2020: Year of the AI Assistant

The AI revolution is here.?Are you actively engaged in deploying AI in your business??If not, why not?

Maybe you are concerned that you do not have enough data.?Or that your data is not clean enough.?Or, that AI might not be accurate enough to provide value to your business.?Or, maybe you just don’t trust AI in general.

However, your competitors are deploying AI and gaining a competitive advantage.??They are analyzing their data faster and more effectively than ever before, providing faster and more effective customer service and drastically reducing their operating costs.?If you are not leveraging the latest analytical tools in your business, your business may be left behind in tomorrow’s economy.

What is an easy and effective way that you can start integrating AI into your business??A good first step is to build an AI Assistant for every digital employee in your company.?This AI assistant will work alongside your digital employees, aiding in everyday work tasks.?A good target is to increase total employee productivity by 50-80%.?That is the equivalent of doubling to quintupling revenue per employee!

Why start with an AI assistant??Because they are:

• Relatively easy to implement compared to full automation (think about fully automated cars vs. lane assist)
• Low risk, as your employees are still in charge of their work processes
• Can easily double a digital worker’s productivity
• Do not need to be 100% accurate to improve productivity

Take for example one company that recently used AI to help classify new customers.?This task used to be time-consuming and performed by highly trained technicians.?I worked with them to build an AI assistant that could train itself on the company’s data on historical classifications.?The resulting assistant allowed 70-80% of new customers to be assessed and approved in seconds, rather than days or weeks using the old process, a huge decrease in response time to customers.?This greatly accelerated their process, saving the company millions of dollars in costs, while improving customer service.?One year ROI for the project was above 10x.

With the returns on AI investment so high, it pays to start now in your AI journey.?How should you get started??What if you don’t have an IT intensive business??What if you don’t have data in your company process??The 4-box below can help guide your actions in various IT and Data maturity scenarios.

Assuming you have a strong digital business, here are some AI assistant strategies you can employ:

1.?????Information aggregation, summary, and analysis – Leverage AI to process large amounts of data and make it accessible to humans.

2.?????Decision support – Provide decision making assistance to humans given uncertainty and large amounts of data.?Look-a-like models can quickly find similar situations from the past that can help in decision making.?Protective “guard rails” can prevent bad decisions by providing warnings or offering suggestions.

3.?????Menial task automation – Automate processes that are relatively simple, voluminous, and digitized.?This leaves the more challenging, nuanced, and interesting work for humans to engage in.

Are you ready to deploy AI Assistants in your company??As always, feel free to reach out to me for any support needed in your AI journey.

? Copyright Lucas Finco 2024