Another bar opens a few blocks away, and a lot of your regulars want to check it out, thus draining your usual Saturday night business. A special you re running on microbrews doesn t sell as much beer as you thought it would, and you wind up overstocked or it sells too much, and you run out before the next delivery. What you need, Michael B. Cooper says, is business intelligence. We go to a place where there s a lot of data and create something intelligent out of it. In fact, there isn t likely to be enough of the right kind of information in such a business for Neuristics to be much help.
People wander into bars and wander out, without much opportunity for data collection.
But similar problems are faced in all sorts of industries that keep thorough records on consumers behavioral patterns including retail, air travel, mortgage lending, consumer credit and countless others. So the Hunt Valley-based company is reinventing itself. Until recently a developer of a predictive modeling product for the credit card industry, Neuristics has taken the core intellectual property embedded in that product, so-called artificial intelligence, and is applying it more broadly, with a goal of winning consulting contracts and spinning off whole new companies. A year ago, the company was not in good shape, Cooper acknowledged. We re going to have to have the financial wherewithal to manage these companies to a point where they re attractive to first-round investors.