With projects spanning four sectors, 27 countries and more than 80 institutions, KOGI Corporation is uniquely poised to address the design challenges vexing many of today’s organizations as they look to rebound in a pandem-ic-stricken world. KOGI’s flexible and creative AI and IoT design solutions help ensure that they not only bounce back, but reemerge even better poised to com-pete in a digital economy.

New technologies distinguish KOGI’sCRM system

Ask most managers, and they will say it is often difficult to keep tabs on their employees. Ask most employees, and they will say that corporate manage-ment systems are often clunky at best and invasive at worst.

By integrating new technologies such as facial recognition into their proprietary embedded customer relationship man-agement (CRM) system — and bringing it all to mobile — KOGI’s Corporate Employee Optimization (CEO) app is able to ensure a smooth experience for both sides.

For example, instead of clocking into work with a fingerprint reader or RFID card, employees can simply scan their face with their own mobile phone. The tag is noted along with the phone’s GPS location to confirm the employee’s whereabouts, whether they are meant to be swiping into work for the day or arriving on time for an important meeting abroad.

“Let’s say your employee is in the UK. How do you know your employee is not at this time at Starbucks drinking coffee even though he says he’s meeting the customer?” KOGI CEO Gavin Lee said. “The employee will always say that the meeting went very well, but some-times these important messages will not be delivered to the boss. This system picks up everything in a quantified manner.”

Most apps boast humble beginnings, but CEO took off straight away. With more than 4,800 employees spread across wildly diverse industries, one prominent Qatari royal family enterprise had an acute need for a system to accurately and securely keep track of them all. After finding success in Qatar, the app quickly gained more attention across the Middle East and beyond.

Data collection that doesn’t sacrifice privacy

Recently, KOGI has been turning heads in Europe — receiving an invitation from the World Economic Forum (WEF) to demonstrate the CEO app thanks to its most innovative feature: privacy.

Many facial recognition systems will upload a user’s image data to the cloud, where it lies vulnerable to hackers or other bad actors. However, if someone were to gain access to a CEO system, all they would see is a nonsensical mathe-matical representation of the data.

“Even before the face is sent over to the cloud, we deconstruct the person’s face into a string of digits, so it is actually no longer recognizable,” Lee said. “It is garbage data.”

Users can also rest assured that their location data remains private, even from their boss, as the app utilizes passive rather than proactive location tracking. When a user taps a button on their phone “is when and only when the GPS signal is sent to the cloud, just to verify where he or she is,” Lee said.

Strong privacy simultaneously solves two problems, as it makes front-end users more willing to share data with the knowledge that it will be protected and does not overstep permissions, and makes back-end management more confident that the information they hold cannot be misused.

A secure solution for home quarantine

Even though it was conceived as a corporate solution, the CEO app is proving valuable in a number of unex-pected industries as KOGI’s partners continue providing guidance on custom projects, including parental control and healthcare.

Indeed, KOGI’s invitation from the WEF was not related to business at all, but rather to demonstrate the app’s prac-ticability for fighting infectious disease.

Quarantine is one of the greatest tools we have to quell pandemics, but as COVID-19 spread across the globe, gov-ernments found themselves in hot water for violating privacy with their quarantine tracking measures. These concerns are just what the CEO app is able to alleviate, as it assures those in quarantine that their data is private, and assures governments that no one is able to game the system.

Bringing the contactless revolution forward

All KOGI products, including the CEO app, have another unexpected feature that is proving essential to industries across the board in the post-COVID-19 era.

Using the CEO app to clock into work on mobile removes the need for employees to touch a single card or fingerprint reader, while KOGI’s suite of other solutions in the enterprise, healthcare, retail and transportation fields similarly remove the risk of viral cross-contamina-tion. And since most of KOGI’s products are software-oriented, businesses need no more than a week to deploy solutions that could bring customers back.

Take parking as an example. KOGI provides a mobile-based app that allows users to reserve a parking space in advance, then guides them to the space using indoor navigation. While originally envisioned as a solution to “parking rou-lette,” the app also eliminates the need to interface with a parking attendant or a touch an actual machine.

The pandemic has also spurred retailers to shift from an online-to-offline (O2O) model to a purely online expe-rience. KOGI’s clothing retail solution, which provides a sizing chamber that scans a customer to discover their size, was originally geared toward minimizing stock, but is now being adapted to also minimize physical contact.

“Businesses, restaurants, retailers — they want a new way under the digital transformation to become competitive during the pandemic,” Lee said. “We are always changing to how the real world is adapting, how businesses are adapting.”

Selling points:

• Facial recognition-enabled CRM app ensures data accuracy and allows for customization across industries

• Mathematical representation and reactive location tracking safeguard privacy, earning recognition from governments as well as corporate partners

• Mobile solutions minimize interpersonal contact and therefore the risk of viral cross-contamination

• Software-oriented systems reduce deployment time to within a week