Chloe Andries
TechInAfrica – There can be no doubt that artificial intelligence (AI) is a transformative technology, perhaps even the most transformative technology currently available. But if you think that the transformative nature of artificial intelligence is limited to global technology giants’ companies, think again. Artificial intelligence will ultimately transform all companies in all sectors of activity, including yours. Even if you can’t yet imagine the impact of artificial intelligence on your organization, you can be sure that it will be the case soon.
If you want to make the most of artificial intelligence, it is like in any business transformation, it all starts with strategy. Your artificial intelligence strategy will help you focus on your main business objectives and prioritize ways in which artificial intelligence can help you achieve these business objectives. In general, companies use artificial intelligence in two ways to ensure their success:
- Designing intelligent business processes
- Creating intelligent products and services
Let’s take a look at those different uses in detail.
Designing intelligent business processes
Artificial intelligence is used to help companies in all sectors to optimize and automate their business processes. This can simply be automatically recommending product B to each customer who purchased product A, based on the preferences of other clients. It can also be something complicated such as fully automating a complete production line. For most companies, the major AI opportunities lie somewhere in between.
Another example of processes optimized by AI is predictive maintenance. This involves using sensors to constantly monitor vehicles and machines to predict when parts could fail. The goal of this process is that if you know that a machine is likely to fail, you will be able to change it beforehand and avoid or minimize downtime.
In addition to that, through natural language processing and generation, the machines can also be used to communicate with customers. In fact, customer service chat rooms and email chat rooms are now quite common.
Intelligent business processes
Artificial intelligence basically consists in making machines smarter, so that they can think and act like humans. We only have to look at the popularity of devices such as smart phones, fitness trackers and smart thermostats to see how consumers are embracing products and services that can make their lives smarter, easier, simpler and more connected.
Hence, it’s no wonder that companies are increasingly looking to make their products and services smarter with AI. Google’s search algorithms are an obvious example of a tool based on artificial intelligence. Amazon’s Alexa is another one. Social media platforms also rely heavily on artificial intelligence.
The artificial intelligence is also used to produce smarter versions of much more traditional products. Let’s take the example of vehicles. They are now much smarter than they were 10 years ago and can perform a range of tasks independently, from perfect parallel parking to alerting a driver who begins to fall asleep at the wheel. More and more vehicles can drive independently.
Finding the AI that will suit your business
Finding the right AI will depend on what your company objectives are. That’s why your AI strategy should be guided by your overall business strategy. Before embarking on an artificial intelligence strategy, it is therefore essential to review your business strategy first.
Then, once you are fully aware of the company’s organizational objectives, you can begin to examine how artificial intelligence can help you achieve these objectives. To help you define your AI, you can use and AI use case model and then adapt it to your company.
