By John Premkumar, Vice President & Service Offering Head – Digital Experience at Infosys
Under pressure from demanding consumers, smarter competitors, rising costs and stricter regulators, organisations are constantly striving to do better. As a major enabler of productivity and efficiency, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming indispensable to this pursuit. According to a global consulting firm, AI technologies could potentially improve business efficiency by 40 percent and cut operational cost by 30 percent.
There is hardly any business that is not benefiting from AI optimisation: a leader in the use of robotics, manufacturing is adopting the latest AI technologies in smart factories to improve production processes, strengthen supply chains, proactively address bottlenecks and streamline workflows. In factories around the world, AI is helping to build digital twins of processes, components, or the factory itself, that can be used to simulate an operation, test-fit tooling, improve a workflow or innovate a design virtually, before implementing it physically. AI’s image recognition capabilities are transforming quality assurance by identifying defects early in the production cycle, while cobots working alongside human employees on the shop floor are improving both worker productivity and safety.
The arrival of generative AI has taken AI-led possibilities to a new high, as large language models draft documents, write software code, develop product designs, and even create marketing assets at a speed and efficiency that is impossible for human beings to match.
In the world of finance, AI is bringing unprecedented efficiencies to process-heavy functions such as credit scoring, risk management and fraud prevention. Specifically, financial institutions are leveraging machine learning and predictive analytics to process structured and unstructured data for insights that enable, among other things, holistic credit evaluation (compared to traditional scoring), real-time detection of suspicious activities, and prediction of market trends.
Brand marketers are using AI to automate a variety of tasks ranging from media buying to content creation, to save time, effort and money. A leading provider of insights predicts that by 2025, 30 percent of the marketing messages from large corporations will be AI-generated. We estimate that using generative AI tools for conceptualising and creating content could free up 5 to 10 percent of an organisation’s marketing bandwidth. Companies that make full use of AI’s creative and cognitive capabilities can optimise marketing campaigns on the way to double-digit cost savings.
More than just efficiency
It is established that leveraging AI to streamline workflows and automate repetitive jobs allows employees to focus on higher-end activities, such as problem solving, innovation, mentoring, and communication. But now, even high-skilled jobs can benefit from AI: a study showed that high-skilled workers who used gen AI within its capability limits improved their performance by 40 percent compared to non-users. A great example of how far AI has reached comes from the healthcare sector, where it is improving the overall state of medical care by enabling triage and diagnosis, reading CT scans and X-rays, analysing genomic data for personalised medication, etc.
As organisations progress in the AI journey, they should look at exploring more sophisticated use-cases. Beyond efficiency and optimisation, lie AI’s powerful cognitive capabilities, empowering enterprises with rich insights and informed decisions – which supplier is ESG compliant, what pricing strategy to employ, which market to target next, what features to introduce – that enterprises can leverage to personalise products and experiences, engage customers, innovate faster, and build competitive advantage.
On the horizon is an evolutionary AI solution, namely Autonomous or Agentic AI, whose advanced reasoning capabilities enable it to solve complex, multi-step problems, understand and respond to queries, take decisions, and act independently, without human intervention. Since the technology can learn and improve continuously on its own, there’s no telling how far it will go. Enterprises that have picked the low-hanging fruit of efficiency should embrace AI’s higher capabilities for a bountiful harvest.