AI-powered platform democratises analytics of forward-looking indicators based on insights from the outside, known as Outside Insight

In the quest to become data-driven, companies are increasingly investing in Business Intelligence software to gain a competitive advantage. Yet the insights generated by those tools are mostly fuelled by data from within a company’s walls, instead of the real-time market signals found externally online – from consumer opinions to corporate filings. This outside data can unlock key indicators about an industry or competitor, but harnessing the volume and variety of global data is a time-intensive task. And although advances in artificial intelligence have made it easier to capture and analyse this data to create powerful insights, most commercial AI tools are one-size-fits-all models with limited capabilities.

That’s why Meltwater – a pioneer of media intelligence and curator of the world’s most diverse collection of open and licensed global data – is opening up its AI platform, Fairhair.ai, to give developers and data scientists the tools to:

• Connect and organise internal and external data by a knowledge graph
• Access pre-trained, configurable AI models
• Create real-time insights to make forward-looking, data-driven decisions

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Originally developed to power Meltwater’s media intelligence and social analytics products, Fairhair.ai – as an open data science platform – makes it easier for businesses to gain a real-time pulse on everything from market research to risk management.

“We quickly realised our AI platform had far more potential, beyond Meltwater’s core products, to democratise competitive insights created from real-time online data. Fairhair.ai goes beyond Business Intelligence by filling the gap between historic trends and real-time market indicators, and predict what’s ahead with forward-looking insights – a practice we call Outside Insight,” said Jorn Lyseggen, Meltwater’s founder and CEO. “In spite of being the most valuable source for forward-looking indicators, online data is the biggest blind spot today in corporate decision-making. Historically, online data has been hard to track and analyse in a systematic and rigorous way because of its sheer scale, plethora of data types, and its multitude of languages. Fairhair.ai addresses many of these challenges and helps companies analyse the noisy and messy web to better understand their competitive landscape.”

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Fairhair.ai gives developers the tools to leverage the platform’s library of pre-trained AI models or train their own models to create advanced analytics fuelled by the world’s largest corpus of outside data. This data is continuously mined by Meltwater’s privacy-by-design knowledge graph for relations and facts about the entities, such as acquisitions and product launches.

Fairhair.ai also makes it easy to integrate this knowledge graph with any organisation’s internal data and existing models. For example, companies can integrate Fairhair.ai into enterprise risk management – such as navigating complex supply chains. The platform’s powerful knowledge graph can trace events through global supply chains, connecting suppliers, products, and their dependencies. “Existing AI platforms often require a lot of expertise and experimentation to be effective. They also don’t help with the expensive and difficult preparation of data. Fairhair.ai provides a fast-track to reap the benefits of AI and advanced insights by opening up access to our data and models organised in a knowledge graph,” said Aditya Jami, CTO and Head of AI at Meltwater.

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The expertise behind Fairhair.ai includes Meltwater’s decades of experience collecting and analysing web data and content partnerships. The platform reflects years of research and development from an experienced team of in-house engineers and data scientists through a series of AI acquisitions. Supported by collaborations with top universities and research groups, such as Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Oxford, Fairhair.ai is also informed by a Scientific Advisory Board. Its founding members – Regina Barzilay, Georg Gottlob, Jure Leskovec and Eric Nyberg – are considered pioneers in fields of natural language processing, information retrieval, web data extraction and large-scale information network analysis.

“Fairhair.ai not only includes access to a very large knowledge graph that has been enriched by lots of feature extractors, but significant analytical capabilities with all of today’s best AI tools integrated together for researchers and students,” said Nyberg, director of the Master’s Program in Computational Data Science at Carnegie Mellon University.