‘We will go out of our way to help you grow’: Charismatic CEO Aida Taveras on how Inmotion goes the extra mile bridging the digital gap

“Our company not only implements the digital offerings created by our partners, Google and Salesforce, but also looks to create in-house solutions to complement and empower our partners’ services.”

Inmotion is a Salesforce Cloud Reseller and Google Cloud Partner, focusing on the digital transformation of medium and large companies. It serves clients in a variety of sectors, including financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, and retail, and offers them services that facilitate client connectivity, relationship building, and improved profitability and revenue. The company serves clients in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Panama, Jamaica, and the United States.

Inmotion works together with a network of reputable international partners to create solutions that are uniquely suited to satisfy client needs.

The company was founded in 2019 and is headquartered in Santo Domingo.

The Silicon Review reached out to Aida Taveras, CEO of Inmotion and here’s what she had to say.

Interview Highlights

Please provide a brief summary of the events that led to the founding of Inmotion.

The founding of Inmotion began as an idea to bring talented individuals, some with more than 30 years of experience in the technology sector, to bring forth the innovations that the countries we operate in have been sorely missing. As a result, Inmotion is now recognized as an approved Salesforce Cloud Reseller for the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, and Google Cloud Partner for Latin America.

Our experience has taught us to identify gaps in a variety of sectors. Once we see an opportunity, we put to use the most relevant and recent offerings, develop them into innovative solutions, and use tried-and-true best practices that have been strengthened by the recent disruptions. Put simply, we seek to understand how to better utilize all available data, tools and, most importantly, talent, to help our clients and ourselves make better decisions - and, if possible, apply AI elements to our solutions, for instance, to make recommendations to our clients about their next best actions and relevant new digital offerings in their sector.

Q. As a certified Cloud Reseller, what are your primary focus areas?

Our goal is to support our clients' innovation, teamwork, and adoption of new technologies so they can better adjust to the rapidly-evolving cultural and technological environment.

In the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, we have had the opportunity to spearhead digital transformation initiatives and offer our clients creative solutions to help them meet their goals. Through our partners, we provide a wide range of solutions that we tailor to meet the needs of our clients.

Furthermore, we provide agile methodologies and personalized solutions to our customers, accompanying them every step of the way as they embrace a more digitized environment. That is why, to decide the primary areas on which to focus in any potential or ongoing project, we must begin with a conversation. We need to understand our clients’ goals, and perhaps, more importantly, what they perceive to be the challenges in their path. Once these conversations take place, we can design a minimum viable product. Also, we have started to explore our potential customers and their respective sectors so that we can anticipate their needs and present them with the most value-adding digital offerings in the market. Finally, the process is dynamic. We value and encourage input from our clients because we prefer long-term business relations. Rather than a one-off project, we want to design a path toward digitization for our customers.

Our work in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico brings about a change in different sectors. For instance, using Google's Vision AI, we are working on a security initiative for the Ministry of Defense to track down suspicious vehicles and prevent robberies. Additionally, we are working on projects for the retail, healthcare, and traditional and online banking industries. Our unique solutions often use top-notch AI for processing documents, images, and videos.

Q. Can you introduce us to your services? What are their key features?

Our company not only implements the digital offerings created by our partners (Google and Salesforce) but also looks to create in-house solutions to complement and enhance our partners’ services. By doing this, not only do we add value to our clients in the public and private sectors, but we also help them close the digital gap by training new cohorts of young talent who will create the digital offerings of the future. Some of the services that we provide are managing unstructured data with artificial intelligence, providing real-time alerts to deliver relevant and timely messages to the customer through relevant channels, resolving inconsistencies in their data, and creating predictive risk models for companies in the insurance and financial industries. Moreover, we are working to establish a culture of open banking to promote financial inclusion. This is highly relevant in the Dominican Republic, where 49% of people are unbanked.

Currently, we are rolling out Inmotion Academy to help more people leverage our knowledge on cutting-edge solutions to transform their lives, and their places of work, and even become entrepreneurs, regardless of whether they end up working or not in the Inmotion team. We believe in education as a powerful tool for people to improve their lives and put their skills at the service of society, and with this build a better future for all.

