Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019.  Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist for Zoho

Maximizing Rapid Integration of AI Across Application

A key advantage for businesses that have moved from analog systems to digital software is that everything can be tracked-who clicked on an ad, who came to your site, what percentage of those clicks turned into customers, what percentage of them made profits for your business. Tracking tools have produced a lot of data-terabytes of data for many companies-but it has gotten to a point where making full sense of that data has become nearly impossible. 

That's where artificial intelligence comes in. In 2019, the integration of conversational AI across business applications-specifically for CRM and customer service-will enable the systems to do the work and like a "virtual assistant," gauge how happy or unhappy customers are. Conversational AI also has the capability to use the customer data it collects to suggest ways to improve their experience and solve problems more independently. In fact, conversational AI can grab data from a number of touchpoints beyond CX - website traffic, social media visits, surveys and more.  Internally, conversational AI in applications will help companies break their silos by more easily accessing data across the entire organization - tying sales, marketing, finance and other business functions more closely together so that better decisions can be made across the board. 

AI can also be used to provide insight. On your site, let's say the web traffic from France this month has been up. AI can trigger a notification that says, "Hey, I noticed a rise in traffic from this region. France has contributed to a good portion of your revenue in the last two years, so I'm forecasting that your overall revenue this year will be up." That notification is automatically triggered and will inform a new course of action for the sales and marketing teams.

Applications of AI can be both reactive and predictive, used across the board by companies to provide business solutions that would otherwise be impossible to achieve. It is the engine for migrating previously unmanageable amounts of data seamlessly across applications, and it's getting more important every day.

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About the Author

Raju Vegesna is the Chief Evangelist for Zoho. He has been with the company for 18 years and is strategically involved in the evolution of the Zoho Suite. Prior to joining Zoho Corp, Vegesna co-founded an Internet services company in the education market. He holds a Bachelors degree in Computer Science.