The role of AI in a stressful business landscape

The year 2020 is a particularly interesting year which will be etched in the memory of many business stakeholders. The landscape of the business world has changed drastically and quickly. The suppliers have changed in their approach to the markets. The consumers have changed in their approach to consumption. And finally the competitors have also changed. This quick and drastic change has put enormous pressure on enterprises. They have to adapt to these accelerating changes or be left out to extinction. It is in these challenging circumstances that we find Artificial Intelligence being very handy for many businesses. AI is generally quite adaptable under any business circumstances, but it is powerful during times of change.

Insight technologies - making sense of the change

There are various algorithms that specialize understanding change or an event. Problems like detection of change, tracking change and predicting change are few topics that are studied widely in the AI literature.

Detecting a change is modelled as a statistical study of historical samples of data and identifying places where changes occur. Prediction of future changes is useful in various business scenarios that could help in being prepared for a crisis. Reasoning about the change is very important to identify the underlying nature of the problem

AI systems have been supporting human endeavour by modelling these changes and helping us to reason about the changes. The insights derived from the AI systems are helping us to understand the fundamental nature of the business process. Using these insights business stakeholder will be better equiped to react in the face of crisis.

Action technologies - recovering from the change

With the backing from the insight technologies, it is now logical that we embark on a journey to make some changes that can improve business outcome. A business stakeholder can either correct the course or to recover from the change that got him to this point. AI is suitable for this transformation with tools like automation, recommendation and personalization in its arsenal.

Ecommerce websites use recommendations systems extensively in for their core functionality. They suggest consumers with alternatives or related content. The fundamental nature of the recommendation system is to suggest new solutions by understanding past behaviour. The past behaviour can be either a single person or from the collective behaviour of many people. The recommendation engine could be a useful tool in deriving alternative or related paths for business owners. The recovery stems from the collective wisdom of all human endeavours.

Process automation is a method of chaining many intelligent agents to create a robust intelligent agent. The various building blocks could include agents like visual inspections bot, content arbitration bot, notification bot etc. By chaining these individual bots together it is possible to create a powerful automation system that can aid in various human activities. By leveraging the intelligent agents for offloading repetitive tasks, human effort can be devoted to activities that can be performed only by humans.

Personalisation is a method of tailoring a bespoke software entity that can address the specific needs of a particular individual. The personalisation can be used either for the business staff or for customers of the business. When personalisation is applied for business staff, the AI tools are created to the specific needs of the personnel thereby enabling them to perform to their best ability. If applied to the customers, it will create a personalized user experience which helps in better retention of business.

With the collection of two groups of complementary technologies viz insight technologies and action technologies, it is possible to recover and re-imaging the business possibilities. Although 2020 has been a challenging year, the possibilities that Artificial Intelligence lends is very promising. The future belongs to anyone who can visualise the opportunity in this challenge.

References

Dataiku presentation