Accelerating Growth Using AI: A Focus On Relationship Intelligence
This blog looks at the social network science and relationship or collaboration sciences that fuel growth outcomes. It provides clear definitions, highlights disciplines that enable relationship intelligence, and identifies leading companies enabling RI. The blog closes by recognizing illuminary leaders who nearly 20 years prior saw what what was possible. Finally, the realities of relationship intelligence and its value to industries is here to stay thanks to the digital transformation evolution to cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence and advanced visualization methods.
The term relationship intelligence (RI) is all about establishing, growing and nurturing relationships to build more trust. With increased trust, people simply engage more, purchase more and hence companies build more loyal customers. Relationship intelligence is also often referred to as relational capital (enabling companies to increase their profits over a longer-term horizon).
In today’s highly digital intelligent world, understanding the value of RI is an area that board directors and C-suite leaders must understand and recognize they need advanced software tools to modernize their operations to achieve what will increasingly be called “productivity revenue intelligence.”
No one would dispute that there is tremendous value in building relational capital/relationship intelligence (RI): the value of the company’s relationships with the individuals and organizations with whom it performs its business role, including relationships with external groups: suppliers, dealers, partners, customers that contributes to a company’s reputation.”
Relationship dynamics are leading indicators to a company’s financial success. To put this in perspective, IDC research has found that “companies continue to be lost in administrative overhead where business users spend on average 7.36 hours per week trying to find information and on average 8.15 hours per week trying to find people or experts.”
I remember when I was a partner at Accenture and sourcing knowledge was one of the most important enablers in the company, knowing who the top experts are to answer tough questions or guide you to the best knowledge source was a revered operating process. Now with AI, sourcing that relationship or contextual knowledge can be done literally in seconds, equalizing intelligence access across a large global knowledge source.
Time is every company’s most scarcest resource – it is finite and limited.
AI however is not, as it never sleeps and can aggregate large, diverse data sets to create a predictive model on relationship intelligence, and bring a lense of clarity to a company’s operations that has never been able to easily see before.
Will this be eventually classified as surveillance capitalism as companies can now so easily monitor all employee, customer, and supplier interactions?
That is a big question given the powers of AI and its benefits in exposing the deepest insights in relationship interactions but also guiding companies more clearly to profitability pathways. Its now all about mining data breadcrumbs in every interaction touchpoint to paint a picture. Its almost like painting impressionism art work as the data patterns appear over time and the denser the dots become the invisible becomes visible.
Today, companies are storing relationship data that can be easily minded from data sources from both employee to employee interactions or employee to customer interactions and customer to employee interactions. Data sources that can be stringed together with rich social graphs can come from: emails, texts, phones, search history, calendar /meeting, etc.
