR, NIS Directive, and Care Quality Commission (CQC), which mandate that personal data is suitably protected and breaches are promptly detected, responded to, and reported. Despite having firewalls and antivirus software, the hospital sought to improve visibility of events inside its network to detect advanced threats capable of evading these controls. The hospital's IT department, a team of six, lacked the resources to manage the technologies required for 24/7 security monitoring.

Marmon Holdings, a global industrial organization with over 100 autonomous manufacturing and service businesses, was facing a challenge in optimizing its manufacturing appliances at the McKenzie Valve Plant. The company sought to integrate a Computer Vision (CV) solution to analyze and enhance the use of its machines. The primary goal was to gain more visibility into the run versus idle time of the machines, thereby eliminating production bottlenecks and improving return on investment (ROI). The challenge was to achieve this while ensuring low implementation costs.

Grokability, a company founded by Alison Gianotto, was facing a significant challenge. Alison needed a quick and efficient way to evaluate her business performance. However, she was overwhelmed with other tasks and didn't have the time to dig deep for answers. As the company grew, time management became less of an issue, but a new problem arose - recovering payments. Alison was managing the help desk, working on installations, and writing software code all by herself. She was strapped for time and needed a solution that would allow her to easily visualize company metrics and glean company insights, without having to build her own tool from scratch.

Cardone Ventures was facing a number of challenges that were affecting their return on investment (ROI) and overall efficiency. The sales team was spending an excessive amount of time pursuing unqualified leads, which diverted their focus from motivated prospects. This not only wasted valuable resources but also reduced the potential for successful conversions. Additionally, the company lacked 24/7 coverage for inbound leads. This meant that any leads that came in during off hours were not contacted until business hours resumed, leading to potential missed opportunities. Furthermore, the company was struggling with slow lead response times. With leads coming in around the clock, it was not feasible to drop everything to respond immediately, leading to delays and potential loss of interest from the leads.

Audiobooks.com, a leading audiobook publishing company, faced a significant challenge in improving the Cost-per-Circulation (CPC) for digital content and audiobook titles on their platform. The company aimed to predict customer churn using AI to drive more value for their clients and solidify their bottom line. As a subscription-based business, customer retention was crucial for Audiobooks.com. The company operates in a competitive market where customers can easily switch to alternative providers. Any negative experience could prompt a customer to abandon the brand, resulting in a loss of revenue, affecting customer lifetime value (LTV), and increasing the cost of acquiring new customers. The company's goal was to minimize the churn rate to lower CPC, which is calculated as the total cost of their licensing fees vs. the total number of book checkouts. High customer churn negatively impacts book checkouts and makes it difficult for distributors to get government funding. The executive team set a bold goal to track the habits of problem users and proactively make personalized offers to minimize attrition by predicting churn while increasing checkouts.

BuildASign.com, a company specializing in custom signage, was facing a significant challenge in managing their growing number of leads and contacts. The marketing team was constantly requesting assistance from the company's developers to connect apps that lacked native integrations or to build custom reports and search tools. However, the developers were often unavailable as they were shared resources with the support and sales teams. The marketing team had to manually move leads and contacts from the generator to a customer relationship manager (CRM) or ActiveCampaign, which was a time-consuming and menial task. The workload was becoming overwhelming and was diverting resources away from more important tasks.

The case study revolves around the challenges faced by the founders of Carlypso, a tech startup that sold cars 100% online. The company was founded in 2013 and sold to Carvana in 2017. The primary challenge was the limited engineering resources, which were spread thin due to competing priorities and a constantly changing roadmap. The founders felt that they were distracting their engineers with requests to integrate off-the-shelf apps, which was hindering them from focusing on building technology products that could differentiate them from their competitors. Another significant challenge was the manual tasks that prevented the company from scaling quickly. These tasks involved moving data from one system to another, which was time-consuming and inefficient.

Julie Stoian, a digital marketing consultant and tech coach at ClickFunnels and owner of Create Your Laptop Life (CYLL), was facing a significant challenge in managing her businesses. The manual steps involved in running her course and coaching business were time-consuming and detracted from her ability to focus on her clients and business growth. The manual work meant that Julie either had to spend less time on her clients and businesses or hire additional staff to manage tasks, which would increase costs. The challenge was to find a way to automate these tasks, keep costs low, and allow Julie to focus on more critical aspects of her business.

Caren Kelleher, a music enthusiast and former Google employee, identified a significant gap in the music industry. She noticed a high demand for vinyl records, particularly from independent artists, but a lack of capacity in factories worldwide to meet this demand. This challenge was compounded by the difficulty of getting the records pressed and into the hands of fans. Caren founded Gold Rush Vinyl, a high-quality record-pressing company, to address this issue. However, she faced another challenge: scaling the business on a budget. She knew that automation would be key to achieving this, but struggled to find a solution that was flexible enough to fit her team's unique needs.

Tom Sagi, who joined his family's construction business in 2008, faced significant challenges in tracking employee time and wages as the company transitioned from using subcontractors to hiring their own employees. The existing time tracking platforms required an email address, which many of his employees did not have. Even with the adoption of mobile time tracking, importing the team's hours into payroll was a cumbersome process. This led to inefficiencies, with significant time spent on payroll processing instead of productive tasks. As the company grew, Sagi also faced challenges in streamlining other aspects of the business, such as client onboarding. With a lean team and limited resources, it was crucial to automate non-core functions to allow the team to focus on improving the platform.