The Tipping Point of AI: Why You Need Smart Digital Solutions

So many of us, as workers, are often stressed about the idea of making a mistake in the workplace – mistakes that could affect everything from regulatory compliance to revenue to customer retention. In the previous Exela blog, the first of four tips on how to drive better customer experience is “use AI and bots to help with smaller issues” – but how do you do that? Using AI will not only give your customers a better experience, but will help your workforce avoid the potential for those small (or big!) errors that are simply part of being human.

AI is transforming every industry, from the uber-traditional financial, health insurance, and automotive industries to the newer worlds of smartphone app development and e-commerce. Machine learning (ML) is a subset of AI in which a computerized system either learns from a set of existing labeled data or learns to identify similarities within data without being told what the outcomes could be. Examples of ML include Netflix predicting what you’d like to watch next, Facebook algorithms noticing what products you shopped for and showing you ads, or Amazon suggesting new products you’d like to buy based on past purchases. Given the frequency we receive these suggestions in our online lives, the ubiquity of ML (and the overarching presence of AI) demonstrates how necessary it is to implement digital solutions within your company.

With a smartphone in nearly everyone’s pocket, customers have come to expect mobile and web options that make their lives easier. On the other side of that relationship is the workforce behind the banks, health insurance providers, hospitals, apps, and retail stores that must implement these AI-based solutions. Each industry has ever-changing guidelines to be met, leaving a wide margin for error when constantly trying to hit a moving target. Digital solutions help manage these issues, taking efficiency to the next level.

Malcolm Gladwell’s well-known text, The Tipping Point, gave us a term for when something reaches critical mass and is known and adopted across all parts of life, from our business lives to our personal lives. When Gladwell wrote it in 2000, he may not have thought of it being used to describe technology adoption in every vertical. All parts of a business need to work together to achieve an AI tipping point, what TechCrunch refers to as “collaborative automation” as employees are trained in new digital processes that will alter the landscape of their day-to-day work. Exela’s solutions provide just that – a layer of business process automation that changes how a business runs for the better, making it faster, more efficient, easier to use and implement, and providing an optimized customer experience. Machine learning principles allow users to either “auto-select” the correct answer to a problem or provide recommendations to the worker to reduce stress-related mistakes, therefore speeding up the time required to reach a successful outcome, especially in relation to customer experience.

Industry leaders are already implementing technology solutions in new and innovative ways, revolutionizing how business is conducted. For example, self-driving cars, apps that can identify different plant and animal species through crowdsourced photos, robots that interact with banking customers and direct them to the right employee for quick and effective service – all of these innovations require AI platforms similar to the offerings Exela applies to so many industries, from fintech and healthcare to print/mail services and staffing needs.

As tech leaders look to the future, AI is poised to become more intuitive, learning from repeated, assigned tasks and eventually will be able to move beyond single-step prediction. This is great in industries like healthcare and insurance, where events often move in a sometimes lengthy but predictable sequence. Industrial workers, healthcare professionals, and insurance representatives will benefit from AI knowing which task comes next and helping them complete it with accuracy, narrowing the margin for error and boosting productivity on all sides of project workflow.

Customers expect their experience with companies in all verticals to come with a layer of digital innovation, and if your company doesn’t “have an app for that” then you are perceived as lagging behind the pace of technology. Improving customer experience means adding AI to your existing systems, but you can’t do so without first knowing your specific automation needs. Choose a company that doesn’t just deliver AI and walk away, but helps transform each customer’s individual digital journey for the best experience for both customer and workforce.