THEIR CHALLENGE
Transformation in a turbulent environment
The unpredictable nature of the commodities market—heavily influenced by external events such as natural disasters and geopolitical turbulence—means that commodities companies increasingly rely on access to fast, accurate intelligence to aid decision-making.
Independent Commodity Intelligence Services (ICIS), whose commodity prices have been the backbone of thousands of transactions for decades, deals in what is arguably now the most valuable commodity of all: data. Part of LexisNexis Risk Solutions, ICIS’s role as a source of commodities intelligence makes it a vital cog as the global economy becomes ever hungrier for information.
“Coming from an IoT and smart systems background, I sometimes joke that the commodities industry is not really about big data in a storage sense,” said Christian Mastrodonato, Senior Director of Software Engineering at LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group. “It's more about data quality, versus the sheer amount of data you can get from billions of sensors across the field.”
He continued: “Our data landscape is varied. We have a lot of numerical data, mainly on prices and what we call fundamental data, which is based on supply and demand across different industries. But we also have a lot of content, as we have editors and journalists doing research, talking to people all the time and writing new content. What makes ICIS special is having this very interesting combination of quantitative and qualitative data that you have to match all the time.”
Transformation is a constant for ICIS—and as a digital company is also a necessity. With numerous channels through which customers can consume its data, a key pillar of ICIS’s current transformation is evolving to a data-as-a-service model and investing in what it calls ‘cloud DB’.
Specifically, ICIS is building a ‘central truth’ repository to transform how it exchanges data across its channels and ultimately manage and structure data across the business more consistently. ICIS is also utilizing a micro front-end architecture in the way it builds websites, which is helping to completely redesign the workflows and experiences of its editors.
MongoDB has been fundamental as a persistent layer for this transformation of ICIS’s service model and web applications.
OUR SOLUTION
Powering a first-of-a-kind market tool
Successful transformation means keeping one eye on the future, and ICIS’s positive experience with MongoDB in its core business spurred it to experiment with generative AI (Gen AI) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). These powerful technologies, which could transform commodities intelligence, are included in the suite of features of MongoDB Atlas.
Recently launched in production, using MongoDB Atlas as the underpinning vector database, Ask ICIS is a first-of-its-kind gen AI assistant for commodity market intelligence. Subscribers can tailor responses directly to their roles, market segments and priorities, and Ask ICIS’s citation-backed content can be provided in various forms, from short summaries to long reports.
While the tool is still in its early days, the sheer pace at which it enables energy and chemical professionals to access insights is already unparalleled. Speed was also the core consideration when building the application and interface.
“The key point for us when building the RAG application was getting it in front of the customer as soon as we could,” said Mastrodonato. “That was a key driver for us choosing MongoDB Atlas as our vector database, along with quality. We also had the internal knowledge, as we're already using MongoDB for our core web platform, so it was our first choice. We tried it, it worked out of the box, that was it. We also leveraged Azure Cognitive Services and a blend of cloud LLMs.”
He added: “When it comes to RAG and gen AI, the real transformation is in how our customers interact with our data, which is completely different from before. The landscape is moving so quickly and the reality is that most of the value comes from customers putting real questions into the system every day. It helps us to understand how the user experience is evolving.”
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