Authored by Srihari Palangala, Senior Director and Head of Marketing, Dell EMC India
Global businesses across industries are in the midst of a massive digital transformation. As we enter the realm of Industry 4.0, exponential technologies are getting interwoven into the very fabric of traditional businesses – asking them to either rise up to the challenge or perish in the face of high-tech upstarts. Digital transformation has unleashed entirely new business models that most of us could not even have envisaged 5 years previously. The breakneck speed at which technology is permeating businesses has been breath-taking to watch. AI is disrupting entire value chains of businesses – changing the way enterprises today conduct research into new products, manage the manufacturing process, and orchestrate the supply chain, marketing and sales processes. Today we are seeing humans and machines coming together to deliver superior outcomes to all their key stakeholders – customers, employees and partners. An AI augmented workforce is not just a thing of the future. It is the present – the now – and organizations would do well to embrace this disruption and harness its potential to stay ahead of the curve and create new value pools to protect themselves in this new competitive environment.
Let us look at some areas where AI is disrupting the business value chain, as well as revolutionizing client experience.
Business Transformation with Artificial Intelligence
Even a cursory glance at how AI is entering the mainstream and disrupting existing value chains can uncover transformational examples of its impact to business.
AI Augmented Manufacturing
Traditional manufacturing processes are now increasingly augmented by robotics and AI. These technologies are getting a stronger foothold and provide increasing sophistication to the manufacturing process. The successes seen by manufacturing that combines human and machine intelligence has made AI-augmented manufacturing a pervasive phenomenon. Today, business leaders in the Industry 4.0 generation need to seriously consider planning a hybrid labour force powered by human and artificial intelligence – and ensure that policies and plans are in place to ensure that the two coexist in a complementary and symbiotic manner.
Smarter Supply Chains Powered by AI
Orchestrating a leaner, more predictable supply chain is a subject ripe for an AI-led disruption. We are seeing new products and categories and new virtual retailers proliferating the industry. This requires corporations to reduce their outlay on the overall network responsible for the network that manages the entire process from procurement and assembly to stocking and last mile delivery. Evertracker – a Hamburg-based startup provides a great example of AI augmenting the supply chain function. Evertracker uses data from internal and external sources along with IOT sensors and applies AI to help customers identify weaknesses such as delays and possible shortages early. Business leaders are constantly on the lookout for such solutions that can directly lift their bottom-line by bringing in more intelligence and automation to their supply chain networks – thus unlocking savings for their businesses.
Enabling Intelligent Marketing and Sales
Some of the most prominent examples of business transformation with Artificial Intelligence come from the marketing and sales arena. These functions are constantly on the forefront for some of the most exciting inventions in AI – whether it is social media sentiment mining, programmatic selection of advertising properties, measuring effectiveness of marketing programs, ensuring customer loyalty or intelligent sales recommendations. One of the most recent and evolved applications of AI is Reactful . With digital transformation driving business to explore and exploit e-Commerce platforms as a credible channel for sales, innovations such as Reactful help marketing teams drive the digital agenda forward. This tool helps drive better customer conversions on e-Commerce properties by analyzing the digital footprints (click streams etc.) of prospects who are browsing online channels and persuades them into making a purchase. They deliver this through improved personalization at the point-of-purchase, aiming to improve conversions and reduce cart abandonment. Marketing and sales use cases are as such at the epicenter of an AI disruption and business leaders need to uncover more use cases that can help drive effective top-line growth.
An Artificial Facelift for the Human Resources Function
The human resources function has historically been considered a cost-center in organizations and hence could do with the technology-powered facelift that AI could provide. In addition to bringing down the costs associated with talent acquisition and management – it would also help teams become leaner, more organized and reduce the turnaround time for talent acquisition. AI interventions are being seen in the areas of employee engagement and attrition management, but some of the most exciting use cases come from the talent acquisition area within the HR function. Recualizer is one such solution that eliminates the need for HR staff to scan through each job application individually. With this tool, talent acquisition teams can determine the framework conditions for a job on offer and leave the creation of assessment tasks to the Artificial Intelligence-powered system. The system then communicates the evaluation results and recommends the most suitable candidates for further interview rounds.
AI Redefining Customer Experience
Customers are the life-blood of every successful organization. We live in times where the switching costs for customers are increasingly lower and the number of competitive options to choose from are very high. In this scenario, businesses intending to win with their customers need to have a smart approach to customer experience management to ensure customer loyalty.
We have now gone well beyond just bots pre-programmed to address frequently asked questions by customers. AI-enabled systems today go further to provide personalized guidance to customers that can help organizations level-up on their customer experience. Booking.com is a case in point. Their chatbot helps customers identify interesting activities and events that they can avail of at their travel destinations – all while maintaining a lower cost of delivering that experience.
We live in exciting times where technology disruption is changing the very way we do business. Artificial Intelligence is the harbinger of this change and is a key enabler of how businesses transform into the enterprise of the future. By bringing in new revenue streams, unlocking competitive advantage, improving customer experience – while running a tight ship in terms of costs, AI can be a hugely beneficial to enterprises seeking to improve their foothold in their industry.
Dell Technologies is leading this disruption and helping enterprises power their AI workloads, with the industry’s richest and best-in-class portfolio of products and solutions for AI deployment, IoT, Storage, Workstations, HPC, Servers, plus access to AI Customer Solution Centers and AI Innovation Labs.
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