Q. In what industries are your clients? Can you provide us with one or two success stories describing the challenges your clients faced and how Inmotion helped them overcome those challenges?

Among the continuously growing number of successful transformations we have guided, I would like to share the following two with you:

We helped the Dominican Republic's first fully-digital bank with the implementation of CRM to maintain 24/7 omnichannel communication with its customers using bots powered by artificial intelligence. When there is no one available for customers to contact in case of an emergency, this is of the utmost significance. Working on this project, our objective was to promote a culture of service and innovation in the financial industry. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Salesforce and all of our other implementing partners for their assistance with this extremely rewarding project.

Another example that comes to mind is the emergency services in the Dominican Republic, where we presented them with a proof of concept. While their operation was already well-automated, we helped them realize that their resources could be put to better use if they had better forecasts and a more complete understanding of hotspots requiring more readily available resources. And thus, we set out to build an open-source model with the support of one of our partners, Google, to help them achieve exactly that.

Q. Tell us about the Inmotion team. What value do they bring to the company?

I believe there are two main factors: Youth that makes us bold and experience that gives us wisdom. We are a young company that is prepared to venture into uncharted territory in both the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico to help our clients in meeting their requirements. Along with these territories, we also serve clients in Jamaica, Panama, and the United States.

Our team is young and eager to go out of their way to help and learn. In addition to our young team members, we also have consultants with more than 30 years of experience, including myself, who, to this very day, keep on learning and helping our younger team members focus their energy in the most fruitful way. Of course, we allow them to follow their instinct. We are not afraid of mistakes because they are lessons. If anything, we are afraid of being stagnant while the world evolves.

Tell us, what’s next for Inmotion.

I am glad that you asked this question. I have recently completed an MIT course on ‘Organizational Design for Digital Transformation’, during which, the future of Inmotion became clear to me. Our first step towards the future (that we have already begun) is to improve our internal processes to avoid redundancies and errors and create synergies. To be clearer, one of our goals for 2023 is to create a library of our solutions that can be repurposed for new digital offerings.

To give you a quick overview of our expansion and internal reorganization goals, in the next two years we want to use the platforms provided by Google and Salesforce, such as Tableau for data visualization and analytics, to create a comprehensive picture of all the goods and services we have sold, the industries they each serve, and various performance metrics - going beyond self-reported customer surveys.

Finally, we are looking to expand into new Latin American regions that have been underserved. We are working with new brands, testing new technologies, and building our machine learning models to tend to different needs and collect and interpret better data for our clients. For instance, leveraging Google’s Document AI, we want to help our customers extract information from PDFs (regardless of their format) and convert them to actionable data, index the information, and exploit all valuable insights.

Q. Is there anything you would like to add before we wrap up?

Yes, I want to thank my team for their amazing work. We have survived numerous challenges – chief of them the Covid-19 pandemic - and other limitations that exist in the countries where we work.

Importantly, we will keep working to advance women in technology. At Inmotion, women make up two-thirds of our management staff. I, therefore, ask anyone who reads this to put their faith in us and come to us. We will go out of our way to help you grow.

Aida Taveras | In Her Own Words

I am Aida Taveras. I have more than 30 years of experience in the computer software industry. Previously, I worked as a Sales Manager at GBM Dominicana, where I focused on Premium Accounts across industries such as F&B, Retail, TELCO, and the Public Sector. During my tenure, I led the Innovation Team and Corporate Social Responsibility Team and was responsible for 65% of GBM’s revenue.

In 2016, I founded Mercadeo del Caribe, my tech and consulting company, which focuses on helping customers achieve critical operational objectives through digital transformation. Mercadeo del Caribe supports development of eco-friendly and paperless businesses, increasing customer satisfaction, profitability, productivity, and employee motivation, and improving decision-making.

In 2019, I joined Inmotion as its CEO. I have to say that this has been one of the most challenging and fulfilling accomplishments of my career so far. Under my leadership, Inmotion has grown from a micro to a small-sized company and is well on its way to becoming a medium-sized company, with an impressive average growth rate of 300% over the last three years.

“Using Google’s Vision AI, we are working on a security initiative for the Ministry of Defense to track down suspicious vehicles and prevent robberies.”