Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer in its infancy; it is an essential business transformation tool to deliver results with impact. AI is changing every aspect of business by bringing data to the center: from AI infused customer and employee experiences to AI infused operations, and, ultimately, protecting the company from external risks and fraud.

At IBM we are calling this an AI application flywheel. By drawing insights from hundreds of C-level AI engagements, major AI-driven business priorities surface to the top for each C-Suite executive. These include,

• CEO – who has made a mission to make their organisation an AI driven company.
• CMO – who wants to revamp marketing with advanced AI led customer engagement.
• COO – who manages operations and wishes to leverage and apply AI efficiencies.
• CFO – who wants to safeguard his company from new emerging threats and frauds.

AI infused customer and employee experience

According to Servion Global Solutions research, approximately 95 percent of customer interactions of the future will be powered by AI. At that scale, it may become impossible to differentiate between humans and virtual agents during live conversation via telephone or online.

Customers and employees alike want to make efficient use of their time. For customers—faster and more personalized service. For employees—the ability to free up time from mundane tasks and focus on building innovation into products and services. Intelligence built into customer service that provides answers quickly and makes the customer feel special is going to be table stakes. Automation built into employee tasks like HR onboarding or team project management will be critical to maintaining a brand’s top position in the market.  Reliability in cognitive and intelligence services—built on a platform that preserves brand integrity while accelerating time-to-market—is key.

Case in point is Prudential, Singapore. They used IBM Watson Discovery and IBM watsonx Assistant running on IBM Cloud™ infrastructure to develop an intelligent interface for customers seeking answers to their queries. Watson Expert Assist is the value pattern created by combining watsonx Assistant enabled virtual agents with the content analytics capabilities of Watson Discovery to deliver AI infused customer and employee experiences.

Together watsonx Assistant and Discovery can transform the way customers begin their buying journey with the brand. Automated engines recommend customers to take the next best step by analysing their behaviour and in turn delivering highly relevant product and service offers. This also helps extend the loyalty of customers by providing them with a digital personal assistant to guide their decision-making and shorten the conversion cycle.

AI infused operational efficiencies

One of the largest hospitality and real estate firms in Asia has been using IBM Planning Analytics powered by TM1 to streamline planning, budgeting, forecasting and analysis of large finance data sets. Financial forecasts are a critical component of a successful business plan and budgeting process. With increasing demand for instant access to information in a web-driven world, financial managers are expected to offer financial forecasts to predict any financial impact on organization goals and priorities.

AI infused planning analytics provides finance teams capacity to analyse disperse large finance data sets, perform sophisticated calculations to develop accurate financial forecasting models to project expected sales, conduct budget management, and perform initial and ongoing credit analysis.

AI infused risk and fraud

Today businesses rely on traditional risk scoring systems with simple statistical analysis. Those who use predictive systems do it in an expensive, non-optimized way of limited scalability.

Businesses operate in highly competitive, complex and regulated environment. New rules to comply with make it increasingly important to reduce risks. To stay competitive, businesses are challenged to offer rapid real-time fraud detection as they process high volumes of customer transactions passing through their doors.

Case in point: one of biggest retail chains in Asia is implementing a real time payment fraud system and integrating with POS, financial systems and banking systems. Artificial Intelligence, with built in IBM safer payments solution, identifies complex, nonlinear patterns in large data sets and makes more accurate risk models. These models learn, improving their predictive power over time. In turn, these models integrate with Watson enabled services to route fraud alerts and inform of corrective actions.

Learn how to operationalize AI in your business: ibm.com/watson.

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