AI-Enabled Business Processes Advance Resilience and Agility

By now most organizations understand that the AI gap is widening; those who had already begun to use intelligent technologies to advance digitization initiatives, such as new business model development and strategic automation, have been able to meet and rise above many of the more urgent challenges arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, these resilient companies were able to withstand the challenges presented by the pandemic, while others who are still on the threshold of digital transformation are at even greater risk of falling behind their competitors.

Companies need to become an intelligent business now and bring in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to help refresh business models, strategies, and processes so they can be future-ready and able to survive disruption. 

Organizations are looking to AI technologies to inject intelligence throughout their core capabilities, processes, and operations to achieve more robust business resilience and transform insights into action.

AI-enabled business processes are a trend with the potential to rapidly accelerate the agility, innovation, responsiveness, and resilience needed to be adaptive to the speed of change characterized by current times. Packaged capabilities, like business applications with embedded AI, enable organizations to have out-of-the-box AI capabilities that require minimal effort to start standardizing AI in core business domains.

Ronald van Loon is a SAP partner, and as an active industry presence he’s able to witness first-hand how emerging intelligent solutions, like AI-enabled business processes, are generating new sources of business value in areas that are ripe for data-driven innovation and intelligent automation. 

As it becomes increasingly imperative to use the most current technologies to transform data into real-time actionable insights, improve product development, automate key business processes, and deliver excellent experiences, companies are looking to solutions that enable them to innovate faster with AI and become an intelligent enterprise. 

Maximizing AI Adoption and Innovation

Organizations want the ability to maximize the potential of their data and be better prepared for future disruption through analytics, machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), predictive analysis, and robotic process automation (RPA). 

Organizations who are already benefiting from the power of AI need to continuously differentiate with ongoing innovation, and those who have not yet utilized AI should start to speed up initiatives throughout their processes, services, and capabilities.

AI-enabled business applications are emerging as a solution for companies to address complicated challenges with more momentum and simplicity while augmenting human capabilities and experiences.

AI-enabled business processes offer a substantial opportunity to rapidly modernize the organization through the pervasive intelligence of AI, which helps to:

• Automate business processes. 
• Generate actionable advanced analytics insights that empower users.
• Enhance decision making.
• Boost product development for both new and existing products.
• Drastically improve customer and employee experiences.

Next-generation intelligent solutions and services, like RPA, and conversational AI, that offer AI and ML capabilities for various business applications can resolve many of the barriers to innovation in domains such as manufacturing, finance, and retail while helping to speed up AI adoption and empowering users.

Delivering Exceptional Experiences and Personalization

Throughout the pandemic, chatbots proved to be a powerful tool for enabling organizations to successfully handle unprecedented surges of customer queries, new digital service demands, and changing customer expectations and behaviors. Likewise, as organizations struggled to manage the rapid shift to remote work and equip themselves with the tools necessary to streamline the work experience for employees, self-service solutions like chatbots empowered users with more convenience, speed, and agility.

Conversational AI (often called intelligent chatbots) applications with embedded AI are helping businesses to not only significantly reshape and elevate the human-to-technology experience, but better manage critical business tasks. 

The Conversational AI market is predicted to grow from $4.8 billion in 2020 to $13.9 billion in 2025, with much of the momentum attributed to the need for intelligent technologies to help organizations through these current challenging times by offering opportunities for AI-enabled customer services and employee engagement. 

For example, SAP’s Conversational AI solution uses performance-driven NLP to help businesses enhance employee productivity and engagement through unified digital experiences, and extend more seamless, intuitive experiences and brand interactions to customers. 

With AI-enabled business applications, businesses can eliminate the complexity, knowledge curve, and specific AI skill sets that are typically needed to use and interact with many traditional AI tools and technologies. Instead, they’re getting an out-of-the-box AI solution that doesn’t demand any specialized talent or work from their side. This enables them to take advantage of AI in a simplified, intuitive way that impacts the entire organization and value chain, from end users to service delivery.

• Easily apply AI into key business processes without the need for users to learn or create a customized AI solution.
• Drive enterprise-wide AI democratization through greater accessibility across standard business processes.
• Streamline AI adoption and quickly start realizing the benefits of AI with reduced time to meaningful value.
• Advance a core set of standard, repeatable AI processes and practices that can empower users to collaborate, improve performance, and deliver faster business results.
• Enhance critical domain areas with standardized AI across numerous functions.

Replacing Manual Processes with Intelligent Automation

RPA adoption is steadily growing as businesses seek to introduce new cost efficiencies and automation into their business processes while reducing the propensity for errors, and benefit from better cycle time and improved productivity across transaction and data processing. 

RPA essentially refers to technologies that can perform a sequence of actions such as data manipulation, prompting responses, and initiating communication between other systems and processes that typically demand human intervention.

When intelligence is added to RPA, such as through AI, its value greatly increases by:

• Accelerating decision making. 
• Introducing more operational speed, accuracy, and efficiency into business processes.
• Helping businesses proactively respond to customer demands and improve their satisfaction levels with tailored experiences.

Another key benefit RPA with embedded AI provides is allowing humans to do what they do best and focus on valuable, complex, or creative tasks instead of repetitive ones that can easily be replaced by intelligent automation.

Bots developed with ML and conversational AI can help accelerate digital transformation initiatives by allowing organizations to focus their resources on more valuable initiatives and systematize traditionally laborious, manual processes. 

For example, Rehau Group used SAP intelligent RPA to automatically process thousands of financial accounting documents per day, effectively overcoming the challenges that they were facing due to time consuming, error-prone manual processes. Applied ML automatically and intelligently extracts information from incoming documents and generated invoice objects, transforming a formerly four-day work process into a ten-minute activity.

Advancing the Intelligent Enterprise

Organizations can further advance the intelligent enterprise with AI capabilities for business applications. AI enabled business applications drastically improve business processes and operations by increasing productivity, quality of products and services, while driving enterprise-wide resilience.

Check out SAP for more information about AI enabled business processes and how they’re accelerating business resilience and transformation in an era defined by new urgency for transformative digital solutions.