Lucidworks Launches Inaugural Connector Awards to Recognize Fusion Devotees

Lucidworks is well known for the quality of its product and collaborating with customers, partners, and the open-source community. This year, at the annual ACTIVATE conference, we launched the inaugural Lucidworks Connector Awards to highlight some of those who have been innovating and impacting their employees and customers through the use of Lucidworks Fusion. 

Earlier in the year, we asked our employees to nominate customers who are championing and improving workflows and revenue with Fusion. We were thrilled to receive a flood of nominations, and selected two finalists in each category–Digital Workplace and Digital Commerce–to join us in Washington, D.C., earlier this month to present their Fusion-powered solutions to a panel of industry experts.

The 2019 Lucidworks Connector Awards judges were:

Mike Gualtieri – VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

Sheryl Kingstone – VP, Customer Experience & Commerce, 451 Research

Kieran McQuilkin – Market Editor, American Inno

The 2019 Lucidworks Connector Award finalists use AI tools to make work and life easier for customers and employees. Those finalists were:

• Marc Desormeau, product owner for site search and product data optimization at Lenovo
• Pankaj Andhale, data scientist at Nordstrom Rack | Hautelook
• Dr. Atousa Duprat, research software engineer at Uber
• Viren Patel, director of enterprise search and artificial intelligence at PwC

At Lenovo, Desormeau uses Fusion to create personalized online experiences for shoppers spanning 88 countries, 36 languages, and multiple B2C, B2B, SMB, and private sites. Lenovo has seen significant improvements to click-through rates and revenue year over year since implementing Fusion–within just the first year they recognized a whopping 170 percent increase in search-based revenue. 

Andhale’s team powers search on NordstromRack.com and Hautelook.com with Fusion–using tools such as synonyms, stop words and signals to boost relevancy of results. Andhale and his team share search engine results with merchandising teams to create a feedback loop to update its algorithms. They also plug their custom algorithms into Fusion. The approach seems to have worked; the retailer doubled its conversion rate after implementing Fusion.

Uber uses Fusion to provide insights to its corporate information teams. To find those insights Duprat matches user queries with user activities – the idea is to give users access to relevant queries in the corpus that match their interest. She also uses machine learning and natural language processing techniques to tag those queries, then integrates tagging across domains. This ability to integrate advanced machine learning and NLP models with Fusion pipelines enables Duprat’s team to deliver the most relevant results to employees, increasing usage of the search application and user productivity.

Patel’s team uses Fusion to power PwC’s firm-wide enterprise search application–leveraging machine learning models to deliver the most relevant employee and client insights from various data sources, including SAP, Workday and Salesforce. By providing employees with a 360 degree view of people and companies with Fusion, PwC has been able to decrease call center times and increase productivity of knowledge workers.

Lucidworks did not select or influence the selection of winners. Judges looked for criteria such as impact of the solution within the finalist’s organization, the spread of Fusion adoption internally or externally and AI innovation.

We are proud to announce the 2019 Lucidworks Connector winners:

2019 Lucidworks Commerce Connector: Pankaj Andhale, Nordstrom Rack | Hautelook

2019 Lucidworks Workplace Connector: Viren Patel, PwC

We look forward to continuing to build upon the Lucidworks Connector Awards program next year and beyond. We plan to open up nominations for 2020 soon. Stay tuned!