Using AI to Enhance Business Operations

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

MIT Sloan Management Review, June 11, 2019

by Monideepa Tarafdar, Cynthia M. Beath, and Jeanne W. Ross



Artificial intelligence invariably conjures up visions of self-driving vehicles, obliging personal assistants, and intelligent robots. But AI’s effect on how companies operate is no less transformational than its impact on such products.

Enterprise cognitive computing — the use of AI to enhance business operations — involves embedding algorithms into applications that support organizational processes. ECC applications can automate repetitive, formulaic tasks and, in doing so, deliver orders-of-magnitude improvements in the speed of information analysis and in the reliability and accuracy of outputs. For example, ECC call center applications can answer customer calls within 5 seconds on a 24-7-365 basis, accurately address their issues on the first call 90% of the time, and transfer complex issues to employees, with less than half of the customers knowing that they are interacting with a machine. The power of ECC applications stems from their ability to reduce search time and process more data to inform decisions. That’s how they enhance productivity and free employees to perform higher-level work — specifically, work that requires human adaptability and creativity. Ultimately, ECC applications can enhance operational excellence, customer satisfaction, and employee experience.

ECC applications come in many flavors. For instance, in addition to call center applications, they include banking applications for processing loan requests and identifying potential fraud, legal applications for identifying relevant case precedents, investment applications for developing buy/sell predictions and recommendations, manufacturing applications for scheduling equipment maintenance, and pharmaceutical R&D applications for predicting the success of drugs under development.

Not surprisingly, most business and technology leaders are optimistic about ECC’s value-creating potential. In a 2017 survey of 3,000 senior executives across industries, company sizes, and countries, 63% said that ECC applications would have a large effect on their organization’s offerings within five years. However, the actual rate of adoption is low, and benefits have proved elusive for most organizations. In 2017, when we conducted our own survey of senior executives at 106 companies, half of the respondents reported that their company had no ECC applications in place. Moreover, only half of the respondents whose companies had applications believed they had produced measurable business outcomes. Other studies report similar results.

This suggests that generating value from ECC applications is not easy — and that reality has caught many business leaders off guard. Indeed, we found that some of the excitement around ECC resulted from unrealistic expectations about the powers of “intelligent machines.” In addition, we observed that many companies that hoped to benefit from ECC but failed to do so had not developed the necessary organizational capabilities. To help address that problem, we undertook a program of research aimed at identifying the foundations of ECC competence. We found five capabilities and four practices that companies need to splice the ECC gene into their organization’s DNA. Read the rest here.