Artificial Intelligence is influencing almost all the business verticals today. For e.g. AI is profoundly used in self-driving cars, financial trading, education & personalized services to consumer. The bulk of data created from social media and connected devices have helped tremendously in building new data models and improving the accuracy of these models. We have also built data models where machines can listen, see & respond. Two important implications can be:
·Now that they can speak, read text format, process & use previous training, it can help humans on myriad topics and at considerable depth
·Now that they can identify spatial objects & optical patterns, they can exit the virtual world & join us in the real world
In short, machines can solve problems where humans are great (parallel processing, for e.g. pattern recognition) and humans are slow (sequential processing, for e.g. logical reasoning).
Using AI for Competitive Advantage
AI in today’s world is helping business to reframe their traditional static competitive advantages (distribution network, capability, market share etc.) into more dynamic one. For e.g.
· Customer: AI has redesigned both the physical stores as well as high-traffic online portals by generating important customer insights. Retailers & e-tailers can run point-of-sale, loyalty, weather, locality, demography etc. data through their AI algorithms to create personalized promotion & marketing offers. They can learn about the customer & provide them with familiar, complementary or even new purchasing options for a complete new WOW experience. These WOW moments can help tailers to up-sell or cross-sell their products at negligible marginal cost.
· Capabilities: Traditionally any enterprise has three-core foundation: People, Process & Technology. By integrating new ways of working, say agile, the time to market product or services quickens as enterprises build prototypes and take them to market.
Add another layer of AI, and the whole gamut of insights it can provide based upon the data, can help you make your product right even in such small prototypes.
Beginning the Journey
Executives are responsible for deciphering activities, processes & tasks, which can give maximum ROI & is scalable. From top level, things may look complex, but as almost all complex activities can be broken down into smaller manageable tasks, executives needs to think fast, act smart. It is always better to analyses the use case of AI from these four parameters.
· Customer needs: Finding out the problem statement, which you want AI to solve from your customers, their implicit or explicit unmet needs.
· Technology: Use technology to capture data, signals & pain points from different sources and exploit the technological & computational advances to work towards a resolution. Find out ways, using which you can optimize your processes and services
· Data: After finding needs & exploiting technological advances to working towards a resolution, it is imperative, that executives do a sanity check. Using external data sources and feeding your algorithm can help you better your chances of finding out a potent business solution
· Divide & Rule: This step is mostly inclined towards aligning yourself to breaking down the complex, tested & proven resolution into simple tasks, which can then be followed and scaled.
These four steps, though may be intuitive, may have their own hurdles in terms of capabilities of enterprises and the required investment in hardware.
However, eventually, AI belongs to those enterprises & people that must put it to use. Any business (using AI) will be successful only if humans & machines work together!
No comments:
Post a Comment