How AI Is Helping Companies Find And Fix Gaps In Their Strategy, From Software To Diversity
Humans cannot watch thousands of transactions happening in real time, but an AI can monitor huge flows of data, and then take action to spawn workflows.
Why is AI an important tool for businesses to utilize for their strategies? Because it transfers decision making to systems that can do it faster, cheaper, and 24 hours a day, every day. It also automates activities so humans are not required to do menial, sometimes dangerous tasks. This improves efficiency, and in the end, all of this adds to generating a higher level of profits.
Scott Klososky, a sought after speaker on the topic of Digital Transformation and Founding Partner at Future Point of View, a boutique technology consulting firm, explains this further.
“AI’s can watch for anomalies in patterns of customer activity, and AI can watch the flow of email traffic for combinations of words,” says Klososky. “Being able to reduce communications, transactions and performance to data then allows AI’s to be built that can find problems or opportunities, then tell someone, or spawn a workflow to take advantage, or lower risk.”
For example, Netflix has an AI that watches all their users and what they are watching in real time. This allows them to automatically generate a layer of suggestions in the interface of what is hot and trending. A human does not have to figure that out and hand code the hot shows.
However, AI is an incredibly broad category that includes a vast array of different technologies that can be used to improve business processes. “For example, there are decision support systems, there are fully automated AI’s, there are surveillance AI’s, etc.” says Klososky.
When used correctly, AI significantly enhances highly complex business processes. James Layfield, CEO at Clearfind, explains one such specific use case – the bringing in of AI-enabled solutions to do the heavy lifting on highly complex tasks such as software selection.
As software becomes more and more complex, it is becoming more than the human mind can consider alone. AI can take every variable, and every product into account when making recommendations.
“Many have resigned themselves to phone calls, spreadsheets, demos, and so much manual work every time we want to know what is going on with our software,” says Layfield. “Everything in your business is driven by data, except for software, and that doesn’t make any sense because software is one of the fastest-growing line items for every business out there.”
Layfield is also General Partner in a fintech investment fund Treasury with the cofounders of Acorns, Betterment, and a board member of Paypal, and has angel investments across a host of technology ventures.
Layfield explains that the way that companies today are researching software is akin to how people looked for flights before the likes of Expedia and google flights. According to Layfield, his company uses AI to take a spreadsheet-laden, manual process, and automated it by saddling it to a massive database and sophisticated algorithm that gets you the best software choices within seconds.
“We’ve developed a methodology to gather the feature data, which cuts out all of the manual work for much more comprehensive and positive outcomes,” says Layfield.
The idea of using a mix of statistical techniques, computer science, as well as concepts borrowed from other disciplines, such as robotics, to process large amounts of data in order to help make decisions has fascinated scientists and business people alike for a long time now.
Today, thanks to the (relatively) low barrier to entry into the field and increased computational power at lower costs, the impact of AI is growing in all areas of business. We are past the point of using AI for limited use cases such as recommendation algorithms and fraud detection, we are building entire systems that are powered by AI and are designed to exploit these technologies to their full potential.
