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AI & Cloud: Want AI to work for your business?

The final essential ingredient for AI success is the realisation that you can’t just do AI for the sake of it, and that you should not be building bespoke AI in most cases.

AI & CLOUD: Want AI to work for your business?
AI & CLOUD: Want AI to work for your business?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one technology that nobody can seem to get enough of! Such is AI’s incredible potential that it won’t be surprising if future business battles for market supremacy get played out as virtual ‘AI wars’ between companies.

Consider this: Forrester predicts that businesses that use AI, Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT) to uncover new business insights will steal $1.2 trillion per annum from their less informed peers by 2020. This business shift starts with simple things such as moving customer service from reactive to preventive. Then, it starts to transform businesses. So why aren’t more businesses taking action? The reason is simple: Most enterprises are taking a piecemeal approach to technology adoption. This reactive, tech-first approach isn’t strategic. As a result, some 13% of businesses are failing to experience the benefits hoped for from deploying disruptive technologies.

AI is a fantastic tool, but with any emerging technology, its use needs to be targeted, like an arrow and it needs a solid base, built on data and for innovation, and this is where cloud comes in play. Cloud is the foundation where digital transformation begins—or to extend the analogy, cloud is the bow from which to fire your AI arrow.

Cloud is necessary because digital transformation requires first and foremost innovation. As a delivery platform, cloud empowers enterprises to jump in and try things, whether it’s AI, IoT, blockchain, or any other new technology that is coming down the innovation pipeline. In addition, the magic of cloud is that it funds innovation at the same time: Moving your infrastructure to cloud gives you massive cost benefits, enabling you to repurpose the funding towards the future. The other essential area to get right is data—all today’s emerging technologies rely on data, but AI, more so than any other. The more data that can be fed into the AI algorithms, the more accurate and effective the results. The challenge is twofold: First, most companies today are sitting on huge amounts of data, which they are not using or sharing properly.

Second, even this huge amount of data is not enough to feed the voracious appetites of AI.

The final essential ingredient for AI success is the realisation that you can’t just do AI for the sake of it, and that you should not be building bespoke AI in most cases. Good AI in business is about focusing it on how to do a job better —whether that’s improving customer service, identifying better talent and keeping employees happier, spotting fraud, or making the supply chain more effective and efficient. To make this happen, enterprises have a range of cutting-edge, purpose-built, ready-to-go applications that will enable them to integrate transformational technologies such as AI seamlessly into their day-to-day capabilities in finance, HR, marketing, sales, etc. The cloud allows these different business functions to connect across a platform that can learn, adjust, self-correct and pull insight from across the business, resulting in a connected experience and yielding better insights.

We are still early in our move to this next age of emerging technologies. Winners are starting to emerge; and what is enabling them to take the lead is clear. They are embracing cloud as a foundation for innovation, they have a clear data strategy, they are doing that now, and they are achieving quick wins. So what’s your AI game plan going to be? We’d say use the ‘AI’ arrow, with the ‘cloud’ bow.

By- Manish Gehlot & Sheela Nambiar

Manish Gehlot is director of IT, LOTS Wholesale; Sheela Nambiar is senior director, Oracle Digital

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First published on: 16-08-2018 at 00:11 IST
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