How AI Helps Digital Enterprises Streamline Operations

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming how enterprises analyze and process information. It is also shifting from theoretical to real-world technology. Companies are deploying AI technologies to boost efficiency, reduce costs, and grow sales and profitability. The technology can also reduce marketing waste by predicting what works. It is the most impactful innovation of our lifetime, and it will create new winners and losers across entire industries.

According to Gartner, artificial intelligence will create $2.9 trillion in business value and 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity globally in 2021. Most of that value will be realized by enterprises that implement AI in functions such as sales management, customer service, manufacturing, and logistics. With improvements in natural language processing, employees and users can easily communicate with machine-learning interfaces. 

Let’s look at how AI applications are revamping digital enterprises and the retail industry.

Organizations can lower risk, as well as increase ROI by using artificial intelligence to improve governance and compliance. According to McKinsey & Company’s 2016 analysis, traditional AI and analytics can give the retail industry $909 billion in annual value while advanced AI can provide an extra $777 billion each year. That’s $1.7 trillion in annual value or 12.39% of sales. For retailers, marketing and sales are where AI creates the most value at $1.1 trillion in annual benefits (out of the $1.7 trillion).

A big problem for global companies is that big data is spread across silos that don’t communicate with each other. Contracts, customer data, regulations and other important information are not fully utilized. AI can get data auto-tagged, classified automatically, and organized in the right compartments to make information discoverable across multiple locations.

“Inefficient contracting costs companies anywhere from 5% to 40% of a contract's total value,” says Hemanth Puttaswamy, CEO and Co-founder of Malbek, a cloud-based contract management software that uses AI to enable search and filter capabilities for contract data. “It’s our firm’s goal to significantly reduce that cost, as well as improve entity-wide efficiencies.” For example, the company’s AI-powered contract tool learns a client’s patterns for redlining and negotiation. That enables sales, legal and finance to tap into discoverable, relevant, and timely contract info across the enterprise.

With increased competitive pressure in today's retail industry, brands that are winning are those who adopt artificial-intelligence-based technologies and data-driven approaches to serve shoppers the right prices to make the sale. Knowing the price consumers are willing to pay for goods is critical for maximizing sales. 92% of high-performing retailers have processes and systems in place to manage price relationships and rules to achieve their business objectives. 

Retailers can also take advantage of technologies such as Brain of the Store, a spatial artificial intelligence platform that analyzes store and shopper movement in real time by leveraging a retailer’s existing store infrastructure, like security cameras. This data can be used to provide visibility into customer and staff behavior.

According to a 2020 KPMG report, 85% of retail insiders believe that artificial intelligence can significantly improve organizational efficiencies, and 80% say AI is being used to alleviate issues related to customer service. 

Moreover, 45% of retail respondents predict that they will reap major benefits from customer service chatbots in the next two years, according to the same KPMG report.

Decision makers support AI in sales and customer service because they see a quicker path to ROI. In a separate 2019 KPMG study, companies that invested in AI saw 15% productivity improvements for projects they were undertaking. Chatbots and conversational interfaces are changing the competitive landscape because these can interact with web and social traffic 24/7. 

Chatbots reduce costs, improve customer support, and capture revenue opportunities in real-time. They’re also growing in sophistication. However, they mostly answer people’s common queries such as, “How much is your subscription service?” or “What’s your return policy?”. The automated technology solves the never-ending challenge of accurately responding to impatient audiences. AI-powered replies online prevent prospects from shopping at competing stores. 

AI can shift the competitive balance in any industry.