For SA businesses and institutions to remain competitive they have to adopt Artificial intelligence (AI) tech to match the global speed of innovation and efficiency, says Amritesh Anand, vice-president of tech multinational In2IT technologies.
In that regard, AI has become such an important investment for businesses in SA.
This, as larger AI budgets have become a sharp point of focus globally, as businesses across all industries are increasing their investment in artificial intelligence to create competitive advantage.
The use of AI has been stepped up globally in recent months, driven by the United Nations tech agency International Telecommunication Union, which is championing the use of the technology to hasten sustainable development.
For businesses, a significant number of industries are now using AI to improve consumer experiences.
Financial services and insurance industry, chatbots are being developed to answer consumers’ questions regarding financial products, and in the banking sector, AI is making decisions whether to grant a loan or finance a vehicle.
“Adoption of AI has led to massive transformation in this industry as use cases in this industry are many,” says Anand.
“Simple automation ideas of replacing monotonous tasks with intelligent software to complete digital banks.
“We are witnessing an immense shift in banking and insurance industries leading to faster product evaluation which are scientifically driven through user-based data analytics to faster operations.”
Anand predicts that going forward the use of AI and chatbots will be bumped up as businesses seek to scale customer service and communications.
“Chatbots which started with simple FAQ based, have evolved over time to adopt AI technology in backend,” says Anand.
“Today chatbots are conversational… They can sense the sentiments of the users through conversation, can initiate or highlight the product for up-sale at an appropriate time with the user, and can hand over the conversation to live agents.
“All these are possible using AI in the backend.”
Widespread use of such chatbots are vouched for by the fact that Facebook itself has more than 300 000 live chatbots by end of 2021.
“If we delay adoption of AI today, catching up will be more difficult and cumbersome as the rate of adoption and innovation today is very fast,” says Anant.”
He explains that AI fundamentally impacts greater insights into business and operations through data analytics – this means greater and quicker innovation.
Using AI for Business Process Automation – leads to faster and efficient completion of work and better engagement with customers and employees – resulting in more satisfaction, and saving time.
“Be it at any industry, AI use is more of a necessity today rather than a choice,” Anand says.
“As the industry and competition are changing the only way to be competitive is to innovate and be agile and AI helps you to do that”.
Anand says AI is definitely changing the way of conducting business and urges South African business leaders to prepare for an AI-centric future.
“Business leaders must go with a business idea which is low hanging and easy to implement and prove within the organisation,” says Anand.
“Partnering with digital centric IT firms can help reduce the learning curve and help with a quick proof of concept which can be taken into production quickly once satisfied with proof of concept
“Over time they must create a plan to have a centre of excellence, responsible for creating use cases led by business needs, which can be integrated with various existing systems to draw out value.”
On the contentious issue of regulating AI technology use, Anand says AI is a classic case of a “double-edged sword”.
When Facebook bots started learning from each other, they created an unknown language and algorithm, this is a classic case of technology going out of the hands of its creator itself.
“Hence government should definitely consult the industries to come up with regulations to use such technology without really stifling the usage for the right purpose and impacting the growth,” says Anand.
