Are you missing your competitive advantage in the market, asks Emil Hickley, business manager at Decision Inc.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is not about replacing jobs but rather enhancing them. As the technology grows in sophistication, so too does its potential for business. However, companies must be open to embracing it as an enabler for growth.
According to an article in Forbes, AI also offers many opportunities to help enhance employee skills. There is clearly a wealth of potential for the use of AI.
AI is already assisting organisations to onboard and train staff. Traditionally, companies are reliant on experienced people to help guide new employees through the complexities of the organisational environment.
But by incorporating AI into business processes, the technology fills this gap. By understanding the important points and passing that knowledge on to new hires. This means strategic resources can remain focused on their core job responsibilities.
From a sales perspective, AI can highlight the likelihood of a deal being converted and can identify the top three things to focus on that will make it successful. It does so by analysing customer sentiment in real-time as the communication progresses.
In turn, management can view all deals in the pipeline and, based on size, can then decide if they want to join in the process and positively influence it from a leadership perspective.
Another area for leveraging AI is customer service. Take insurance for instance. Only a small percentage of the calls made from a contact centre are analysed after the fact. And often, it is only when customers start complaining that insurers seek to address poor service issues. For its part, AI can analyse all calls and immediately highlight the areas to focus on and spend more resources for a more positive experience.
The roll-out of AI
Rolling out AI into existing processes does not have to be a difficult undertaking. It has become as easy as subscribing to a licence to unlock the capability that is already available on many platforms.
What used to take almost six months to do, can now be implemented almost instantaneously. This enables organisations to analyse data faster and even predict the optimum model for them to use – a previously time-intensive manual process undertaken by data scientists.
By enabling AI to analyse data, a business can drive change and behaviour. For example, it can take its top 10 satisfied customers and define those successes into areas which the marketing team can use to showcase positive messaging.
In the past, it was difficult to change an AI model that was ‘stuck’ in a specific way of thinking. These used to require significant retraining. But thanks to the subscription-based AI models today, it becomes a much faster process to introduce new business metrics and have the environment retrain itself.
Turning data around
Fundamentally, AI has the capability of exposing bad data sets and duplicate data. Perhaps more concerning is how it highlights how some duplicate records do not even contain the correct information.
So the focus must turn to how those duplicates came to be there and how one can go about fixing. AI, therefore, points to gaps in existing processes. Some might feel threatened by this while others see it as an opportunity to improve the environment going forward.
AI will become part of the standard operating procedure of any business. But it must become an integral part of daily use otherwise we are wasting the opportunities it can provides. Companies must therefore examine how best to capitalise on AI and help it to transform its operating environment.