Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2024. Read them in this 16th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
New Year, Fresh Start: AI, Automation and The Future of Workplace Environments
By Olga Lagunova, CTO at GoTo
As significant as AI’s impact was in 2023, the technology holds the promise to fuel even greater digital transformation in the year ahead. Generative AI in particular is poised to significantly elevate employee efficiencies and operations across marketing, sales, research and development, IT, cybersecurity, the customer experience, and more. To fully harness these benefits, however, organizations must proactively integrate new AI-enabled solutions, redefine work processes, and commit to comprehensive training and upskilling initiatives for their employees.
The fusion of AI and expert human capabilities is emerging as a powerful force. As the business leaders responsible for guiding technology strategy and spearheading innovation, Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) will play a key role in steering this transformation within their organizations.
Automating Repetitive Tasks & Improving Decision-Making:
With the ability to seamlessly automate routine and repetitive tasks, including data entry, customer service functions, and reporting, AI has the potential to not only accelerate standard processes, but fundamentally transform the way employees work.
In the realm of data entry, AI-enabled technologies help to process information much faster and more accurately than a person alone, significantly reducing the likelihood of human error and expediting the information processing pipeline. Here are just a few examples of technologies that not only enhance data integrity but also significantly improve employee productivity:
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR) that extracts text from various scanned documents and pictures
- Robotics Process Automation (RPA) that automates repetitive processes of entering data
- Predictive Text and Autofill automatically completes data entry for the user
- Voice-to-Text Data Entry enables the employees to dictate information rather than typing
AI serves as a catalyst for improved decision-making by leveraging its capacity to analyze vast datasets, extracting valuable insights that might be difficult or impossible for humans to identify due to the sheer volume and complexity of the information. This approach enables businesses to make more informed strategic decisions, particularly in critical areas like product development and marketing.
Machine Learning models can also optimize marketing strategies by analyzing customer behavior, preferences, and engagement patterns to create personalized targeting, generate content recommendations, and design more impactful marketing campaigns. Generative AI accelerated the transformation of the world of marketing and sales, offering new capabilities to boost efficiencies and unlock employee creativity to deliver better results. By harnessing the potential of Generative AI thoughtfully and responsibly, organizations can use technology to help humans generate high-quality blog posts, craft targeted marketing and sales outreach, develop leads, qualify prospects, draft follow-up emails, and more.
As businesses navigate the complexities of the modern market, integrating AI-generated insights will empower leaders to make data-driven decisions, positioning the business for sustained success and adaptability in a rapidly evolving business landscape.
Enhancing the Customer Experience:
AI and Generative AI are elevating the overall quality of customer support by transforming Contact Center operations, consistently delivering great customer experiences through a thoughtfully designed combination of digital and human support that fosters customer satisfaction with the company and builds customer loyalty.
AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants are used to assist customers with real-time responses to address questions and resolve issues for faster resolution times. AI trained on businesses’ customer service models excels at addressing common questions and guiding customers through routine troubleshooting and is capable of handling increasingly complex queries to guide responses. This helps ensure customer satisfaction and allows human service representatives to engage in more complex and personalized interactions, elevating the overall quality of customer support provided.
Generative AI also increases the productivity of Contact Center agents by providing real-time assistance and enhancing agent’s capacity to deliver superior customer service. These programs can analyze past customer interactions to identify behavioral patterns, predict potential issues, and advise agents on steps to reach a desired outcome.
Understanding what’s leading to the best and worst customer experiences and knowing exactly where to focus efforts enables Contact Centers to quickly fix what’s broken and amplify what’s working well. The sentiment analysis capabilities of AI solutions can be used to provide real-time updates to Call Center managers on the status of customer interactions so they can address any concerns before they escalate and foster heightened customer satisfaction and loyalty.
AI will play an increasingly important role across customer interactions in the year ahead as expectations for fast and efficient resolutions continue to increase.
Optimizing Workplace Operations:
Harnessing AI to improve workplace operations can be instrumental in predicting equipment failures, enabling organizations to proactively schedule maintenance and prevent costly downtime. Additionally, AI proves invaluable in forecasting demand for products and services, empowering organizations to fine-tune inventory levels and production schedules for optimal efficiency.
Another crucial application is in fraud detection, where AI plays a pivotal role in identifying and thwarting fraudulent transactions and activities. This not only safeguards business assets but also contributes to minimizing losses. In these diverse ways, AI emerges as a versatile tool for streamlining and fortifying operational processes.
New Year, Fresh Start
The ongoing evolution of AI, including Generative AI, opens a wealth of possibilities for CTOs to harness the potential of organizational efficiencies and drive innovations in the year ahead. CTOs armed with a deep understanding of the latest AI capabilities, solutions and ethical considerations will play an important role in guiding their organizations through the changing landscape and set the tone for a year marked by digital transformation, innovation, growth, and digital excellence.
##
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Olga Lagunova serves as GoTo’s Chief Technology Officer. In her role she is responsible for leading our global engineering organization, building and operating GoTo products. Olga has extensive experience with global technology companies in industries that include IT management, location intelligence and global ecommerce. She joined GoTo from Pitney Bowes where she was the Chief Data and Analytics Officer and Vice President of Commerce Cloud Technologies. Before Pitney Bowes, Olga was SVP and Distinguished Engineer at CA Technologies, where she led global engineering teams focusing on large-scale SaaS applications, analytics, and mobile application development for enterprise IT. She is an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University, teaching part-time at Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy.
