Use Cases in Professional Services

I explored the potential of AI to address the key challenges of professional services organizations. This could be an organization that provides information technology services or others that provide consulting and legal services. At their core, all professional services companies are a people business.

To gain an edge in this intensely competitive industry, we need AI to help solve key supply chain and delivery challenges. Here are some use cases:

Hiring the right people is winning half the battle and AI can make an immediate impact there. The key is not just to match the technical skill needed but to assess cultural fit and determine whether the candidate will stay with the company. This is a good fit for machine learning in tandem with strong NLP and OCR capabilities that make it easy to derive training data from resumes of past / present employees. 

In the short term, AI can be a great assistant for PMO activities. Writing the MoM after lengthy meetings is a laborious task that few Project Managers look forward to. Technology is available today to transcribe audio in real time. Similarly, chatbots/conversational AI can help team members apply for leave, enter timesheets and email assistants (like in Gmail and LinkedIn) and tools like Grammarly can help polish client communication.

An area AI can help with in the medium term is employee retention. It can predict the employees who are a flight risk and suggest ways of connecting better with them. The base data used to predict this could be the projects the employee has worked on, the manager, trainings attended, vacation taken (that indicates work-life balance) etc. Other leading indicators could be the sentiments expressed in social media posts but using them could be a violation of privacy.

Predicting the demand for skills and whether a project is likely to fail are more complex problems that I believe AI can solve only in the medium term. The causal factors are often unknown and unrelated to each other. Hence the output of a deep learning algorithm will be tough to understand and will cause too much emotion in the organization. A new explainable AI paradigm not dependent on machine learning is needed.

Given the myriad possibilities, it is surprising how little AI has been embraced by professional services companies. Clearly they need to practice what they preach!