The time when digital transformation meant digitizing paper records into a word doc or PDF is long gone. Digital transformation, in today’s time, especially with coronavirus bringing digital adoption on the forefront at full scale, has become a must-have mode of operation for businesses.
Digitally transforming or bettering the customers’ experience is the cornerstone of every new business process or technology investment. It has become one of the key ways of retaining the existing customers and attracting new ones, all the while aiding business growth. Sharing the intent and end goal of digital transformation is a technology which like the former used to be an afterthought for businesses – Artificial Intelligence.
Digital transformation and AI when in conjunction can lead to unprecedented business growth with a clear understanding of where the customers needs lie. An Infosys report titled Human Amplification in the Enterprise gathered that 98% of the respondents who used AI based activities for powering digital transformations reported that it helped them generate high revenue and even raise the bottom line by around 15%.
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”
-Bill Gates
Let us look at the ways in which AI can be used to improve the digital transformation success rate. These ways are enough to give you a reason for why outsourcing digital transformation to an AI skilled digital transformation company can be a good move for your business.
- Creation of customer persona guiding digital transformation
Businesses which come with successful digital transformation efforts can see betterment in the customer satisfaction and loyalty rates driven by a well-defined customer persona. Making use of AI for understanding customers and creating persona act as a foundation of all the digital transformation efforts.
AI combines the product preference, brand, location data, event, transaction history, content viewed, and communication preferences to help define a customer persona which is an exact representation of the business objectives.
- Propensity model helping with predictive analysis
By general definition, propensity uses machine learning to estimate probability of a customer acting on a marketing event. The event can be anything from an offer to email campaign to a CTA leading to upsell, resell, or cross-sell.
By giving businesses insights into whether or not users would react to the offering, can not just help them strategize better but also make them a conversion magnet.
- Using AI-driven insights to redesign IT integration and infrastructure
IT infrastructure has to respond promptly to the changes in customers’ preferences while offering scale to grow. Everything about the brand, manufacturer, and retailer has to be defined according to the customers and where their needs lie. Understanding the customers’ pain points and wishlists, can help you revisit your current IT infrastructure and gauge if it needs a change.
- COVID-19 driven need for transparent tracing will become the new norm
In the wake of the COVID-19 run on the stores, tracking orders across distribution outlets, supplier, and e-commerce channels are being combined with the allocation and out of stock predictions drawn by AI is lowering the shortage positions and out of stock instances.
AI powered tracking can prove to be invaluable in finding the inefficiencies in processes which lead to a slowed down time to market and terrible customer experiences.
- Digitalizing supply chain for greater efficiencies
For a digital transformation strategy to be deemed efficient, the supply chains would have to be designed for excelling at the time to customer performance. AI, through its multitude of algorithms, can help with making supply chain decisions a lot more streamlined, predictive, and transparent at every step.
In fact, this is the reason why over 45% of the organizations use AI driven intelligence to fasten their speed to market.
- Dynamic Analytics leading to faster decision-making
One of the obvious things about business processes is that by accessing the analytics and data, businesses can greatly enhance their decision-making game. AI can help process over 100s and 1000s of data point in real-time without the involvement of any human being.
It can also enable organizations to develop predictive analytics driven models for testing and retesting their hypothesis testing multiple times. This, in turn, can bring optimization and effectiveness in picture – making data science a key part of a business conduct.
While the reasons you read above are enough for businesses to employ AI in their processes for making it efficient, there is something that entrepreneurs must know. AI is not only about automation. By putting the focus on automation, businesses can leave out a series of strategic benefits that AI has to offer.
This means, as a prelude to AI incorporation, business leaders must ask the right questions:
- Consider the continuous transformations in businesses, how can I envision my business in the new landscape?
- How should I use novel technologies for evolving my organization in line with the changes in business environment?
These questions would help you understand how AI can be expanded beyond autonomous.
Parting Words
Digital transformation and AI are those strategic exercises which can address how businesses can operate in a constantly evolving landscape, know the key objectives, and build the module plan needed for attaining these objectives. It is important for the transformation efforts to be aligned with the business vision that would set the basis of long-term growth.
It is also very critical to build a strategy which focuses on both internal and external stakeholders and their perceptions. While, on one hand, it is necessary for the businesses to understand and acknowledge the stakeholders’ needs as a part of their goals for digital transformation and towards a better portfolio offering: the one which is customer-focused and addresses their needs in a best possible manner.
In the end, AI comes with the potential of driving processes at scale and helping businesses make informed decisions. The ground rule however should always be that the use cases and business objectives must be clear. Otherwise, the organization, irrespective of the technology stack and expertise can fall down like a house of cards.
Author Bio : Holding a Bachelor’s degree in Technology and 2 years of work experience in a mobile app development company, Jason is focused on making technology digestible to all. Being someone who stays updated with the latest tech trends, he’s always armed to write and spread the knowledge. When not found writing, you will find him answering on Quora while sipping coffee.