With the dramatic changes brought on by COVID-19, businesses are having to adapt to remote working, reduced budgets, and remaining agile as they undertake massive digital transformation. Business resiliency has become the key priority for C-Suite executives as they respond to this new, and still changing, environment. And despite challenging global trading conditions, 55% of organizations still expect to maintain or increase spending on AI technologies. It’s recommended that AI be focused on three key areas to tackle current challenges: reducing organizational costs, automating or optimizing processes for efficiency, and reducing risk.
Automating and optimizing for efficiency
One well-known use for AI is to automate traditionally manual processes within an organization, such as content capture and routing. AI technologies can be used to tag and understand each document from the moment it is received, and then route it to the correct workflow. This ensures a level of consistency and efficiency unparalleled by human capacity, and allows for employees to focus their skills and talents on high-value projects that benefit from ingenuity and creativity.
When looking externally at how AI helps organizations achieve key revenue goals, the ability to understand customer insights at massive scale stands out. Understanding customer needs is critical to delivering excellent products, offers, and experiences, as well as identifying new growth opportunities. Those insights may be explicitly stated in channels like social media, surveys, call transcripts, or email communications. However, in others it may be obscured and hidden within the meaning behind such messages. This information can often be overwhelming and difficult to analyze manually when considering the sheer quantity of communications from each customer. Instead, AI can be leveraged to provide a 360-degree view of customers, understand their sentiment, and do so at a scale unparalleled by individuals. The resulting insights can be quickly and easily consumed to make better data-driven decisions for enhanced customer experiences.
Reducing risk
Companies face strict, ever-changing regulations when it comes to Personally Identifiable Information, or PII. Failure to comply can bring costly fines as well as require substantial resources to resolve the root cause of the issue. To avoid this, organizations need a method to ensure adherence to these requirements and a way to understand what resides within their content stores. By leveraging AI, organizations can comb through their content stores to uncover where PII resides, allowing business users to respond to requests or migrate it to appropriate storage locations.
In a similar vein, these content stores can also contain other forms of high-risk information within them that are unsuitable for the workplace. One such example is visuals displaying content such as alcohol, drugs, violence, weapons, or pornography. By leveraging computer vision technologies, users can leverage AI to understand what is being displayed within each visual, and act upon the resulting insights they find.
Reducing organizational costs
It’s imperative that organizations minimize costs wherever possible, and AI can support this critical endeavor in several ways. One approach is to leverage text analytics to understand each piece of content, identify if it still has utility or if it should be removed, like duplicate pieces of content. This directly reduces data storage costs without requiring manual assessment, a tedious task, while also improving content findability for end users. This same application of AI can be leveraged when migrating to the cloud. By reducing the amount of unnecessary information that is being moved, such a project can require less time and budget to complete and can deliver a cleaner content store. In addition, AI can enable organizations to identify data from legacy applications and transferred to a current platform. When the process is undertaken with AI, it can be accomplished at an enormous scale and speed and allows outdated tools to be decommissioned. This can allow for new processes and operational efficiencies to be implemented and retiring these legacy applications removes high-costs and maintenance manpower.
Join the virtual panel to learn more
OpenText AI & Analytics will be hosting a live virtual panel of professionals to discuss how to navigate the new business dynamics and remain agile by leveraging AI. Join David Schubmehl, IDC Research Director of Cognitive/Artificial Intelligence Systems, and AI experts from OpenText on January 19th, 2021, from 11-12pm EST to learn more and have your pressing questions answered. Attendees of the webinar will also get early access to a new IDC Industry Brief, Creating the Resilient Organization Using AI and Text Analytics.
