Using AI the right way to drive Digitization within your organization

Intelligence has been one of the most important virtues possessed by humans. It has allowed us to make a plethora of groundbreaking inventions and discoveries over time. However, since we started embracing digitization, humans have started sharing a bit of their intelligence with machines!

This is what has come to be known as artificial intelligence (AI). AI has allowed digital platforms to learn, analyze, and act like human beings. Just like we gather information present around us and analyze it to come to logical conclusions, AI allows digital platforms to do the same with the data fed to them.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence (AI), in simple words, is the ability of computers and machines to mirror human thinking capabilities. It is a technology that allows digital platforms to gather data and process it the way we humans do. With artificial intelligence, digital platforms can learn from past mistakes, make valid predictions, calculate risks, reason well, and analyze a set of data provided to them.

A lot of artificial intelligence revolves around identifying trends and patterns in data. When a machine is fed with trillions of GBs of data, AI allows it to find specific trends and patterns that help a machine make assessments like humans.

Broadly speaking, there are four major types of artificial intelligence – limited memory, reactive machines, self-awareness, and the theory of mind. When combined and used the right way, they give rise to technologies like NLP (natural language processing), facial recognition, computer vision, machine learning, and deep learning.

When it comes to driving digitization within organizations, AI often pairs up with machine learning to help businesses make intelligent predictions, minimize risks, make recommendations, and provide enhanced customer service.

Is Artificial Intelligence the same as Automation?

It is common to get confused between artificial intelligence and automation. While both inventions play a major role in digitally transforming your business, it is important to understand the subtle difference between the two.

Automation involves the creation of programs and systems that follow pre-programmed rules to carry out specific processes (often repetitive) to reduce human interference. The key purpose of automation is to reduce the dependence on manual processes. It prevents employees within an organization from spending their time and efforts performing tedious and repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on more complex and important activities.

On the other hand, artificial intelligence is used for stimulating human thought processes. While automation may be a part of AI, AI’s purpose is to enhance the efforts put in by humans by behaving like them. It adds more value to the work done by human employees by analyzing large sets of data and providing them with valuable insights regarding the same. In other words, AI enables machines to act like superhumans who can feed on large datasets, identify patterns, and come up with logical conclusions.

Driving Digitization within your Organization with AI

Living in the age of digitization, you cannot afford to avoid getting on the digital bandwagon to enhance your business processes and sustain yourself in the market. Artificial intelligence, in more ways than one, makes driving digitization easier, faster, and more effective.

Here are some of the most important ways in which you can drive digitization within your organization with AI:

1. Defining customer preferences

In 2024, customers prefer personalization more than anything else. Your sales and marketing professionals need to tailor their processes based on the needs, preferences, and interests of your customers to get the traction you are looking for.

Artificial intelligence allows you to define the preferences of your customers, allowing you to tailor your products, services, and communication around them. With AI, you can create customer personas that are more accurate and well fleshed out. This allows you and your team to be in sync with what exactly your customers prefer.

Right from the platforms they use for making purchases to the kind of products/services they are gravitating towards, AI-driven tools guide digital transformation projects from the very beginning. Right from the kind of content they view to their transaction histories with your company, AI helps you make sense of it all and target them better with personalized processes.

2. Providing personalized support

Gone are the days when businesses would set up conventional help desks to provide support to their customers and employees. Just like all other processes, the process of providing adequate support needs to be personalized.

Artificial intelligence allows you to provide personalized support to your customers and employees through conversational AI. As the name suggests, conversational AI is the technology that allows users to interact with machines in the form of AI chatbots. These chatbots talk to your customers and employees like human beings, analyze their problems, and provide them with a suitable solution within seconds.

Most organizations use AI-driven help desks for offering primary support to their customers or employees. Here, the chatbots resolve the basic issues people have regarding the products, services, company policies, regulations, and more by scanning the enterprise knowledge base and extracting the right information for the right people.

3. Predicting customer behavior

This is arguably one of the biggest reasons why businesses choose to implement AI-driven tools for driving digitization. Every business wishes for a superpower that allows it to predict how the customers would behave. Artificial intelligence brings you very close to this superpower by analyzing market trends and the past behaviors of your customers (especially while engaging with your organization).

AI-based algorithms can be used for creating powerful propensity models based on the persona of your customers. This allows the technology to predict the manner in which your customers are likely to behave to a specific promotional message, discount offers, or any other form of communication. While this does not provide you with any guarantee of sales, it helps you minimize risk and take the right steps towards achieving your business goals. When you know that the likely outcome of a specific action is not positive, you would certainly think twice before carrying it out.

4. Tracking your customers’ buying journeys

Along with providing personalized services to your customers, it is equally important for an organization to be there for their customers at every stage of their buying journeys.

From the moment a prospect has approached the point at which the purchase is made, every customer follows a unique buying journey. AI-driven tools allow your marketing and sales reps to be with your customers at every stage, resolve their issues, answer their questions, and persuade them to reach the end of their journey. As the needs, preferences, and motivations of every customer as unique, artificial intelligence helps your team members to personalize interactions with every customer your business caters to.

Staying with your customers throughout their buying journeys allows you to build healthy relationships with them and create a loyal base of customers.

5. Training your employees

Driving digitization within your organization is never limited to fulfilling the needs of your customers. It also extends to catering to your employees who are one of the most valuable assets for your organization.

In the age of digitization where more and more employees prefer working remotely, it often becomes difficult to train them using conventional methods. Gone are the days when organizations would conduct live and in-person training sessions for getting their employees trained. However, AI helps you train your employees irrespective of the location they are working from.

New-age training methodologies such as microlearning use artificial intelligence to enhance the training offered to employees around the world. Instead of bombarding your employees with long manuals, guides, and sessions, microlearning allows you to provide bite-sized training material to them that does not take more than 10 minutes of their days, on a daily basis.

Such training methodologies incorporate AI to track the performance of your employees and guide them throughout their learning paths. AI-driven training tools understand the strengths and weaknesses of each employee, using this data to provide them with personalized training material. This way, you can ensure that your employees are trained without the need for conducting on-premise training sessions.

6. Generating valuable and extensive reports

Periodic reporting is always important to understand the performance of your team and organization as a whole. If you are executing a specific campaign, customizable reports help you make valuable assessments and take decisions that matter.

AI-driven tools make generating valuable reports faster and more specific. The technology can keep track of the nitty-gritty details about the actions performed by your customers as well as your employees and reflect the same in insightful reports. These reports help you assess your KPIs, calculate ROI, and obtain a 360-degree view of your organization and its processes.

The Final Word

In 2024, driving digitization within an organization is incomplete without artificial intelligence. Instead of replacing manpower, AI helps you enhance the efforts put in by your team members and acts as a powerful virtual ally to your organization while attaining common business goals.