How Edgar Escobar and his team at ALTO had two successful AI Projects

How Edgar Escobar & his team at ALTO had two successful AI Projects

We are pleased to Alex Jarett's recent interview with Edgar Escobar, the CIO & COO at Grupo Alto, a company dedicated to helping its retail clients reduce shrink via a combination of services, which include both surveillance and back end legal services to help companies and law enforcement prosecute criminals and reduce theft in their protected stores.

Edgar has a long career in Data and Data analytics prior to rising to the combination role of CIO & COO, and as he explains it, has been using different forms of AI for years.

In our interview, Edgar provided two use cases of using AI which we both felt might be helpful to the community.

Project One:  Reduce spending on the Cloud.

As we all know, cloud expenses can grow significantly and Edgar wanted to ensure that the company was prudent in it’s spend.  By using AI in a team member / analyst role, the team was able to determine that their spend was too high and could be reduced, and identify what areas they should focus on.

At this point, in the second part of the project, they were able to use tools infused with AI to tune up or rebuild how they were utilizing the cloud.  By focusing their efforts with these tools, they were able to effectively reduce the spend.

This project brought about significant savings and is a continued success.

Project Two:  Reduce Legal Case load and focus on the winnable cases. 

As mentioned above, part of the service Grupo provides is a back end legal service, where their attorneys provide information and support to law enforcement for theft cases involving their protected stories.  The idea is to help prosecute criminals and provide a deterrent to these criminals in their protected stores.  The problem Edgar and team identified was their lawyers were handling too many cases, and not all of the cases were winnable.  

So they integrated AI as a “team-member” to help them identify the best cases that their legal team should focus on.  By doing this, they were able to reduce the workload and significantly increase the success-rate.  And that has created a bigger deterrent to criminals going after their protected stores.

As you can see, Edgar and team have had significant success using AI to help them solve two business problems using the “Embedded team member” model.  Edgar’s advice when using this model is to think of the AI as a young, very smart team member who has to be educated on your business operations.  

Great advice and thanks to Edgar for sharing their success with these two projects.