Our perspective is that the implementation of AI in business must be driven from the very highest level – the Board.
More leaders are learning about the ways in which AI can enhance competitive advantage and ethically improve the work place. This is not about looking for ways of building AI into the process if it is not going to provide any kind of tangible or intangible benefit, rather to solve problems by augmenting human decision making.
The reason for implementing AI needs to be based on an ethical and measured approach. But without adequate understanding it is unlikely Boards will be able to lead in this area, leaving their companies short of insights which will eventually result in them being left behind in the marketplace.
Boards who embrace AI are leading their sectors and creating excitement and motivation within their teams. For guidelines which step through strategic and ethical AI implementation see An ethical framework for the implementation of AI in business process
Here are some great examples of AI in business;
Marketing: Automatic customer demographic analysis and targeting, recommendation engines offer up new products to the right customers, chatbots are a growing feature, gathering data and supporting the sales function, AI powers campaign success analysis and automatic adjustment.
Sales: Time management, predicting customer need, improvements in focus on the right target customers through the use of predictive tools and business intelligence engines.
Research and development ( R & D): Analysing vast and disparate data sets in diverse, structured and unstructured formats and correlating the data to find patterns in research outputs to assist in the development of drugs.
IT operations: Cyber security products developed using AI analyse networks, identify emerging threats, and automatically fix vulnerabilities before the attacks occur.
Human resources: AI can actually support the removal of bias from the recruitment process, it enables the analysis of a far larger number of applicants without getting “CV fatigue”. Chatbots are also regular feature in large companies to support the HR function and provide employee engagement 24/7. AI is an asset in monitoring the effectiveness of COVID-19 social distancing measures and analysing the risk and safety of people in physical environments.
Contact centres: Chatbots are providing 24/7 engagement, solving simple problems quicky saving the service agent’s time and improving the ability of the company to service its customers.
Building maintenance (and security): Automatic management of building IoT sensors to optimise the use of resources relative to the utilisation and occupancy of the building. Automatic predictive maintenance processes which ensure that building operations are kept at their optimum by anticipating parts failures and mitigating them before the building owner knows there is a problem. Image analysis to enable the search of unstructured video data to find people and events of interest. See our latest article: De-Mystifying the Use of AI in the Professional Security Domain Advanced AIs automatically correlate data across multiple sources to predict emerging threats to enable fast mitigating action.
Manufacturing: Automatically predicting the cause and effect of market conditions on the demands for products and services and adjusting the supply chain to optimise working capital and production output to meet the demands. Automatic adjustments to the manufacturing process to improve output quality through improved automatic test and inspection against agreed criteria. For further reading see our article The Business Case for AI – is it worth it?
Accounting and FInance: Automatic anaysis of accounting data to provide strategic insights into the meaning of the data enabling faster and more effective strategic decisions.
Customer experience: Automatic analysis of customer buying patterns and demographics results in good fit recommendations of goods and services
Further reading? We also picked this article for you written by Bernard Marr in Forbes as a 5 minute follow up read which provides great insights into the ways these 10 business functions can or are already using AI in some way. This supports our view about the beneficial use of AI in business.
For the full, insightful and easy to read article click through the link below.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2020/03/30/10-business-functions-that-are-ready-to-use-artificial-intelligence/
If you would like to start your journey towards the ethical and beneficial use of AI in your business, contact us now.