How Businesses Are Leveraging AI to Drive Growth in 2024

Organizations that will survive in the digital transformation era are those who will be called Digirati, as they will combine the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital activities with strong leadership, which in turn will allow them to turn technology into transformation for Organizational operations efficiency. This is referred to as Digital Maturity.  George Westerman, Didier Bonet, (2014)

 

The technological environment has been improving at a faster rate, this change has been informed by human beings as the need for effective ways of operation and/or simpler ways of accessing services. The most conspicuous revolution in information technology can be observed in the size of the resulting hardware and applications developed over time that has enabled organizations to function effectively and at higher throughput in order to deliver effective services to consumers.

 

The recent technological shock that has been discussed by executive leaders is Artificial intelligence (AI) and how it can be incorporated into the digital processes with particular regard to enhancing the efficiency and customer experience.

 

Artificial intelligence can be defined as a process of watching what people do and automating it. Organizations are looking at the processes that are been done by humans and trying to mimic those processes using Artificial intelligence to achieve faster processing of tasks and also to save costs on operations in terms of human capital.

 

Depending on the finances, organisations are taking different approaches when it comes to integrating artificial intelligence into their digital transformation strategies of which some are transforming all the parts of their organisation while others are still doing only the basics.

 

Various experts have written about this topic but one thing that is clear is that the best organizations in the future will be those that will combine digital and artificial intelligence activities with strong leadership as a way of turning technology into transformation. This is what is normally referred to as digital maturity and organizations that will reach that level will outperform those that will not be digital maturity.

 

How Businesses Are Leveraging AI to Drive Growth in 2024

Executives globally are looking at leading organizations that are efficient by streamlining both internal and external processes with the expected results of improving operational efficiency. For this to be achieved, they are looking at how artificial intelligence can be integrated into digital transformation to improve operational efficiency and customer engagement and three areas of focus have been discussed

 

Customer Experience

In digital transformation, customer experience is divided into three stages which include customer understanding, customer touch points, and top-line growth discussed in-depth below.  

 

1. Customer understanding

Lately, everything is all about understanding and knowing who your customers are, and organizations are using various methods to do so, like taking advantage of social media to know what customers are interested in or what makes them dissatisfied with the organization's services. Organizations are taking advantage of Artificial Intelligence and digital solutions to promote their products to customers and this has led to organizations to invest in building online communities just to get in touch with their customers and maintain loyalty.

 

2. Organization Top-Line Growth

Organizations are taking advantage of Artificial Intelligence and digital technology to improve in-person discussions with their customers. A better understanding of the customers helps the organizations transform to their expectations.

 

3. Customer touch points

Customer touch points involve having multiple channels of communication so that your customer can get in touch with your organization. This is key to the organization's business as customers always want to get immediate feedback once they contact you. Organizations that have good products but poor feedback to their customers usually have a low customer base compared to those who may have a fairly good product but have excellent customer feedback.

 

The major tools that organizations are digitally taking advantage of as touch points include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, web chats etc. These tools enable the organization to answer the customer queries faster to avoid them going to the branch physically.

 

Many organizations are now coming up with Artificial Intelligence and digital innovations to provide self-services to their customers. Touch points like the organization's apps that allow customers to access the services using tablets, smartphones, and iPad are saving the customers and preventing them from being in long queues.

 

The demand for touch points by customers is forcing programmers to change the development approach from writing the program for the users to the users demanding what the programmer should write for them with the incorporation of Artificial Intelligence.

 

This approach is referred to as User-Centered design (UCD) or Human Centered Design approach because if a programmer writes a program and users reject it, it will be rendered unusable. People are pushing organizations to digitally transform and integrate Artificial Intelligence into their solutions.

 

How can avoid Business failure in integrating Artificial Intelligence into digital transformation strategies to Drive Growth in 2024

 

In this digital age organizations are leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance organizational efficiency and reduce operational costs. However, they need to ensure that they avoid failure as it is not cheap to implement Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions. Three key steps can save organizations from failure in implementing Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions. 

 

1.Data Harmonization and Cleaning

Organizations need to first harmonize and clean the data by accessing data sources and infrastructure to ensure that inconsistencies have been identified and documented. This will help an organization to determine whether the infrastructure is adequate to support the integration of Artificial Intelligence into their digital transformation strategy.

 

Identification of data relationships to integrate and setting of data governance documentation is important before an organization embarks on the journey of integrating Artificial Intelligence into digital transformation.This would assist organizations missing out on critical building blocks to implement Artificial Intelligence solutions.

2.Artificial Intelligence (AI) Proof of Concept

As organizations humanize and clean up their data, they need to define relevant use cases to pinpoint the specific outcomes from the implementation of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions and list appropriate models to use in the implementation process. It is important for organizations to define business logic, select appropriate models, and fine-tune models to get the needed results.

 

3.Elevate Operations, Leverage Automation, and Uncover Opportunities

 

The last stage of avoiding failure in the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is optimization of the implemented models reporting the behavior of the models and documentation of the results. Lessons learned in this process are documented for future improvement. 

 

Therefore, it is a reality that participating in the AI journey in the digitalisation of organizations is a process, which organizations must understand that it is essential to start with a small standalone process to adopt Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions, to be able to assess the behavior of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) models before applying them in large processes that can lead to failure and important loss for the organization.