AI is great for most business areas within companies. It promises new insight, prediction, analysis - which allows firms to target their most promising prospects in sales, most troublesome (and prospective profitability) customers, and links current data with future expansion.
Well, that's great for the business units, and for Sales and Marketing, and for Finance, and even for Operations. Primarily, IT focuses on "what to analyze, how to analyze and provide output that is meaningful to the business". The business then asks "How can I apply this insight to make better decisions and for direction in both tactics and strategy".
We all know about Amazon's use of AI, to use a well-known example, about customer product recommendations, or Netflix's movie recommendations. A more complex variation of this would be Walmart's predictive analytics team using AI to anticipate best price points for new products.
How about IT? is it simply a means to an end, a tactical vehicle for a strategic roadway?
The answer, of course, is no. Beyond the obvious - that IT, as generally used, is the tool for designing, implementing and reaping the benefits of AI, IT itself could use AI. How so? here are some possibilities:
- Infrastructure: AI can be used for IT asset management. How many laptops and PCs broke down in the the past 5 years? use predictive analytics to find out possible future costs, by department, region, function, job title and even time of year (perhaps the after-parties in December are a little too, er, wild). Similarly, Software assets - licenses, subscriptions to software and data services - can be analyzed to find out rate of use, peak usage vs. license costs and predictive cost management and demand.
- Operations: Already in wide use at call centers and tech support areas, AI includes staffing, chat bots,. Now, with increasing use of Amazon Alexa, Google Home and other audible assistants, users can resolve their issues without human contact in most cases. This does not mean that humans are not needed - in fact, quite the contrary - the call center / tech support personnel's valuable time can be spent solving higher level issues, instead of "my shared drive connection is lost" type simpler issues.
Other potential functions include speaking to a device and asking, in plain English (or other language) for requests such as "Please give me a report of all cost centers with expense ratios higher than 15% from January through June of this year".
- Research / Investigation - IT Operations, Systems Management, Compliance: Much of workers' time is taken up by looking for and researching something - why something was or wasn't done, why it took so long, or how something connects to something else. AI could help, by using neural networks to sift through data, and by analyzing past data streams, to come up with potential explanations. Examples include "Why was the invoice rejected?" to "Why did the product specs have another layer of safety features after approval by Compliance?"
Constant analysis of vast streams of data on just about every function, task, process, policy, project, and mandate might sound like a vast headache; but used properly, it will alleviate many bottlenecks in process and operations, and produce cost savings and open up new ways of looking at, and doing things to increase productivity. The devil is in the details though - and as the age of AI opens up at a head-spinning pace, prepare to learn about it, use it and stay ahead of the game.
Project Charter / Design / Approval / Funding / Implementation / Oversight / Completion: Projects involve a number of people, policies and process in large firms. AI is currently used to automate some of these steps, with the potential to automate many more steps in the near future. The idea is not simply to have a workflow process automation, but use intelligent programs to probe the cost benefit and burn rate areas and predict the final run rate and project completion time and budget. Not to worry, if you are a project manager - the knowledge you have built up will be needed by any automation team. Are you killing your own future? No - your expertise will propel you to higher value-add processes, so you can spend your time analyzing the project from a higher perspective instead of worrying whether functional testing can start before any project milestone prerequisite is done.
If you don't know where to start, there are several online courses that explain AI in greater detail. If you are interested in the business implications, select, from one of the many offerings from any of these online education providers. Many of the courses are free, others might have a marginal fee.
Note that many colleges also have online classes, some of which may be free - or not. Check Cornell, MIT, Stanford etc.
Some of these providers are:
Hope this gets you thinking of how you can contribute to your business' IT area.
