Mythbusters: addressing common misconceptions around AI in business
By Jon Taylor on August 14, 2019Artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly prevalent role in modern business, and the benefits of being able to successfully leverage the technology speak for themselves; AI-powered businesses are growing 30% faster than the competition, with 50% higher profit margins.
However, despite an ever-growing number of AI success stories hitting the headlines, many businesses still hold pre-conceptions of the technology, which may put them off getting started with their own AI for business strategy. Let’s try and clear some of them up…
“My data isn’t good enough”
This is something we hear quite often in the early stages of engaging with a new customer. Some worry that years and years of working in multiple, disjointed legacy systems means that they need to spend copious amounts of time (and money) getting their data organised in order for AI to be beneficial.
However, this isn’t the case. 99% of the time, we’re able to unify your data in its entirety, regardless of whether it’s sat in a nice, shiny data warehouse or spread across multiple systems or servers. We’re also able to combine this data with external, third-party data sources, giving our AI plenty to work with regardless of data type or structure.
“It’s going to take too long to see results”
This is usually a common concern with those who have suffered a bad experience with transformation, change or data projects in the past; they can be slow, scary and painfully costly.
With Peak, though, we focus on delivering outcomes for businesses as quickly and effectively as possible, delivering rapid results with a short time to value. We do this thanks to a combination of our technology and our in-house data science team, who will continuously support and oversee your AI project, showing you how to use AI in your business and ensuring that positive ROI is delivered in months, not years.
“It will only work in siloed functions”
Off-the-shelf or “plug-in-and-go”-style AI point solutions are becoming more and more common in today’s market. While some are able to effectively operationalize a single function of a business with AI – take a CRM system, for instance – this can often do more harm than good and be detrimental to other business systems. If you’re using AI to enhance your marketing comms and drive more sales, for instance, it’s no use if your supply chain can’t cope with this accelerated demand.
However, this isn’t the only way. AI business solutions work best when they are implemented across the value chain, with AI treated as a central system of intelligence – powering all processes and decisions, rather than one or two. This is a major benefit of our own AI System, which has the ability to leverage business-wide data in order to optimize a business’ entire operations in unison.
“It’s going to take my job!”
Many still have pre-conceptions of AI application that allude to science fiction-style robots coming to take over the world. Thankfully, our approach to AI for business is a lot less Hollywood. We like to think that any business project, no matter how clever the technology, still needs that creative human touch to deliver success.
There are plenty of expert voices out there which explain why AI plus humans is a winning formula – 80% of business leaders agree that AI boosts productivity and creates new jobs. We don’t see the technology as a way of replacing workforces, but more of a way of making people more efficient and successful by removing some of the more tedious aspects of their role. Take merchandising in retail as an example; merchandisers do the job they do because they love to work with fashion, not to sit with their head in spreadsheets combing through data.
AI can help to accelerate productivity and allow more room for creativity by driving more efficient business processes which truly enhance the employee experience. For more on this particular example, be sure to check out our on demand webinar on AI for merchandising.
To summarise, what we’re trying to say is that becoming AI-driven is easier than you might think. You just need to find the right partner to take that leap of faith with – one that focuses on delivering maximum results and has your best interests at heart. If you’d like to chat to one of the Peak team about outlining a potential AI opportunity for your business, we’d love to hear from you.
