Digital transformation for any business is a matter of survival in the growing competitive environment. Users want services at a faster rate and great experiences at their disposal. Consumers compare the experiences of different companies and always go with business apt in delivering smooth user experiences. Although the digital revolution started decades ago, organizations still use traditional methods to streamline their operations.
However, most organizations are looking out for disrupting technologies to place new IT architectures and operating philosophies for creating new ways to deliver value and match customers’ specific needs. Digital transformation is also coined as the 4th industrial revolution, considered a game-changer in technology’s role in the corporate world.
It is a movement that attracts companies interested in innovating, reviewing processes, and gaining a competitive advantage with the help of technology. Data and Artificial Intelligence are the key factors that play a crucial role in the digital transformation journey. Getting value from the different data sets, both structured and unstructured, brings insights for increasingly intelligent and agile decision-making. In contrast, Artificial Intelligence empowers businesses to personalize the customer experience at scale leading to tech-driven digital transformation.
How Powerful is AI for Business Transformation?
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will be the key technologies to propel organizations through digital transformation. Thinking about AI implementation may seem like a futuristic development, but it is not valid. AI is bringing change to the world and is becoming a growth engine for economies and organizations. Almost every user in the digital world uses some sort of AI; for instance, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, or Siri are a few examples you must have interacted with in your everyday lives.
Another example is while visiting a website, and you must have come across a chatbot assisting you in your search queries or helping out with your goals. AI/ML-driven tool helps businesses perform and organize work by gathering user data. AI tools are becoming an integral part of organizations in the public and private sectors. Governments of numerous countries are leveraging technology in their service levels and developing solutions focused on the well-being of citizens.
Artificial Intelligence Key Statistics
The adoption of AI is increasing every day. Businesses of all sizes, from SMEs to large enterprises, are leveraging the technology to strengthen their decision-making processes, keeping customers at the center. Here are some artificial intelligence key statistics:
- 86% of CEOs report that AI is considered mainstream technology in their office.
- 91.5% of leading businesses invest in AI on an ongoing basis.
- According to Gartner, customer satisfaction is expected to grow by 25% by 2023 in organizations that use artificial intelligence.
- 38% of employees expect their job to be automated by 2023.
- AI spending in the retail industry is expected to reach USD 20.05 billion by 2026
- AI market share in the US is expected to reach USD 190.61 billion by 2025
- AI software is expected to reach USD 62 billion in 2022, an increase of 21.3% from 2021
How AI can Expedite Different Business Levels
Traditional technology can provide visual data but does not possess the ability to analyze, predict, and improve based on the data. AI, on the other hand, supports digital transformation across many areas of the organizations as it mitigates the setbacks common in the traditional technology. Here are the five different business levels where AI is expediting the processes.
IT and Security
The most popular use of AI lies in the IT and security sector. Software tools include predictive and prescriptive analytics based on heuristics, AI-based skills, and machine learning algorithms to reduce the workload and automate processes. AI security tools work to discover, predict, justify, act and learn about security threats without a human analyst’s intervention.
The IBM institute partnered with APQC (American Productivity and Quality Center) to survey 1,000 executives for their organization’s IT and operational cybersecurity systems. 64% of respondents have implemented AI for security capabilities, 29% are evaluating the implementation, and only 7% do not consider using AI for cybersecurity. The AI adopters have delivered significant impacts on their security outcomes. Some of them are the ability to triage Tier 1 threats, reduce false positives, and detect zero-day attacks.
Customer Service
Organizations understand the importance of this area and how it directly impacts the brand’s reputation. Users who come across customer service delays or have a bad experience stop interacting with the company. AI helps remove such bad experiences for users by empowering business fronts with AI chatbots and intelligent assistants. These bots process and analyze customer data from the first point of contact and rapidly get them the right solutions. The data collected from their interactions can be analyzed to gather valuable insights and perspectives on how to serve customers efficiently.
Business Operations and Decision Support
Artificial intelligence is transforming the way we conduct business, from mundane tasks to data analytics and overall business operations. It improves human capabilities, reduces business overheads, addresses customer needs, and boosts productivity and efficiency. AI decision-making allows businesses to make faster, consistent, and accurate decisions by capitalizing on datasets with AI. Machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision enable analyzing large amounts of datasets without error. It helps business teams to focus better on the delivery and make informed decisions for the growth of their organization.
Finance and Accounting
AI is automating finance and accounting with intelligent responses to the ever-changing expectations of diverse stakeholders like suppliers, vendors, customers, and partners. Almost all accounting tasks, including tax, banking, corporate audits, compliance, and payroll, are automated using artificial intelligence. Besides this, AI enables the processing and automated authorization of corporate documents like procurements, purchase orders, invoices, expense reports, payable accounts, and receivables. ML algorithms sift through voluminous data and can identify frauds early to avoid revenue loss.
Human Resources
Another important segment that is getting automated with AI is human resources. It helps streamline many HR processes, including hiring, interviewing, scheduling meetings, filtering candidates, or finding the most qualified profiles for vacant positions. It also provides a personalized user experience through predictive analysis in recommending career paths and training programs. AI in HR management improves the complete employee lifecycle, from recruitment and onboarding to HR service delivery and career growth.
Conclusion
To gain a competitive edge during the digital revolution, it is vital to use the right technology like AI to become more agile, innovative, and profitable. AI has seen massive growth in its digital transformation among enterprises over the last decade. With AI poised to reach a notable milestone in the coming years, businesses of all sizes to keep pace with changing trends. Artificial intelligence, along with other disrupting technologies like IoT, cloud, and AR/VR, will transform the facets of the business world.
