Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023. Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
The Role That Automation and Decision Intelligence Will Play in 2023
By Ram Palaniappan, CTO, TEKsystems Global Services
The average adult makes more than 122
decisions per day. That may sound unrealistic, but this does not factor in the
cause and effect of those judgments that splinter into hundreds or thousands of
micro-decisions.
In the business world, the number of decisions is likely
higher, as executive leaders make choices that shape company strategy, culture
and vision. This includes pivoting in the face of disruption, macro-economic
factors, security and threat, activating digital transformation strategy and
staying the course amid daily crises.
But what are the components of such a decision and how can
executives be aided in this process? With the conditions of the world endlessly
shifting and moving, companies will continue to adopt automation and machine
learning tools in 2023 to help inform decisions. This technology will develop
more data to provide context and help inform potential solutions, aiding the
decision-making process.
This technology, labeled as decision intelligence, combines
artificial intelligence, machine learning and human elements for holistic
management. A previous Gartner study shared that more than a third of large
organizations will have analysts practicing decision intelligence in 2023. Data
is already used across industries to power and inform future-facing solutions
and help organizations save money, increase revenue, reduce risk and improve
the customer experience. By combining the power of data with human instinct,
organizations will be able to make more comprehensive and thorough decisions.
10 years ago, companies were bound by the limitations of
technology as well as the reduced complexity of the business. Business
intelligence tools were implemented with the promise of delivering fresh
insights that could solve everyday business problems. But the same technology today
failed to live up to the potential and users struggled to act based on the stale
historical data. Our ability to react to new situations, scenarios and unknowns
has made these technologies redundant in today's world.
Today, with the invention of the cloud, technology is no
longer a hindrance, the cloud provides the ability to explore, innovate and
scale. Organizations are bound only by their agility and commitment to
transforming the enterprise. This enables them to take a complete view of the
business, removing the need to validate information or track down stakeholders
prior to making bold decisions. In fact, machines themselves can make those
decisions and keep the business running. Human assistance or interference is
needed and saved for critical decision-making.
Companies will begin to take a comprehensive view, looking
forward, backward and sideways. They will utilize AI tools to make split-second
choices based on intuition and technological insights.
This decision-making technology can also be applied to the
end user. Data already exists for customers' histories with companies across
industries. The previous decade saw growth of almost 5,000 percent in the
amount of data created, captured, and consumed in the world, according to Forbes.
This data is an asset to understanding consumer behaviors and decision-making
that can train the machine to assist in taking decisions for a better future.
For example, banks have years of consumers' spending and
saving data. This information could be combined with artificial intelligence
and machine learning to deliver insights to help them make more data-driven
decisions in managing their cash flow, service excellence, cross-sell
opportunities, etc. It also helps hugely with fraud prevention, Anti-money
laundering, etc.
In the retail industry, there is tons of money spent on
product promotion. The effectiveness of the promotion used to be available only
when the whole campaign is completed. In many cases, companies were not able to
maximize the ROI of these campaigns or not able to react in real-time to
competitive campaigns. Today AI and machine learning driven campaigns in real-time,
sharing potential problems before they occur and allowing for proactive course
correction. This will maximize the ROI for trade planning campaigns.
This decision-making technology discussed already exists,
but it has failed to be implemented at a large scale. In 2023, organizations
will continue the trend of relying on artificial intelligence and machine
learning to make more informed conclusions that rely on data.
Recent promises and advancements with ML models using
reinforcement learning from human feedback on ChatGPT are great examples for
how human-assisted intelligence is seeing a huge leap in this space.
It is imperative that organizations continue to build technologies
that assist humans to leverage their decision-making requirement to very few.
By using AI and ML-assisted decisions, companies will be enabled to accelerate
their ability to respond to customers' needs better.
##
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ram Palaniappan is a
CTO with TEKsystems Global Services. Ram is a senior leader who is focused on
big data, IoT and AI strategy. He is a solutions architect with broad
experience in business intelligence, mobility and cloud solutions and product
management. He is an expert at helping customers adopt and mature AI and helps
lead them to data-driven automation and intelligence-driven business processes.