Organizations must anticipate integration of Artificial Intelligence in their business model

The consulting world has been the witness of many transformations the last 5 years. From full digitalization of the processes to cloud management, most of the companies’ processes have been undergoing radical adaptations. With the arrival of more computer processing power and the much clever processing software, the upcoming transformation that is under way is much more structural: integration of Artificial Intelligence in the business model.

State of the Art

Most of the underlying bricks of AI are already present:

• Data are stored and managed in huge volume (big data)

Companies started storing terabytes of customer and devices information. Sometimes, companies don’t even know yet what will be the end-point of storing or even not realizing the values of combining data sets but they all forecast that the data will be source of big revenues creation.

• Data are shared much more efficiently within company organizations

Data are exchanged through the organization via more and more APIs. Processes and systems are built such way that data can be requested by anyone/anything in the organization who needs specific sets of data and has the proper access rights. Such way, value and innovation are created based on the data valuable assets and not merely on nominal outputs or nominal processes. A good API governance also allows faster and more agile deployment of new software solutions.

• Data are treated more automatically by smarter or more efficient software

Organizations invested and keep investing a lot in automation. The first layer is to cover as many functional domains or processes with the relevant applicative coverage. The second step of automation is being deployed with the robotic process automation (RPA). Those robots are completing the semi-manual process flows by manipulating the existing software and replace the remaining manual steps between those software with pre-defined routines. Each time a routine is unknown by the robot, the routine is parked for a human intelligence to define an additional routine until the finite number of cases are fully covered and no humans are needed anymore.

• Finally, organization relies much more on data to take decision

Dashboard of data have always been present in board rooms under the format of KPIs. Today data are appearing everywhere - not only on management screens - almost in real time and decision processes go much faster at lower management level. Decisional intelligence is also appearing under different kind of format: it moves forward in time. Take prediction: companies can predict the behavior of their infrastructure under specific scenario and decide based on cheaper and more efficient counter-measures. Companies are starting also to be able to predict behaviors by either collecting data about customers or either sending data to influence customers in changing their buying habits.

What is coming

Full automation and processes of prediction will not anymore be designed and implemented by human teams but proposed and supported by more powerful software (themselves running on more powerful machines). Humans will remain – for the time being – a supervisor in the whole chain rather than a doer.

Soon you phone will not only inform you of the upcoming travels. Your phone will also pre-book hotels and transportation based on your wishes. You would only supervise and adjust if necessary.

The same way, soon, data and software will operate the same way in an organization. They will propose themselves to automate part of your processes and they will take the lead in forecasting human and machine behaviors while you will supervise the whole process.

Take the medical industry as an example: existing health data of a patient that will enter a hospital will be downloaded from multiple sources – if the hospital servers don’t have it already –. A software with artificial intelligence would have already suggested several exams to run in order to complete the collected dataset. The same intelligence will pre-book the resources and would inform the patient where to go. The human’s interaction will be only happening at the end of journey, once the software would propose one or maybe two diagnostics with a % of certainty. The doctor will have to supervise and explain to the patient the next steps.

Car industry's intelligence will predict your future mobility packages based on your "routines". Domotics industry will propose and pre-order energy efficiency appliances or pre-book a contractor for infrastructure improvements… and so on ...

When is it coming

Soon. And Sooner that one might expect. But it won’t be massive changes, it will be small changes made in a very fast way at the pace of software updates. Many big AI projects – like IBM Watson – failed to deliver full values as it aimed at radical changes rather to look intuitively to small continuous improvements. New AI based projects are now based on scalable proof-of-concepts targeting most valuable company’s environments.

All those considerations must be integrated in companies’ DNA to minimize the rupture while evolving and not be put aside as the transformation is mainly exogenic – even if you don’t transform, the society will transform.

Sia Partners understood these phenomena and transformed itself already. At Sia Partners, the concept of consulting 4.0 is completing our range of consulting offerings. It started as a radical cultural shift inside the company and resulted in new business consulting offerings. Every engagement is now supported with additional technologies helping deliveries to create more values. The concept of “augmented consultant” was born. Those technologies and the necessary change management are now mastered. Our customers can benefit from the wide range of knowledge that was acquired in addition to reinforce their teams with augmented consultants having embedded new competencies.