B1 - MakAI | Devpost

Inspiration

The inspiration for MakAI stems from a personal connection. Our teammate's aunt owns a designer boutique, where her passion for fashion shines through her creations. However, despite her dedication, she faces several challenges: a lack of skilled employees, uncertainty about her digital standing, and a need for clearer pathways to improve her business operations. This experience highlighted a pressing need for SMBs to receive tailored support in understanding their digital maturity. We want to provide the tools and insights to survive in the digital age.

What it does

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are at a crossroads. They recognize the necessity of digital transformation but often struggle with where to start. Understanding their current digital maturity is critical for successful transformation. This is where our innovative solution, MakAI, comes in—a powerful AI-driven assessment tool that can be integrated as an extra feature within Verizon's Business Ready platform.

MakAI is designed to simplify the complex journey of digital transformation for SMBs by offering a structured approach to assessing their digital maturity. \ Here’s how it works:

Digital Maturity Assessment:

Users will complete a straightforward, intuitive questionnaire that evaluates their digital capabilities across key dimensions such as strategy, culture, technology, and customer experience.
The assessment generates a Digital Maturity Score, utilizing the BCG Digital Maturity Model to categorize users from Nascent to Multi-Moment. This score provides a clear picture of where they currently stand in their digital evolution.

To deliver a meaningful assessment, MakAI will focus on a range of specific metrics:

Strategic Alignment: Assessing the clarity of digital strategy and alignment with business goals.
Cultural Readiness: Evaluating employee engagement and openness to change. Technology Utilization: Examining technology adoption, integration levels, and automation in processes.
Data Management: Measuring data accessibility, quality, and its role in decision-making.
Customer Engagement: Analyzing current methods of customer interaction and how personalized those experiences are.

Generating a Report:

Following the assessment, MakAI generates a detailed report highlighting specific areas where businesses are lagging. This report includes visual aids and actionable insights that allow users to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses effectively.

Tailored Course Recommendations:

Based on the results of the digital maturity assessment, MakAI provides personalized recommendations for relevant courses and resources, specifically incorporating options from Verizon’s Business Ready platform. This ensures users have access to quality training tailored to their identified needs.

How we plan to build it

MakAI will be developed along the lines of a tool that decomplexes the digital maturity assessment of small and medium-sized businesses, thus, it will be a user-friendly AI-supported solution.

Our initial step will be conducting extensive in-depth research through the direct communication and interactions with the owners of the SMBs in order to get their feedback and complaints. By this, they will be able to analyze their challenges regarding digital transformation. Subsequently, we will build a basic and simple easy-to-use questionnaire that permits users to evaluate their digital proficiency in areas such as strategy, technology, and customer experience.

On the one hand, the examination will lead to a Digital Maturity Score, which will be a proof of passing the three recognized maturity levels. On the other hand, it will give extensive coverage of the user's competencies and weaknesses based on which improvement suggestions will be communicated.

Also, for improvement-a comprehensive approach will be used so that a clear and detailed report of the user's strengths and weaknesses can be created and this would be used as a guide for the user. As an addition to the above, tailor course suggestions that will fit their particular competencies will be added and thus, the students will have suggestions of courses from the Verizon Business Ready platform.