The introduction of AI is driving a fundamental shift in the way businesses think and operate. CIOs, CTOs and CEOs are rethinking their strategies, and asking themselves how they can leverage AI, and harness all the insights and advantages it offers.
“The benefits are extremely promising,” says Bridgette Kemp, business unit manager for Oracle at Axiz.
“Failure to jump on board the AI train could be catastrophic as the competition will be gaining a wealth of previously unavailable data to improve their businesses on every level. The majority of companies understand the challenge and have IT staff, data scientists, and developers putting their heads together to define an AI strategy.”
She says AI is transforming several aspects of our personal and business lives, from digital assistants that set alarms, turn on lights, and deactivate home security, to logistics systems that select the quickest shipping routes.
The more advanced AI systems we see today, employ machine learning technology to learn from experience by scrutinising current conditions. In today’s workplaces, these autonomous agents have a sensitivity to context and can anticipate interaction processes and evaluate their performance, are at the vanguard of the intelligent enterprise.
“An intelligent enterprise is one where humans make decisions with the help of intelligent machines. The days where AI was a far-fetched product of science fiction movies are over. self-directed agents improve the regular decisions that individuals make daily,” she explains.
They are the perfect solution for businesses that need to analyse real-time conditions to enhance business activities, for example, pricing products based on shifting demands, and replacing inventory when shelves start to empty.
“For financial services organisations, these agents can flag any anomalous transactions that might indicate fraud is taking place. The people plus technology combination is an excellent one, that will drive the need for a whole new generation of skills.”
Other areas, says Kemp, where AI is having a positive effect on IT operations, is business process automation, cybersecurity and database management. AI is completely changing the nature of the business applications that people use each day. “Think about the HR department, that can now utilise AI to pinpoint the best candidates for any job opportunities. Whoever is tasked with recruiting, can filter graduates from institutions of higher learning in the area, and use AI to cherry-pick the best options, such as students who have a combination of the right skills and training.”
So now that we know what is possible with AI, how do organisations go about implementing AI into their businesses? “The better the data, the better the intelligence, but too many companies don’t have data infrastructure needed to realise true AI and ML capabilities.”
Oracle understands this, she says, and has concentrated on the areas that cause organisations to spend vast amounts of time building an AI environment, which is ultimately about preparing the data. Oracle has made it its mission to streamline the process of preparing data for AI applications, and building connections and synthesising the various data sources for those AI applications.
She says Oracle provides a complete range of products, services, and differentiated capabilities to power today’s enterprise with AI. For business users, Oracle brings ready-to-use AI-powered cloud applications, that employ intelligent features to drive better business outcomes.
The IT giant’s ready-to-build AI platform gives data scientists and application developers a complete suite of cloud services to build, deploy, and manage their AI-powered solutions. Next, the company’s Autonomous Database harnesses the power of machine learning to automate those crucial, but time-consuming activities such as security patching, backups, and database query performance optimisation. “This helps to remove any human error and frees up human resources from onerous, manual tasks so that they can focus on activities that make a real difference to the business.”