Building Artificial Intelligence in the Business Ecosystem

The fast-paced evolution in the technology space is re-shaping the business model holistically. From the innovation standpoint, every day is a new adventure and every entity of data is a new platform for aiding the experimentation. While some of these experiments cause a remarkable shift in the paradigms, some are discarded, but the evolution never stops. One such successful breakthrough is definitely the advent of Artificial Intelligence. It is the latest apex summited by mankind and can be called the newest game changer when it comes to impacting businesses. While it has created enough buzz, there still is some road to cover when comes to major quantum leap or full-fledged implementation.

According to a research firm, Markets and Markets’ report “Artificial Intelligence Market by Technology”, the AI market would cross USD 16.06 billion by 2022 and businesses would benefit from contemporary technologies which will streamline processes and operations. Globally, there is rapid expansion in Artificial Intelligence applications such as voice-recognition systems, driverless cars, robotic hotel receptionists etc. and though, not at the same pace, but businesses in India are gradually not just opening-up, but also experimenting with such modern tech tools and applications.

Leveraging AI into Business Ecosystem

Let’s see 5 real-time scenarios in 5 distinct industries, wherein AI implementation in their processes can help them reap revolutionary outputs:

Manpower: While the manpower industry can hugely benefit with AI inculcation in their system, the Recruitment domain of every organisation can leverage this growing trend. Hiring is quite an intensive task, especially the initial screening process. The implementation of AI can streamline the HR processes by automating the operation and initial filtering. With the application of deep learning, people analytics can be exercised and scientific hiring decisions can be made.

Logistics: In a field where businesses are required to structure their work-flow and promotion strategy, embedding AI to impart accuracy and timeliness to the processes is going to add to the advantage. Improvising the supply chain management to manage inventory, AI can help predict demand-generation trend, pricing reception analysis, inventory stock tracking etc., thus leading to an effective stock planning strategy.

E-commerce: To deliver an enhanced consumer experience, e-commerce players can employ an AI-powered product recommendation engine which evaluates consumers’ past purchase patterns and offers customized recommendations. Elimination of repetitive manual tasks is definitely a support – be it through a chatbot customer support or for logistical tracking. While a great consumer experience is foremost delivery, this can also contribute to the additional revenues resulting from subtly-driven impromptu buys.

Retail: Retailers today, are creating opportunities for disruption by investing in AI. According to the recent Frost & Sullivan’s Digital Transformation report, AI applications such as chat bots, facial reaction mapping, consumption trend analysis, wastage-utilisation ratio etc. are provisioning competitive advantage to retailers. With improved and intelligent supply chain management, retailers are not only able to create seamless consumer experience but also creating plethora of growth opportunities for themselves.

Sales: Be it data discovery which encapsulates sourcing, mining and priortisation of the DB, mapping sales probability with deep learning techniques or increasing productivity with an intelligent CRM – AI will be a boon for sales domain. Personalisation is yet another feature which AI delivers and sales can benefit from. AI can not only eliminate the reiterative man-hour wasting tasks, but also facilitate better customer retention and upselling through demand-generation forecast. Now-a-days, the intelligent virtual assistants have made the scheme of things more interesting and competitive. For ex: Conversia which is a virtual sales assistant - helps in friendly conversations with online customers, ensuring automatic response to every lead 24*7.

All industry sectors can benefit with AI implementation since the application and benefits are not at all limited to any sector or domain. For ex: In healthcare industry, there is a huge scope for telemedicine or even intelligent medical diagnostics – predicting a heart attack days in advance cannot remain a fancy anymore with AI applications. Overall, this rising technology is likely to streamline business processes, improve customer services and leverage data across all the sectors – which will significantly impact all aspects of the businesses.

Challenges

While there is an increase in the number of well established companies providing, as well as leveraging AI tools and solutions, pace of adoption of AI at present is still not up to the mark. A look at few of these reasons:

Lack of familiarity to the concept, applications and possibilities of AI

Lack of knowledge about AI fitment into real-time business scenario

Existence of capability gaps in the workforce

Lack of well-planned budget allocation or ROI benchmarking of AI application

Disparity between the expected output, both time and speed-wise and the actual time taken for AI to produce results

Dawn of an Autonomous Era

While these challenges persist, what we witness in the market today is an increased level of understanding and realization of the future dynamics. Organisations are coming out of the oblivious zone and catching up with the AI wave. AI/ Machine learning tools like IBM’s Watson Analytics, Google’s TensorFlow, Alibaba’s Aliyun and many more – all these are increasingly finding customers who are ready to put their trust in the technology advancement and thus contributing in the overall business ecosystem revamp. With its growing implementation, AI will not only enhance customer service and experience, but will also empower the provider and the consumer both.

Snehashish Bhattacharjee
Global CEO & Co-Founder, Denave

Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Business Ecosystem, Snehashish Bhattacharjee Global CEO Denave, denave