Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology will ultimately impact all aspects of your business. Therefore, every department and employee must be brought into the process on some level in order for the organization to intimately understand where machine learning and automation can bring value with appropriate support and guidance from the leaders of the organization. This is not to suggest that the mechanics of deploying the technology and integrating your systems will not be critical. It is to underscore the importance of understanding that the cornerstone of your successful AI deployment will be the coordinating, collaborating, and iterating done by the people in your organization. Given the need for your AI systems to evolve with, as well as drive the evolution of your organization, it is equally important that this be an ongoing process.
With a clear high-level vision as the backdrop, and the right team and culture in place, the focus becomes a tangible executable roadmap. AI will ultimately boil your industry’s proverbial ocean, so it is very much appropriate to have it reflected as a milestone at some point on the implementation roadmap, but that is, for obvious reasons, not the ideal starting point. Identifying a well-defined, self-contained SMART (specific, measureable, action-oriented, realistic and time-specific) initial use case that offers a momentum-building early win is the best prescription for long-term success in leveraging AI throughout your organization. Viable initial use cases for AI include:
- Marketing and product strategy support
- Pricing and risk analysis
- Distribution and logistics analytics
- Marketing and sales support
- Call center optimization and consumer engagement
Arguably the most compelling initial use case is the opportunity to automate consumer engagement. The budding relationship consumers are building with chatbots and avatars is well documented in recent research which indicates that 37 percent of Alexa and Siri users wish their virtual assistants were real. Numerous real world case studies have proven that intelligent virtual assistants (IVA) properly integrated can perform up to 80 percent of the tasks their human counterparts can perform from a call center. This represents very significant cost savings and efficiencies, but the value proposition doesn’t stop there. Sophisticated IVA’s have demonstrated that they can improve Net Promoter Scores and customer satisfaction as well as revenues in comparison to consumer self-service or a traditional call center experience. In other words, AI makes the seemingly impossible combination of lower costs, better engagement, and higher revenues possible.
While the coming of age of AI represents the first strategically disruptive technology to come along since the maturation of the internet, the real challenge of adopting it isn’t technological; it is philosophical and cultural. To keep the fear and myriad of potential applications for AI from paralyzing your organization to the point of doing nothing, your organization must encourage risk-taking and continuously nurture a culture that readily embraces opportunities to look out on the horizon. The billions of dollars being invested in the development of cognitive technologies, combined with the mind-bending prognostications being made about its impact on every industry and facet of life, should compel your organization to press forward with a broad, clear vision that reflects the transformative mandate of the fast approaching Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Victor Morrison, chief strategy officer and SVP of sales for Next IT Healthcare. At the 2017 Vision Monday Global Leadership Summit he explained how chatbots can be used to increase customer engagement.