AI to Play Key Role in Transforming Today's Business

The following are five significant ways that AI can help companies enhance their operations to better compete in the intelligent world:

1. Intelligent Analysis. Instead of the rear-view perspective that business intelligence historically provides, AI analyzes large amounts of data to recommend decisions, or, in the case of machine learning, actually act on the data. With AI, anomalies and trends that affect business can be identified in real time.

For example, a projected delay in a purchase order for a cheap raw material will affect the on-time delivery of high-value orders in a months’ time and have a ripple effect. It will cause customer satisfaction issues, which in turn cause payment delays, credits, increased discounts, lower repeat orders, and impact revenue six months later. Knowing about the issue immediately will allow the buyer to find a replacement rather than accept a short delay in delivery, avoiding the revenue impact in the future.

2. Intelligent Interaction. Applications can have hundreds of rigid, role-based dashboards that are delivered out of the box. These are based on years of experience from multiple industries. In the future, the intelligent interaction will dynamically construct dashboards based on what it thinks the user needs to see based on current activities and the behavior of thousands of similar roles. We are also now seeing the emergence of intelligent voice-activated solutions. The intelligence here is taking unstructured instructions and determining what the user means, then ensuring the right information is delivered back.

3. Intelligent Automation: E nterprise s olutions c an h ave very powerful workflow engines that allow companies to change and automate business processes without writing code. New intelligent systems will learn, suggest and automate processes based on learning business patterns and behaviors. For example, the machine can automatically place holds on customers based on payment and ordering behaviors.

Even though AI is a powerful enabling technology, its value can only be realized if it has the right foundation. Companies with unified applications in the cloud are better positioned to reap the benefits of AI as opposed to those with data sets sprawled across different data marts and hidden in spreadsheets.

Ultimately, the success of AI depends on the quality of the data, which has become the lifeblood of the enterprise in today’s increasingly digital world. Organizations that leverage intelligent technologies to harness data will, therefore, be well placed to outmaneuver their competition, reduce waste, and grow revenue and profits.