The hype surrounding AI potential has misled many into overlooking its current utility. AI experts say the real value today lies in increasing efficiency and accuracy in our everyday work.
If I asked you to give me one example of automation, what would you say?
Most likely a car factory or an assembly plant filled with machines doing repetitive tasks. No matter your answer, you most likely weren’t thinking of automation within your own business. Yet, you should, as workflow automation can offer many benefits to improve your business.
A good workflow answers question like: What actually needs to be done? Who am I doing this task for? How long should I take to perform this task? Who else is involved in the process? What will happen after I do this?
Time is a scarce resource. Most enterprises are deadline driven. This means that the faster tasks are done, the more things are accomplished, and the better the end results will be. Which is a win both for you and your customers. Management can concentrate on strategic activities, rather than day–to–day operational tasks.
Good workflows provide the necessary triggers that make things happen when they should. This means that opportunities are not missed and money is being spent to further improve operations.
But the only way to drop human errors and ensure that a workflow is really effective is to make it run with minimal, or no effort from your team. It has to automatically handle tasks, send alerts and trigger processes. Otherwise, your employees will waste more time checking the workflow, than actually working.
Automating workflows removes the human element from the equation. It creates a reliable process that cut costs where it matters the most.
There are many reasons why an automated workflow can benefit your business.
With the help of Artificial Intelligence, these effects multiply.
Artificial intelligence and automation
AI potential will eventually redefine industries and technologies, but AI experts say the real value today lies in increasing efficiency and accuracy in our everyday work.
Artificial Intelligence is defined as the replication of human intelligence in computers.
The way to enable computers to be intelligent is through Machine Learning. Machine Learning refers to the ability of a machine to learn using large data sets instead of hard-coded rules.
Automated workflows improve visibility. Tracking can allow a staff member to instantly check the status of the item. It allows the key people to see the critical processes at every point. It identifies problems, bottlenecks, and checks end to end performance throughout.
With the addition of AI, the same system can give suggestions and recommendations. This further improves efficiency, as it is easier to identify and remove unnecessary steps and processes.
The goal of workflow automation or AI isn’t to replace employees. Instead, it should enhance their work. By automating the boring tasks, your teams can have a more productive or interesting workday. Improving your entire business’s operations.
There are 4 main areas where AI and Machine Learning can simplify and enhance processes.
Give deeper insights
Advances in AI and predictive analytics will have ramifications beyond business’s technological capabilities.
Artificial Intelligence and automation will transform the job of PR professionals, for example. Tasks such as news monitoring, researching, reporting and building media lists will no longer need to be done manually.
AI plays a big role in the evolvement of predictive analytics. This will give professionals deeper insights into market trends and movements. Intellyo’s Creator Engine is an AI-backed content marketing platform to make content creation faster and smoother. It helps free up mind space so marketers can think more strategically, creatively and high-level.
Replace day-to-day low-level cognitive tasks
AI, automation, and machine learning impacts day-to-day tasks considerably. Decisions that were determined by people can be made with the help of AI, based on given data and business rules. This eliminates the possibility of human error and saves time.
The main focus will be on low-level cognitive tasks:
- scheduling calendar invites
- routinely ordering food
- determining emails to answer/review/delete based on factsf
Chanty’s team chat and Gmail’s Smart Reply tool both use machine learning to save you time, offering the most relevant and algorithmically efficient information, based on the already received messages.
Act as life’s concierge service
As Elisabeth Poston from Helios Interactive puts it, with the popularity of Alexa, Watson, and Einstein, consumer expectation will soon be for tech to act as a concierge. We already have Big Data companies satisfying real-time needs and provide info (weather, traffic, etc.). Artificial Intelligence is improving on post-purchase behaviour, too. This means that soon we’ll get highly personalised info and recommendation about daily individual needs and tasks.
Make marketing more intelligent
AI will enable companies to understand people even better. Debbie Williams from Sprout Content believes cognitive technologies will have a great role in the coming years. They enable us to analyze data like unstructured text, audio, images, and video. Sensing and processing personality, tone and emotion will help us make even greater personalized recommendations. This will enhance the experience of companies engaging in conversations via intelligent virtual assistants, also called AI chatbots.
Chanty also offers you the option to turn your channel discussions into workflows. With the help of AI, it creates instant discussion around files, polls or specific tasks.
The future
With all these new AI use cases comes the daunting question of whether machines will force humans into obsolescence. The jury is still out, but rather than serving as a replacement for human knowledge and ingenuity, AI is often seen as a supporting tool for the humans.
