Carlos Thompson, a prominent advertising executive in Puerto Rico, has a brand-new AI tool to quickly find the essential economic data he needs for his firm’s daily operations and long-term strategic planning.
He is excited about it because he can get all the necessary hard data to prepare a presentation with his team or a proposal to potential investors in a matter of seconds.
“We are always running against time because everything is for tomorrow, so anything that can help us speed up access to information is vital to our business today. Everything is changing so quickly that we need to move just as fast as time does,” says Thompson.
The bot is the latest feature of a digital platform for locally tailored economic data and analysis that is helping dozens of businesses thrive in the complex economic backdrop of the Caribbean Island.
Taken together, the data platform and the recently launched AI assistant aim to be a turning point for businesses by improving and speeding up internal processes, says Gustavo Vélez, the founder of Intelligent Economics (IE), the small Puerto Rican economic data analysis firm that developed the cloud-based portal and the bot.
Both tools are a testament to the digital transformation of Vélez’s consultancy firm, one of the most popular in Puerto Rico. Founded in 2006 and formed by a dozen economists, it used to provide economic data and analysis over the phone and send reports and spreadsheets by mail. Many competitors are still going the traditional way.
“We have managed to differentiate us from others [thanks to digitalization] … attracting more people to us, and adding additional value,” says Vélez.
The economist is a familiar face for many Puerto Ricans, who see him as the island’s economic guru. He has his own video channel, hosts a radio program and writes a weekly column in a Puerto Rican newspaper.
Following Hurricane Maria, which knocked down the island’s power grid and caused damages of $90 billion in September 2017, Vélez decided to become fully digital and started an ongoing shift that has recently culminated with the AI bot. The hurricane was a wake-up call to take the business a step forward by going digital, he says.
The founder of IE asked Microsoft to be a strategic partner in his company’s digital transformation. For almost a decade, Microsoft has accompanied the economic data firm in that process by providing a different set of technologies at every stage, including AI, to make the transformation possible.
So far, the platform and the AI bot have attracted a lot of interest. Vélez says he has nearly 100 clients, including some of the largest companies operating in Puerto Rico, from big retailers and food distributors to banks and advertising firms. He recently opened shop in neighboring Dominican Republic, whose economy is closely interconnected to Puerto Rico’s.
Embracing technology to be competitive
Intelligent Economics’ platform runs on Azure App Service, a service for hosting web applications running on Microsoft’s cloud computing services. It also uses Power BI, a set of software services, apps and connectors that turn data into visuals and interactive insights.
The portal was first introduced in 2018 and has been adding new features and improvements continuously since then. A beta version of the AI bot was launched in November for clients to speed up their customized data searches and improve their overall experience.
The bot runs on Azure OpenAI Service with a GPT4 model. It uses Azure AI Foundry and Azure AI Search, a set of tools to build, ground and deploy machine learning models on Azure. Clients’ information and personal data remain anonymous, according to IE, but interactions with the bot are used to fine-tune the bot’s responses, tone and functionality.
The platform and the AI bot are fed with more than 1,000 economic indicators of from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, verified and regularly polished by IE’s economists — from per capita income and inflation data to retail sales and personal consumption aggregates. There is also data for the rest of the US and Latin American countries.
“The most important thing is that it is fed with our database … not from random data found on the internet,” said Chantal Benet, vice president and chief economist at Intelligent Economics.
Additionally, clients can opt to upload their own internal operating data, such as sales data and price tags, which is not shared with others. They can combine local public data with their own to develop business projections.
Monthly and yearly indicators are tracked by Vélez’s group of economists from sometimes scattered and hard to find government websites and public and private sources of economic data. And much of the data is broken down by municipality, providing an exceptionally in-depth view of the state of the local economy.
Clients say they have all the economic data they need to identify regional and local trends in a single place, available around the clock, easy to access and displayed in an enticing manner through customized dashboards and colorful charts.
This real-time access allows them to enhance the efficiency and productivity of daily work and corporate planning, ultimately making them more competitive in a challenging environment.
Vélez has also developed his own economic surveys — he offers an exclusive monthly consumer confidence index — and provides specific daily analysis explaining indicators and economic trends. As the portal is mostly focused on local data, that exclusive analysis gives it an edge over other global platforms of economic content.
Navigating local economics
Thompson, who runs De la Cruz, one of the largest advertising and marketing firms in Puerto Rico with offices in Miami and Colombia, has been a client of Vélez since 2006. He used to receive the data by phone in marathon sessions. Sometimes he could not reach Vélez immediately when he needed him the most.
Now, he says, the platform is saving him a lot of time and headaches. For instance, the portal was instrumental for Thompson to obtain, quickly and easily, the necessary hard data to justify a planned acquisition in the Dominican Republic to his stakeholders and to secure the needed financing.
Sometimes IE’s platform even helps Thompson’s own clients. Recently, it was key to identifying potential new markets and opportunities for a multinational bank that had overhauled its leading team in Puerto Rico and was being advised by De la Cruz.
“Having everything in a single portal speeds up our entire work and analysis process,” Thompson said. “That’s super important for us.”
Tapping into trustworthy information quickly is particularly important in Puerto Rico. The island, a US territory of 3.2 million people, has been immersed in a complex economic downturn since the mid-2000s, according to the World Bank, which coupled with natural disasters and government crises has fueled an unprecedented wave of migration.
“The economic situation in Puerto Rico is atypical enough to always require a short-term outlook to determine your next steps,” says Benet.
Vélez started his career in the island’s government in the early 1990s, working as an economist at the municipality of San Juan. After more than a decade in public service, he founded his own consultancy firm investing his life savings.
From the start, the economist and his team sought ways to stand out from the crowd — in his case, his then four competitors. He now anticipates that digitalization can triple his sales in the next decade and enable him to reach 400 clients without necessarily increasing the current staff.
Benet says the firm is focused on further implementing and expanding their digital journey: “We always knew that technology was the future.”
Top image: Gustavo Vélez and Chantal Benet, president and vice-president of Intelligent Economics, at the consultancy firm’s headquarters in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Photo by Brandon Cruz.