AI is taking centre stage in industries, including retail and manufacturing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is clearly a growing force in the business sector. Recently, AI has broken the wrong perspective of many executives and business owners that it is applicable just to big companies like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google. It is serving every corner possible when it comes to showing its potential.

AI is taking centre stage across a wide variety of industries, including retail and manufacturing. New products are being embedded with virtual assistants, while chatbots are answering customer questions on everything from online office supplier's site to web hosting service provider's support page. AI has made widespread advancement through its applications such as machine learning, computer vision, deep learning and natural language processing (NLP).

For business, practical AI applications manifest organisational needs. Business intelligence (BI) insights derived from the data collected, analyzes them and predicts the future. Enterprises can employ AI for everything starting from mining social data to driving engagement in customer relationship management (CRM). It optimizes logistics and efficiency when it comes to tracking and managing assets.

These strategies are not just for big tech companies. Even small organizations can follow the suit to develop their revenue. It is true that big organizations gained a large sum of profit in recent years by implementing AI in their working system. However, the reality is that any organization can adopt, scale and benefit from AI today. A survey conducted by Cognizant suggests that around 84% of the executives of organizations view AI as critical, including 48% believing that AI will be extremely important to their company's success.

Here are some of the steps that companies could take to put capabilities of AI into action without the need of data scientists.

Identify the Exact Location for AI Implementation

Identifying the place where AI needs to show its power plays a critical role. AI has a lot of features and it can change the way people function in an organization. However, the key role is to correctly frame business problems where AI can be used. This means focusing on specific use cases that would provide the highest return on investment (ROI).

Participation in AI function by both employees and consumers is where the success of an organization lies. Getting business users to participate is indeed a tough job. But it has huge rewards compared to the initiative that organizations take to influence the users. By solving 'AI challenges' daily, organizations can get a clear picture on people's perspective in the creative process. Some companies carry out similar AI challenges periodically throughout the business. They even encourage the participants by giving prizes.

Work on Relevant Data

AI adoption is not easy on a single run. Therefore, encouraging employee's involvement in the working system might reduce the challenges in accepting. Meanwhile, it could turn employees to citizen data scientists.

AI's primary role in the business model is to analyze data and give a framework on solutions for problems, roadmap to achieve success and future predictions. Henceforth, business users are the best resources in an organization to help find the problem that requires an AI solution. AI works on huge data called big data to help accelerate the inception phase of AI project. The move will consequently boost the results. Big data is considered an asset to the organization as they are the basic raw materials where AI performs its skills.

Leaders must Inspire Transformation

Leaders are the initiators who have the responsibility to drive an organization towards digitization. Undoubtedly, most employees might resist changes within their organization. Ultimately, the leader should inspire the employees to embrace new technologies by fostering people to understand the benefit it carries. The democratization of AI in a company essentially needs investments in the training and working forces. Therefore, it is essential to segment a fund for sensitization and business intelligence (BI) tools.

While AI is being a gamechanger for the business sector, there are certain challenges that it will constantly face. However, AI finds a way to sort it out and companies stand by them. As the reliance on technology increases, the adoption and fast-tracking of the solution is also expected to spike in the upcoming years.